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Grumble.

Hit or Miss

Grumble.

I’ve been a little too busy to read a lot of other weblogs lately — not that I can easily track anymore which ones have been recently updated since the changeover at weblogs.com. The SubHonker Filter, which I used to track my favorite blogs with, is now the “BlogTracker” — but it’s hampered by the fact that most weblogs aren’t yet equiped to send weblogs.com the RPC ping necessary to inform them of their updated status.

I’m now using a fun little PHP script from yaysoft.com which lets weblogs.com know when I’ve updated my weblog. But, I can’t get the BlogTracker to recognize my weblog like it did before, so anyone who uses it to track hit-or-miss.org (along with other blogs) will have to go through and update their account to recognize my weblog again.

5 responses so far (Respond)

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Your blog is showing up just fine for me in BlogTracker. But I did I have to go through and update. I suspect that we’ve basically lost everyone who was there before the weblogs.com change. I’m sure that after I do my php script (or whatever), that I’ll have a second Mermaniac item. I think the whole changeover is really stupid, and I’m kinda pissed off that it seems designed to just rule out everyone who isn’t a Weblogs.com/Editthispage.com/Userland.com user. Or maybe it’s just me.

Bill | 25 Oct 2001
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The problems with the new blogtracker seem to be a bit more complicated than blogs simply not telling weblogs.com when they update. I’ve seen favorites of mine show up in weblogs.com’s feed that don’t show up as updated, new or at all on blogtracker. I give it all a week to start working again, and then I’m going to start writing a PHP script to crawl my (modest) list of fave blogs on an hourly basis. And I don’t even know PHP. Yet.
 
We all seem just a little too worked up about this, don’t we?

Freakho | 25 Oct 2001
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The way it’s supposed to work: If you ping Weblogs.com with the *exact* URL you registered with the old Weblogs.com, Blogtracker will associate it with the old record. (Changing the name will still associate it with the old record, as long as the URL hasn’t changed.) Many weblogs have been having difficulty with this, and end up creating new records.

However, I’ve also heard reports like Freakho’s where something seems just plain broken. If you could please send me email with the specific weblogs for which this seems to be happening– particularly when the weblog is actually in the feed– then maybe we can figure out what’s going on.

I don’t think BlogTracker will be ready for primetime until I implement a search-by-name-and-URL feature in the weblog list. I hope hope hope I’ll be able to complete this before I lose all of my spare time.

BrainDan | 27 Oct 2001
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Dan- I’ve been sending pings using the address I originally registered with weblogs.com, but it made a new entry in the Blogtracker anyway — and they’re identical. Still, major props go out to you for creating the BlogTracker in the first place — I’m happy to wait for the kinks to get worked out.

Matt | 27 Oct 2001
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(I mentioned this to Matt by email, but for the benefit of Matt’s readers:) As is a common occurrence in the changeover, the two URLs are not identical; one has a trailing slash (http://www.hit-or-miss.org/), the other doesn’t (http://www.hit-or-miss.org). It’s hard to see because when you mouse-over a link in Internet Explorer that’s a domain name that lacks a trailing slash, IE helpfully adds it to its status bar display.

I’d like to thank everyone that’s helped me debug BlogTracker so far. I think it’s pretty much as good as it’s gonna get so far, so we’ll just have to wait until more weblogs start participating in the Weblogs.com system.

BrainDan | 29 Oct 2001