Technorati bloginfo API wierdness
For the benefit of other Technorati API users…
In a comment on this entry, Padraig Brady mentioned that his blog had mysteriously disappeared from the Irish Blogs Top 100 list.
I investigated, and found something odd — it seems Technorati has made a change to their bloginfo API, now listing weblogs with their ‘rank’, but without some of the important metadata, like ‘inboundblogs’, ‘inboundlinks’, and with a ‘lastupdate’ time set to the epoch (1970-01-01 00:00:00 GMT), in the API. Here’s an example:
<!-- generator="Technorati API version 1.0" -->
<!DOCTYPE tapi PUBLIC "-//Technorati, Inc.//DTD TAPI 0.02//EN"
"http://api.technorati.com/dtd/tapi-002.xml">
<tapi version="1.0">
<document>
<result>
<url>http://www.pixelbeat.org</url>
<weblog>
<name>Pádraig Brady</name>
<url>http://www.pixelbeat.org</url>
<rssurl></rssurl>
<atomurl></atomurl>
<inboundblogs></inboundblogs>
<inboundlinks></inboundlinks>
<lastupdate>1970-01-01 00:00:00 GMT</lastupdate>
<rank>74830</rank>
</weblog>
</result>
</document>
</tapi>
Compare that with this lookup result, on my own blog:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- generator="Technorati API version 1.0" -->
<!DOCTYPE tapi PUBLIC "-//Technorati, Inc.//DTD TAPI 0.02//EN"
"http://api.technorati.com/dtd/tapi-002.xml">
<tapi version="1.0">
<document>
<result>
<url>http://taint.org</url>
<weblog>
<name>taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog</name>
<url>http://taint.org</url>
<rssurl>http://taint.org/feed</rssurl>
<atomurl>http://taint.org/feed/atom</atomurl>
<inboundblogs>143</inboundblogs>
<inboundlinks>227</inboundlinks>
<lastupdate>2008-02-12 11:48:10 GMT</lastupdate>
<rank>43404</rank>
</weblog>
<inboundblogs>143</inboundblogs>
<inboundlinks>227</inboundlinks>
</result>
</document>
</tapi>
This bug had caused a number of blogs to be dropped from the list, since I was using “inboundblogs and inboundlinks == 0″ as an indication that a blog was not registered with Technorati.
It’s now worked around in my code, although a side-effect is that blogs which have this set will appear with question-marks in the ‘inboundblogs’ and ‘inboundlinks’ columns, and will perform poorly in the ‘ranked by inbound link count’ table (unsurprisingly).
I’ve posted a query to the support forum — let’s see what the story is.
Tags: api, bloginfo, blogs, bugs, irishblogs, technorati
