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.
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