This perhaps isn’t the best blog to test my Technorati plugin because I don’t have a whole lot of inbound links and what I do have are fairly static. However, today because of the trackback I left earlier Ernest Miller’s blog popped onto my list and was duly represented. Nice! I hadn’t thought about it and then noticed it showing up in my right rail. It’s supposed to work but that doesn’t mean I’m so jaded to not enjoy it when it does.
One thing I have gained an appreciation for is the relative flakiness of Technorati. By using the Technorati API I can see oddly different results from time to time. Sometimes when my refresh happens, nothing is returned from the call. Sometimes every item in the list is some reference to this weblog, not the incoming links. I suppose it is good that it flakes a lot now, so I can code the plugin to deal with the weirdness. I considered having it not write out the cache file when nothing is returned, but then it would slow loading the blog to a crawl when Technorati is down because every page would be waiting for the plugin to timeout. I learned my lesson with the XML-RPC pinging plugin – don’t make the actions that happen frequently during remote server outages have side effects to cause them to be called even more. I’d rather have an empty list now and then than have it really hose my site when Technorati is down.
