Posts tagged Technorati
Services_Technorati version 2
Feb 23rd
In an effort to tidy up various older projects that were never quite completed, I’ve turned my attention to my first PEAR module Services_Technorati. It’s a very simple wrapper around the Technorati API, but the PHP4 version never reached a stable release as it depended on some other packages which were also never stabilised.
So it seemed time to make the simple step of converting the code to be PHP5-only and use simplexml for their XML parsing. That removes the dependencies which were slowing me down, and should result in improved speed along the way as the XML parsing is now handled in C rather than PHP. I just released 2.0.0alpha1, but the code should be pretty stable and I’m hoping to run through the steps and get a stable release out very soon.
Update (27th Feb): I’ve just pulled this release and re-released it as 0.7.0. Apparently because the package never release 1.0 in its original version, I should just continue with the previous version numbers despite the change to PHP5.
New Technorati Site Beta
Jun 10th
I’ve been playing with the new Technorati design on and off since we got back from the UK last week. The new design is a huge improvement, making it much easier to get to information and seeming to me to make the site much more approachable for a newcomer. It’ll be interesting to see what feedback they get on that count now the beta’s gone public.
Dave Sifry and Niall Kennedy have the lowdown.
There are still a few inconsistencies which can be difficult to duplicate for bug reports. Yesterday one of my watchlists flagged a new link to this blog, but checking the cosmos for the blog didn’t display it. For many emerging web organizations keeping capacity in step with demand can be tricky (cf. audioscrobbler) but for me keeping the different lists in sync would seem a big step towards improving usability.
Regardless of that, the new site is a big step forwards and well worth a look.
Services_Technorati 0.6.3alpha
May 8th
Services_Technorati 0.6.3 has just been released. The main change this time around is that the suite of unit tests are now complete for basic queries. I may add more at a later date to test handling of optional parameters, and more will be needed once Attention.XML support comes online, but for now they do their job.
Following the completion of the tests I found a few little bugs which are now corrected. They mostly related to the testing of parameters and the building of cache filenames. I also added a patch from Ryan that improves the cache checking.
Newsmashing, del.icio.us and comment aggregation
May 7th
Responding to an article in Slate about Newsmashing, Alan Taylor wrote a post entitled “newsmashing with delicious” talking about the possibility of annotating web pages by posting comments in del.icio.us’ ‘extended’ field. These annotations could then be retrieved by any visitor to the site using a bookmarklet that will retrieve the del.icio.us entries for a given URL.
As someone points out in the comments on that post, there is some resemblance between this and the ‘technorati this’ bookmarklet that lets you quickly find incoming links to a given URL. Unlike technorati, this method makes it easy to quickly comment on a URL without having to make use of your own site. (and you can of course then retrieve your del.icio.us RSS feed and use it on your site). While this doesn’t allow the precision annotations of individual page elements discussed in the original Slate piece, it could well be an interesting tool.
It rather feels as though ways of interacting with others’ pages are becoming a key area of conversation, whether that be this discussion or recent talk about the future (or death of) trackback. Even where it comes to blogs that allow comments directly on the page, there are still many advantages to being able to make your comments through a service that provides you with ongoing control of your content, even if there is the problem that has been raised in online fora for some time that we are not used to conversations where participants can easily change the public record of their contributions.
For the author of an article, on the other hand, is is far more convenient to be able to assemble all comments (or at least records of comments) in one place, rather than having to employ a multitude of searches to discover the general response to what you’ve been saying. Technorati’s ability to search for partial matches and to provide a feed of the results allows me to keep track of all links to jystewart.net that they monitor, no matter how deep that link might be. Del.icio.us has yet to develop that functionality and it would be extremely time consuming to check on each individual piece that I write.
Perhaps what is needed is a tool that can be easily employed to monitor the various commenting services and to aggregate the data found. With a clean API, new services could be added as they appear and simplicity could be maintained. (there is, of course, the ongoing spam issue…). Such a tool could then be integrated with the conversation models I described in this post?
Perhaps I need to eke out some time to work on such things….
Services_Technorati 0.6.2alpha
May 1st
Services_Technorati 0.6.2alpha is now available through PEAR. Despite the minor version number increment, this version contains quite a few changes. The class no longer instantiates its own cache object, and instead the factory (which should be the default interface to instantiate an object) will accept a pre-existing cache object. For the purposes of forward compatibility, the factory also now takes an argument to specify which API version should be used.
I’ve also begun the process of adding unit tests to the distribution. That’s likely where most development energy will be going for the next while as there are still several methods that need tests. I’m still working out how best to test web services where the return values are dependent on the availability of the service, but the tests have already proven useful for identifying one minor error.
UPDATE: some debug code was left in 0.6.1alpha which is not in this version, hence the quick followup release