Technorati

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Thanks to the proof-reading assistance of Ryan, this latest version of Services_Technorati should now comply with the PEAR coding standards, so I’ve moved it to alpha status, and upped the version number. Next up will be writing some unit tests for the module. After the fact, I know, but an important step. Getting a CVS or SVN repository up and running is also high up the list. And it’s probably time to return some attention to a project where I’ll be using this module to step-up the real-world testing. ...

A couple of bug reports reminded me that it was time for another release of Services_Technorati. This release fixes a typo and adds some important checks on the return value of $this->_checkOptions() I’m hoping to finish the last few coding standards issues this week so I can move the package up to alpha status. There’s still no word from Technorati about fixes to their attention.XML support, so I’m not inclined to hold up the package’s release based on that. ...

Voting was complete on my Technorati package a couple of weeks back, but I’ve been waiting to announce it until I was able to upload an initial version to PEAR. The package was approved today, and you can now find version 0.5.5 at the PEAR website. It’s currently set to ‘devel’ so to install it from the command line you’ll need to use: % pear install Services_Technorati-devel Changes in the latest release mostly arise from voters’ suggestions, with the key one being the change of a number of method names to remove the superfluous word ‘query.’ I’ll hopefully be moving it out of ‘devel’ soon, probably once I’ve made the final few tweaks to bring it in line with the PEAR Coding Standards and/or when Technorati finish overhauling the attention.XML API. ...

I just made another round of changes to Services_Technorati. As well as a few maintenance tasks, I made it more explicit that the caching is optional, added a factory method, and worked in support for the new TopTags API call. The Attention.XML support is still not working as hoped. Niall Kennedy (Technorati’s Community Manager) assures me that they will be working on it at their end as soon as possible, so I’ll wait for that before doing any more work there. ...

Jason DeFilippo posts that Technorati have now added a ‘related tags’ feature. If you search for, say webservices you’ll see related entries for ‘web’, ‘google’, ‘soap’, ‘blogs’ and ’links’. Presumably the relationships are drawn by monitoring where tags have appeared together in pages. This is a big step forward in technorati’s support for folksonomies. The usefulness of tags are considerably increased when you can draw out a list of ‘similar’ terms, and that option has certainly been one of my favourite features of del.icio.us. What I’d love to see technorati add next would be support for searching by multiple tags, and perhaps access to the relationships using the API. The latter would allow those of us thinking of building sites with user submissions organised using folksonomies to access a broader range of data when offering relational links, making our local folksonomy support more useful ‘out of the box.’ ...