Technorati Claim
Well that was bass-ackwards! I've just had to jump through hoops to get the Technorati claim to work. The claim mechanism failed completely, until I backed up the first article, edited it, and put the claim code in there. I'll lay odds the damned thing still won't work properly. I have a hunch that it expects the whole article to be in the RSS feed, which is completely and utterly WRONG! The description field should be just that - a description of the material the RSS listing points to. What they should do is use the RSS feed to get an indication of the newest article and download that in its entirety for checking. After all their instructions explicitly say to put the claim code in the body of a new article.
The URL registration is screwed, too. There should be a trailing "/" on the pulication URL for this stream, but no matter how often I delete and re-enter the correction the claim the process insists on removing it, which means I now have to change the web server config to put it back again! I do hate it when programmers (of which I am one myself) see fit to force their assumptions on users.
Oh, and Technorati have cocked up one last thing - the published title is actually "Musings of a Madman" - which they'd have right if they took it from the RSS feed, but no, they had to take it from the title of the first article instead. I had to go through the whole claim rigamarole again, including yet another claim code and temporarily changing the title to get it right. At least give the users the option to over-ride the deafult downloaded title, just in case you have got it wrong. I guess that being the biggest in their field, just like Microsoft they don't actually have to get it right...
And the bugs keep mounting up... No matter what you set the primary language for your blog to be, the value returns to default when you return to the configuration page.
Although Technorati appears to download all the individual articles in the blog, it only seems to index the terms in the RSS feed. Try searching by terms only in the body of the article, and you get zip.
Looking on the bright side. It only took me 6 days to work around Technorati's cluelessness... It's all grist to the mill, and now I can feel smug about having beaten them.
