Lloyd Wood - more of a blog. less of a life.: Fashion victim.

July 29, 2003

Fashion victim.

As is currently indicated by the fashionable additions to the sidebar of my blog, I have registered with Blogshares and with Technorati.

I haven't been able to claim ownership of my blog in Technorati. (And when I log in to that I'm told that it thinks that someone may be impersonating me. Poorly.)

I haven't been able to claim ownership of my blog in Blogshares. (Despite pinging its RPC interface a number of times in a number of different ways, and observing the seemingly fatal dependence that Blogshares seems to have on weblogs.com.)

I haven't been able to figure out the point of Blogshares, either, beyond being a non-collapsing virtual South Sea bubble. Even sans blog, I'm already a Blogshares millionaire, and I've hardly been paying attention. Pay to become a premium member? Penny Arcade shares my view on that.

Posted by Lloyd Wood at July 29, 2003 11:38 PM

Comments

This brings to mind the webrings craze of the late 90s. At least when a webring broke, it was obvious what was wrong.

Posted by: Lloyd Wood at July 30, 2003 02:11 AM

After a series of 'it should be okay now' mails, Seyed got the problem fixed, by nuking my blog and all my shares in it and restarting it from scratch from its duplicate entry.

Part of the problem seems to be the design of Blogshares; every blog database entry is referenced using an external property (the url) and there's no way of dealing with and merging duplicate entries that have been created. Even when you look at the list of blogs you own, they're still referenced by url, so all duplicate blogs bring up the same edit page on the first blog. You simply search the list and find the first one.

Posted by: Lloyd Wood at August 1, 2003 01:12 PM

Another part of the problem is that my blog url has a tilde (~) in it. So when setting up one of the duplicate blog entries I escaped the tilde as %7E.

The instructions to claim the blog that came back to me gave a url that included the sequence '%257E', where Blogshares had escaped the % symbol without recognising that % symbol as the start of an escape sequence I'd entered myself...

Aaargh.

Posted by: Lloyd Wood at August 5, 2003 09:47 PM

Technorati support eventually fixed my problems there, and now I can explore the extremely limited cosmos of this blog. Automation seems fragile, at best; human intervention, essential.

Posted by: Lloyd Wood at March 3, 2004 05:05 PM