Chances are if you’re reading this blog you’ve heard of Technorati, the leading service for “adding up all the links” to the millions of blogs in the world.

There’s a mass joke of referring to the site as “Egorati” which is totally true and totally funny. Basically, it becomes addictive to go look at your own listing on the site and see whether your “rank” has gone up or down. I don’t really need it to see who’s linking to me, because I use Mint and that tends to catch things a lot more thoroughly and quickly than Technorati. But I still want to see my ranking!

The ranking has more than just ego-stimulation purpose. It helps you to get more readers who are looking for what you happen to be blogging about. While my ranking will never put me in the Top 100, there are many categories for which a relatively modest ranking will earn you a top billing for the category. So while I may not make it to the Top 5 Apple Blogs with John Gruber and Merlin Mann, there are other categories where I should be able to stand out a little bit.

Take for example the Top Cocoa Blogs. There are some real recognizable names in there. Brent Simmons and Steven Frank lead the category, but in contrast to the astronomical linkage numbers of Daring Fireball or 43 Folders, their blogs are actually “within my reach,” at least in terms of Technorati ranking. While I am nowhere near as popular or significant as either of those two men, my numbers add up. Even by Technorati’s current measurement, I should come in at third place in the Cocoa rankings, but I don’t show up at all. Why?

My entire Technorati existence has been plagued with bugs from day one.

Take a look again at my page, and you’ll see that Technorati thinks my blog hasn’t been updated in 78 days. This is in spite of repeated attempts to “ping” them with news of my changes. The bugs are deeper than that. Even back when it appeared that they noticed my updates from time to time, they would never “hook me in” to the Blog Finder results. I’ve configured my blog with a bunch of keywords, including Cocoa, but my listing never shows up. My content is also not being indexed. Take a popular recent blog of mine, the “Apple phones home” one. If you type the phrase into Google, you get my page as the first result. Type the same thing into Technorati, and you get a bunch of other blogs talking about my entry, but my entry itself is nowhere to be found.

Because I’m stuck in Technorati bug land. I’ve been there for several months and I can’t get out. So why am I complaining to you, the reading public? Because I’ve tried too many times with Technorati and received no reply or even acknowledgement that they’d look into it. So I figure in this crazy new world, maybe my only hope of getting in touch with Technorati is to actually write about them on my blog and let them somehow find it. Ironic, but it might just work?

I understand that Technorati must face a huge support dilemma. But if they’re going to simply not respond to support requests, it would be better to take the option to submit them off the page. When you submit a request ticket at Technorati, you get an automated email which contains the first sign of rotten-ness in the form of this sentence:

Translation: “support requests regularly get lost and go unanswered, so the onus is on you, the consumer if you actually want this to be tracked responsibly.”

I’m no expert, but if I was building a business, I would see this as a huge, red flag. If you have to build your apology for bad support in to the automated response then somebody is doing a terrible job or you haven’t hired all the people you need to in order to conduct a proper business.

The first couple times I submitted requests, I just waited patiently. Who am I to presume that my little indexing problem is worth rudely following up on the request. I’ll just wait it out. Surely they’re working on it. After a couple months or so I decided maybe their system requires you to actually go through the follow-up phase to turn into a “real ticket.” I responded to one politely and noted that things hadn’t been improving. No response.

I give up on your rotten support system, Technorati. It doesn’t work. It’s a black hole. Nobody responds and it makes me feel like an idiot. It’s rotten! You’ve got a great system and a great site but if you can’t patch up the mistakes then it’s worthless to me, and misleading to your customers.

I started the Red Sweater Links blog as a place where I could feel comfortable spitting out short pointers to interesting things without worrying that I was overloading the main blog.

This solution has been a partial success, but there are some definite down-sides. I often find it difficult to choose whether something is a link or an article. And often a link turns into something I want to talk more about. I am feeling a draw to just merge the two back into a single blog.

This is your chance to share advice or opinions before I “throw the switch.” If you’re a subscriber to both the links and the main blog, would you find it easier to just have one source to monitor?

Another thing I could do is attempt to aggregate several “links” into a single post to minimize “entry pollution” while still having a unified feed.

Can you tell I’m confused about this situation?

Nick Gravgaard has come up with a pretty simple solution to the “tabs vs. spaces” problem. He proposes a system for the elastic interpretation of tabs (via Joel) by text editors. Basically it comes down to treating tabs as indicators of a “new column,” instead of assigning an arbitrary number of spaces to them. The graphic on his page explains it better than I can with words.

A major drawback that he points out is poor readability in older (i.e. all current existing) editors, but maybe it will catch on. I think it’s really cool that you could, for instance, lengthen one line in a block-comment and all the other lines would automatically grow to match that column’s new width. How many times have changed a comment like:

/* Juicy bits of  */                /* Juicy bits of     */
/* info for our   */   ----TO--->   /* info for our best */
/* client.        */                /* client.           */

Extending the second line meant you had to “up the tab ante,” by manually clicking all the other lines of the block comment and tabbing out its final characters, as well.

I think his system would work well for me in most instances, though I’m slightly concerned that sometimes my code does not fit well into discrete columsn. Maybe it’s just poor style on my part, but for instance I could see myself writing something like this:

int doodad;   // what a thing;
int flubber;  // also neat
doodad = doSomethingFunnyAndScary(flubber);    // Not too shabby...
flubber = andTheOppositeCouldAlsoRock(doodad); // Lovely!

In other words, sometimes I end up with localized tab-aligned comments that, to remain pertinent to their target, are kept pretty close (just one tab away). Now in Nick’s system, the “column system” for any chunk of code is uniform until a blank line is encountered. So the above would probably end up looking more like this:

int doodad;                                    // what a thing;
int flubber;                                   // also neat
doodad = doSomethingFunnyAndScary(flubber);    // Not too shabby...
flubber = andTheOppositeCouldAlsoRock(doodad); // Lovely!

It would be easily solved in this case by putting a blank line (which is probably appropriate anyway) between the variable declarations and the code. But I’m not sure yet that all cases would be so easily “fixable.” Still, an excellent experiment and I’ll be curious to see if any major editors incorporate the technique as an option.

Lately I’ve heard a lot on technical podcasts about the public outrage over “Microsoft Genuine Advantage” and the fact that it “phones home” every day.

Apple released Mac OS X 10.4.7 last week, and ever since I installed it, I’ve been noticing Apple’s own modest home phoning behavior. In this case it’s ostensibly to provide users with the opportunity to check whether the Dashboard Widgets you download are identical to ones featured on Apple’s site. Sort of a security debriefing, I guess. From the 10.4.7 release notes:

You can now verify whether or not a Dashboard widget you downloaded is the same version as a widget featured on (www.apple.com) before installing it.

The problem is this feature popped up without my permission, and there’s no obvious way for me to turn it off. This is how companies, even fairly trustable ones (IMHO) like Apple, make users paranoid and suspicious of them. This phoning home is done by a new process called “dashboardadvisoryd.” I don’t know the exact schedule, but it appears to be very frequent: twice today in a seven hour period. If I didn’t run Little Snitch I wouldn’t have any idea this was going on, because Apple made no point of informing me of the new feature and what it would entail.

One of the nice things about Little Snitch is it gives you a chance to “perk up your ears” to what’s being said between the client and server. When I see an unusual connection being requested, I often allow it to take place, but not before switching to the Terminal and starting up tcpdump so I can scrutinize the traffic. I figure if anybody is going to be chatting behind my back I at least want to know the gist of what they’re saying.

So far as I can tell, the activity from Apple is in this case pretty tame. At least so far. Every time it phones home, it requests the following two URLs:

http://www.apple.com/widgets/widgetadvisory
http://www.apple.com/widgets/parser.info

The first appears to be a public key or something. The second appears to be empty but its header values may convey something of interest to Apple’s client.

I can’t see that anything at all is being sent back to Apple, but that’s sort of not the point. The mere act of “checking in” lets Apple know that I’m here and I’m running 10.4.7. They didn’t ask my permission to start making this regular checkin, and I’m not even sure what benefit I’m going to be getting out of allowing it.

In an era when consumers are being encouraged to take responsibility for their own safety in the interconnected world, Apple and others should respect the boundaries of our “digital house” by at least keeping us in the loop about what is being done on our behalf. I can find no documentation about what Apple is choosing to send and receive on a regular basis from my Mac.

Keep me in the loop, Apple. And if I’m not comfortable with it, give me an option (short of Little Snitch) for turning it off. It’s my computer, after all.