Technorati incoming links and WordPress 2.6

Thursday, August 21st, 2008

For many WordPress users the Technorati Incoming Links that once appeared on the admin dashboard of our blogs was a genuinely useful feature. It was replaced back in version 2.3 with Google Blog Search, which you’d think would be fine if one service was much like the other. It isn’t. Google Blog Search is, in a word, crap. It rarely updates and can never be relied upon to show even a majority of recent links from other sites back to your blog. There was a plugin made available that simply switched your blog admin back to using Technorati instead, but with version 2.6 of WordPress that plugin’s functionality seems to have been intentionally broken by the way in which the information is called having been made more complicated and reliant upon different code in different files.

It would appear that the unintimidated can go into various files now and do a lot of tweaking to achieve what the plugin did from 2.3-2.5. But even if you know what you’re doing, as the changes need to be made to core files they will be gone every time you do so much as a small point upgrade of your WordPress installation.

There have been murmurings of bad blood between WordPress and Technorati for a while now, with WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg’s blog having been banned from inclusion in the Technorati Top 100 listing because his incoming links are featured by default on the WordPress admin dashboard. But while some may disagree with Technorati’s tweaking of its own hit list with a variety of (at times) tortuous justifications, the site still indexes and features thousands upon thousands of blogs running on the WordPress platform. So I’d like to think the suggestion of petty-mindedness between the two is made without sufficient evidence to indicate there’s any truth to it.

Still, why make it harder to ditch Google Blog Search? How does that change between 2.5 and 2.6 do anything for end users to make WordPress run better and do more for us? What’s more, it makes no sense that there’s an edit link for the box displaying Google Blog Search results (if you’re lucky—if you’re not, it’s empty most of the time). You go in, remove the Google code, enter the Technorati RSS feed information for your own blog’s incoming links as reported by that service, save, and then… It doesn’t save. You go back in, you’ve got the damned Google Blog Search back.

Making it harder for the average user to switch from one service to another for incoming links flies in the face of everything that’s great about WordPress, namely the ability to customise your installation to suit your needs and wants. I don’t want Google Blog Search. I want Technorati. Why was that once an easy thing to secure, and now isn’t easy at all? I’m not into changing core files. It’s a damned nuisance every time you upgrade. All I can do is wait for either the developer of the plugin that did the job between 2.3 and 2.5 to update that plugin for 2.6, or hope that someone else comes up with a plugin to do what I and many others want. Or maybe the WordPress developers can address the annoyance in the next version. I’m not holding my breath for the latter.

There is, of course, another possibility: that Google works to bring Google Blog Search up to the same high standard people have come to expect from GMail (although that has suffered a lot of downtime recently) and Google Apps. Let’s not mention Blogger because that’s beyond hope of redemption for sure. If Google Blog Search actually worked, and worked reliably and consistently, I and others might not be as offended by being cut off from accessing Technorati from our WordPress admin dashboards as we currently are.

categories: all wired up