Perri Nelson's Website 

Third party services - Can't blog with 'em, Can't blog without 'em.

My website is heavily dependent upon third party services, as are quite a few blogs out there. Sometimes, those services have trouble, and the site moves at a crawl. Most of the time though, those services are up and running doing great things without a hitch, not just for me, but for thousands, or even millions of blogs.

I use blogrolling.com to maintain my blog rolls. Normally this works pretty well, but there are times when their service becomes totally unresponsive. I haven't had problems with that for a while, except late at night.

I also use Technorati a lot. Sometimes their scripts seem to get into tightly bound loops and suck up all of the CPU cycles on my machine in the browser, particularly the one for the "View blog reactions" widget or for the tag cloud.

Technorati's tech support isn't very responsive either. It took me nearly two months before I was able to "claim" my blog on Technorati's service. During that time I received one response from their tech support, and it didn't really address my problem.

The Truth Laid Bear is another example. Sometimes the scripts for the ecosystem seem to run really slowly. There have been periods of time when the ecosystem and site details weren't updated for days at a time.

I also use Sitemeter to keep track of traffic to my site. Twice since I've started using them, I haven't been able to get at the statistics or management pages on their site. In fact, that's happening now, and it's the inspiration for this posting.

When all of these are running slowly it can seem like forever before a page loads.

I used to use Haloscan for their commenting and trackback services. Sadly, haloscan's support for inline trackbacks or inline comments is pretty poor. I still use their trackback pinger, because even though I've implemented my own comment and trackback modules, I've been too lazy to implement the trackback pinging myself.

The thing about these services though, is that there isn't really a good substitute for them. Another thing is, most of them are totally free (I am paying for a plus account with sitemeter). I can't seriously complain about a free service, and I'm not going to.

Sure, I just remarked on a few problems with these, but I still love their services.

I cache my blogrolls now, and usually they don't take any time to retrieve at all. Caching them does mean that they may get a bit stale, but I keep the cache lifetime short. Late at night when blogrolling.com becomes really slow, re-filling the cache can take forever. That makes the blog less responsive. I'm thinking about improving the cache handling for the blogrolls a bit.

Anyway, Blogrolling.com has an invaluable service. I know that I could implement my own blogroll code, and use it, but sharing it with other bloggers and getting them to ping it would be somewhat of a pain. Having a common service to manage blogrolls makes it easy to share them, and to see who's been updating their blogs. I've got over 20 blogrolls I participate in, and believe it or not, I use each and every one of them to see what's up on other people's blogs.

As for Technorati, there's really no substitute that I've found for them. There are a lot of blog indexing services but Technorati is by far the most popular and they've got a huge advantage over the others. I wish their tech support was more responsive, but if they're right about there being 55 million blogs out their, the only way to really improve it is to charge for it.

TTLB is a fabulous site. For a web service that appears to be run by and maintained by one person it's truly amazing. The fact that so many people can rely on it day in and day out is fantastic. The ecosystem rankings are a lot of fun, and it's great fun to compare your site against other sites. Now if only I could figure out how some of those sites drive as much traffic as they do...

What can I say about sitemeter. Their statistics are fun. It's great to see where people are coming from when they hit my site, and where they're going when they leave. Knowing what browsers they use helps me to concentrate on what browsers I need to support. Knowing where they are geographically lets me offer a weather forecast to them. A few people have even used it.

I'm really amazed at the number and variety of services out there that bloggers can use absolutely free. Sometimes they've got problems, but most of the time they run flawlessly, supporting us all.

Here's to all of those service providers. If you use a service that you find you really depend on, let me know about it in the comments. If you've got an idea for a new service that doesn't exist, share it. Somebody may even implement it.

Trackposted to Rightwing Guy, Perri Nelson's Website, The Pink Flamingo, Mark My Words, The HILL Chronicles, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, and DragonLady's World, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Monday Open Trackbacks

It's a little late, but here it is... I've been working on some new blog features...

This is your Open Trackbacks post for Monday, January 1 2007. If you post something interesting you'd like to share feel free to link to this post and ping for a trackback. Just remember to follow the trackback policy.

For the best exposure, go to the blogger's oasis and use the linkfest chooser to choose the posts you'd like to hook up with.

My Nominee for the NWBloggers person(s) of the year.

I thought this would be hard. I was wrong. I just read a headline on the Seattle Times' Website that mentioned that the 3,000th military death had been reached in Iraq. It's a shame that our media has to make a big deal over these "round" numbers as if they're significant. Every military death is significant.

The media has used these "milestone" deaths to try to dampen our support for the mission of our troops. It's been quite an effective tactic, with the constant drumbeat eroding support for the war. Even so, this war has had a surprisingly small number of troop deaths compared to other wars. That can, in large part, be attributed to the success of our troops in dealing with the enemy.

My nominee(s) for the NWBlogger person(s) of the year are the brave men and women of the U.S. Military that have sacrificed their lives to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq. These soldiers truly deserve to be honored by us all. They gave all that they had so that others could know freedom. They made the ultimate sacrifice to end tyranny and promote democracy in Iraq.

There is no greater sacrifice a man can make than to give his life for others. I honor their sacrifice and pray that we finish the job. To abandon the effort after their sacrifice would be a slap in their faces.

Cross posted at NWBloggers.com