vrypan|net|log (archived)

Here is my problem. I set up monitor.vrypan.net using lilina. It is actually an aggregation of many Greek blogs. What I want to do is to provide a “common place” for greek blogs to interact with each other. So this is not “just a blogroll”, it is (or should be) something more.

This was a good oportunity to experiment with an idea I had for some time. I used the Technorati API to check how many blogs link to each post, in order to “illustrate” the “virtual conversations” between blogs.

I then came up with an unexpected problem. Some blogs use Feedburner (an excelent service btw) to export their feed. This is a good idea, since Feedburner provides nice features and reduces the traffic caused by feed readers and aggregators. One of the coolest features of feedburner is tracking of clicks: Feedburner will not expose the original post URL but a custom one that redirects to the original. When a user clicks on it Feedburner will track the click and redirect to the original URL. So, using the technorati API on “fake” Feedburner URLs is useless as they are not “real” blog URLs.

I think that there should be some other way to do this. A possible solution:
1) Feedburner includes the original URL’s MD5. (i.e. instead of http://feeds.feedburner.com/Vrypannetweblog?m=34 it will show http://feeds.feedburner.com/Vrypannetweblog?m=34&md5=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
2) Technorati will allow the use of MD5 instead of URL.

Is this possible? Do you think of some other to get arround this problem? (Sidenote: MD5(URL) can also be used by del.icio.us)