Friday, January 13, 2006

False Updates

Does anyone else have this problem?

I use Blogrolling for my blogroll, and it includes the feature to put a "*" by the links of folks who have updated their site in the last 2 hours - this is the best way I have of knowing who's updated during the day, so I can see what's up.

(aside - I know a lot of people use RSS, but it's been mostly a big waste of time for me. Maybe someone can actually show me a sample of how it can be used effectively to notify me at a glance who's made a new post)

But one thing I've noticed lately is a lot of "false updates" - where an "*" appears beside their link, I check it out, and see there's no new post.

I think the reason is with Blogger's new imbedded comment feature. Whenever someone comments on a post the site itself "updates", causing a Ping to be generated. This filters through to Blogrolling and it thinks there's been a new post. When there actually hasn't been.

Now this is not that big a deal, but it is a bit annoying to think your favorite bloggers have new stuff and there's nothing new there.

(I don't use the embedded comments, although they do show up when you click on a post's permalink (like here). I use Haloscan and have been very, very pleased thus far. I would recommend it highly.)

So, has anyone else noticed this problem with false updates?

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