Using Technorati’s API and PHP
Douglas KarrThanks for stopping by my personal blog on Marketing Technology! Over 50,000 visitors a month find my content worth returning for, so don't forget to subscribe to the Marketing Technology Blog RSS feed or to the Marketing Technology Email to have new content sent directly to your inbox. You may also find my other business blog helpful, Social Media Domination.
UPDATE: March 3, 2007 - Released Technorati Rank WordPress Plugin.
UPDATE: Well it winds up that Technorati has a daily query limit. I found out the hard way, they shut me off. If you’ve installed the widget, you’ll see that it states Error with a link back to the Project Page so that you can download and host the code yourself. I’ve also updated the code so that once you reach the Daily allotment of API calls, it will simply change into an “Add to Favorites” link.
Being a database marketer by trade, I have two flaws (okay … many more than two, but these have to do with this post). I work well with numeric goals and I work well organizing and logically aligning projects, people, software, etc. Even my books are organized (left side of the book case is software and development, right-side top is business, bottom-right is fiction).
The numeric flaw keeps me looking at Technorati, Google Analytics, and Google Adsense all day, everyday. Techorati is one of those ones that really gets my interest because it provides me with who’s linking to me. I love to visit those sites and see what they are saying or what they found useful. In order to recognize whether or not my rank changed, though, I need to do a search on my blog.
I needed something quicker so I programmed a little ‘widget’ to Technorati’s API to obtain my rank quickly and easily. It’s actually what’s displaying the rank at the top of this post. If you’d like to see how, hit my project page up.
I built it using PHP5+ (It uses SimpleXML), cURL, and JavaScript. SimpleXML is an incredibly powerful XML engine! It’s much easier to program with than the old parsing engine. Code Samples are on the project page as well.
I made a modification that utilizes the little Technorati logo. It’s styled quite nicely now. I’ve updated the code page as well.
Regards,
Doug
I have it displaying in my Site Rankings text widget - with due credit of course
You have used up your daily allotment of Technorati API queries.
With that in mind, I’ve modified my posts here to have people host the code on their own rather than hitting my site. Sorry about that folks! I didn’t even know there was a ‘daily allotment’.
I have modified the code to simply pass the error message as commented HTML so it doesn’t display the “0″ that it used to. Now it will only display the widget if there’s a positive response.
I suppose the best bet may be to host the source page yourself you can do that. I’ll keep you posted when I find out what the ‘daily allotment is’. Thanks, Steven!
I’ve also modified it so that if you do reach the Daily Allotment, it simply switches into an “Add to Favorites” link!
Dapper Screen Scraping for any Site
Technorati Rank WordPress Plugin
So I’ll see if I can get this one working: http://samanathon.com/2007/03/10/wordpress-plugin-display-your-technorati-rank-with-php-4/ which you helped with for those who don’t use PHP5
Now I just need to tweak it and it should be perfect