412 Precondition Failed, Technorati, Twitter, and Bad Behavior

April 3rd, 2007

Today I noticed something odd, and in the process of troubleshooting it, inadvertently fixed a problem I didn’t know I had.

Disclaimer: This post will likely make no sense and be completely nerdilicious to all who aren’t bloggers. Sorry.

1. On Technorati, I noticed the name of this blog was appearing as “412 Precondition Failed” instead of “Webomatica”. All the stats and recent posts were showing up just fine — it was a problem with just the name. Nothing major, but annoyingly funny.
2. I sent this observation out over Twitter, something to the effect of it being funny that my blog had a new name on Technorati. (Engtech suggested I buy the domain name “412preconditionfailed.com”).
3. Adam Hertz, VP of Engineering at Technorati saw my Twitter, and kindly looked into the issue on his end. He said that the Technorati spider was being blocked at my site and pulling in the resulting error as the blog’s title.
4. This led me to wonder if something was up with my server. I looked in robots.txt and .htaccess. Nothing odd there.
5. That left WordPress. I think I’ve narrowed things down to the Bad Behavior plugin. It blocks IP addresses of bots that it determines are spam. For whatever reason, it seemed to think the Technorati spider was an evil spam bot. Bingo. After deactivating the plugin, my next post was picked up by Technorati right away, and the “412 Precondition Failed” title vanished. My blog name was back to “Webomatica”.
6. I did some further Google-ing and learned of cases where Bad Behavior blocks legitimate access requests, and even certain aggregators like Techmeme (and maybe others?).

I wondering if I’ve inadvertantly solved an issue of a large delay between posting, pinging, and seeing posts appear on Technorati. I’ll have to monitor the performance over the next few days and see if this problem is resolved as well.

As for Bad Behavior, with Akismet active, I’m probably safe in the spam game. It’s a toss up between inclusion in blog aggregators and potentially being overwhelmed by spam, but having my blog named “412 Condition Failed” isn’t acceptable. I’m willing to see how much annoying spam I get over the next few days to find out if any other performance issues have been cleared up.

And what else was learned from this?

• I keep discovering new uses for Twitter. If you have a problem, try twittering it and someone smarter than you may answer (like a VP of a Web 2.0 site).
• There’s always something new to learn regarding the technical side of blogging. Just when I think I have a handle on things, my handle becomes “412 Precondition Failed”.

Note: There are others!