Ecosystem Self-Service Interface: Part I

Folks:
I’ve been hinting at a new self-service interface for a long while now, and tonight the first piece of it is finally ready.
The challenge that I have faced is that I wanted to develop a system that would accomplish two major goals:
– It would not require manual intervention on my part (slow, tedious, unreliable)
– It would prevent abuse and ensure that only a blog’s true owner could make a change
I think I’ve settled on a system that works on both counts. The first feature to be implemented and operational is the ability to change a weblog’s URL — tonight, in certain limited cases, later, in all.
Tonight’s functionality allows you to change your weblog’s URL in the Ecosystem if you have not added a duplicate entry in the Ecosystem for your new blog’s URL. If you’ve already done that, and therefore have two URL’s in the Ecosystem, fear not: I will be implementing the code to handle that, and ‘merge’ the history of your two URLs. Just, er, not tonight.
So: the way to tell the Ecosystem about your new URL depends on whether or not you have ‘gone live’ with your new URL or not.
If you have turned on your new URL, and are automatically redirecting traffic to it from your old URL, then add the following tags to your new URL’s front page in the header section:
&lt link rel=”DCTERMS.replaces” href=”http://www.myoldblogurl.com” /&gt
&lt meta name=”DC.Identifier” content=”http://www.mynewblogurl.com”&gt
Make sure that ‘http://www.myoldblogurl.com’ matches the old URL that the Ecosystem is tracking exactly.
If you have not turned on your new URL, or are not automatically redirecting traffic from your old URL, you can simply add the following tag to your old URL’s front page in the header section:
&lt link rel=”DCTERMS.isreplacedby” href=”http://www.mynewblogurl.com/” /&gt
The tags will be picked up on the next evening’s nightly scan, so check back the following morning and you should see your URL updated all nice and neat. And if you don’t, please let me know.
Once the URL swap has occurred, you can remove the tags. But I have tried to create the tags based on proper Core metadata standards, which means that any other application that understands Dublin Core could also understand them. So you can also leave them there, if you like.
Anyway: enough for tonight. Coming soon, I’ll get the ‘merge’ code implemented, as I know many of the URL switches that need to happen already have duplicate entries…
PS: I’ve also started cleaning out a lot of the obvious duplicates blogs that show up on the Traffic Ranking pages. Only got through the top 250 tonight, but it’s a start…