blivet.com

Why does it sometimes say “Can’t Parse Blogroll” or “Can’t Open Blogroll” below the “Commotion Elsewhere” heading of the sidebar on my front page? Occasionally, like just a few minutes ago, blogrolling.com temporarily goes offline or otherwise absent without leave. If you went to their site during my outage you would have seen this, and only this, message on their site, “Blogrolling is experiencing unusually high load and cannot process your request at this time.” Which is bad since they supply the OPML file I parse using PHP into my handy little blogroll.

Now I like the blogrolling.com service because it’s easy to maintain your links and you get handy metadata for many of them, like when a blog was last updated. There are other benefits too. I even paid for the service. But lately it’s been either slow on the response causing my site to stall loading, or it fades in and out like an underfunded public radio station causing these strange error messages. I may have to go back to manually maintaining by blogroll, as Maciej suggested, or moving the blogrolling.com-based feed off to a “Links” page. Ugh.