Clearly, something is wrong with Daypop.
I knew something was amiss when yesterday my four year old WFC vs. JFC article rose up into the Daypop 15 Top News Stories. My day-popularity is still going strong today. At this moment, 4 of the 15 Top Posts on Daypop point to my weblog entries. Clearly, something is wrong with Daypop.
What's the problem? The other day I tweaked the layout of my site the other day and,apparently, the changes that I made sent irritating ripples through Daypop. Daypop tracks the most popular news stories and weblog posts by counting the number of weblogs that link to those news stories and weblog posts. By changing my site layout, I effectively changed the contents of hundreds of web pages on my site. Daypop's flawed top post algorithm saw this as a giant burst of day-popularity for the various links that decorate the right hand side of my weblog.
Why doesn't Daypop account for this type of site-layout change, I mean, don't layout changes like this happen all the time in the world of weblogs? I wonder: is there something that I could have done to keep my changes from driving Daypop bonkers?