Hooray. Me and John managed to clear up a backlog of almost 400 blogs in the past two days on Blogwise, thanks in part to John’s great suggestions for improving the submission checker. There’s a bot that visits the site before we do to check for dud links, etc. and caches the page so that when we review it it appears instantly.
The other bonus is that many hosting sites (blogger.com.br, blogspot.com come to mind) seem to be having poor uptimes lately, so the person might have a genuine blog at that address but because the site’s down we can’t review it. With the bot caching ahead of us, it checks the site every hour or so and only caches the page when the site’s up.
Good ol’ Perl. I may release source code (although, admittedly, it’s mostly wget with a bit of Perl tacked on the put the files in the right place and to read from the database!)