Here’s one of those tech notes that usually turns into an open thread, with some information that might be useful to other website monkeys.

While testing the Facebook Like button I noticed that there seems to be a latency problem somewhere in the mammoth Facebook hivemind. If the button is clicked shortly after a post appears at LGF, the number changes to ‘1’ but then immediately goes back to nothing, and the Like doesn’t appear at your Facebook Wall. After an undetermined amount of time, the button starts working properly, and the counter “sticks” instead of vanishing. To make it a little more frustrating, it doesn’t happen with every post.

While checking to see if there was something about LGF’s code that was causing this, I discovered Facebook’s URL Linter app, and plugged in the URL for one of the problem pages. It showed no errors. But wonder of wonders, the Like button that had been misbehaving suddenly started working.

Running the URL Linter must update whatever caches are not getting flushed, or whatever transaction isn’t being committed across their DB servers. I hope Facebook fixes this problem soon.

In the meantime, to make this process a bit easier I wrote a quick Javascript bookmarklet that does the Lint operation with one click, for whatever page is currently displayed in your browser. Here’s that bookmarklet, for anyone geeky enough to know what I’m talking about (install in the usual bookmarklet way):

URL Linter Bookmarklet.

You may have noticed those two shiny new buttons at the top of the right sidebar. The Twitter button leads to my Twitter profile, of course, but I’m also now on Facebook, only several years after the rest of the world.

With this post I’m testing the Facebook app I coded yesterday and today, to automatically update my Facebook wall whenever I post a new blog article. Let’s hope nothing blows up.

Auto-posting is working nicely, and I’ve also listed LGF in Facebook’s “Networked Blogs” application.

Announcing a new feature for registered users: if you have a Twitter account, you can now save your Twitter username in your LGF Account Settings page (it’s near the bottom of the page).

Once you enter the Twitter name and save settings, a link will appear in your LGF user profile that opens a window to your Twitter profile, where friends can click the Follow button and add you to their Twitter stream.

If you post an LGF Page, this new button shows up in the Page’s subheading next to your LGF username:

Here’s a Page I posted recently where you can see it in action: Apple’s Slow and Careful Crisis Management Doesn’t Always Work.

Thanks to “Curious Lurker” for suggesting the feature.

Alternet has a post about a ring of Tea Party conservatives on the very popular social media site Digg, who are systematically burying posts from progressive sites: Massive Censorship Of Digg Uncovered.

I have no doubt that this is happening. But why wasn’t Alternet or the left wing blogosphere equally concerned when leftists were doing the same thing to LGF? LGF posts have been systematically buried at Digg for years, to the point where nobody even bothers to submit them any more; there’s no point. Even big stories that indisputably originated at LGF and had no particular political bias, like the Lebanon War Reuters Photoshop scandal, were deliberately buried or marked “inaccurate” at Digg.

I pretty much wrote Digg off quite a while ago as worthless for political topics; it’s regularly spammed by 9/11 Truthers, Ron Paul lunatics, and Alex Jones parrots, and organized teams of grudge-bearing ideologues on both sides work hard to suppress the other side’s stories. I don’t think this is even news.

The utopian ideal of social media is that valuable and newsworthy stories rise to the top; but rather than resulting in a triumph of grassroots democratic value-added breaking news, Digg’s system encourages mob rule, and rewards the people who are the most obsessed.