BlogShares
Greg - Pungenday, 54 Bureaucracy 3169 @ 02:58 AM
1) I have some gripes about industry voting on BlogShares.
2) I'm sharing my solution. (Surprise, surprise... It's a CGI.)
Interminable screed follows.
I've snipped the griping part of this post. I thought better of it for the following reasons: 1) It was really trivial and inconsequential, even beyond the norm for my prattle. 2) I just needed to vent, I vented, I feel better. In retrospect I don't necessarily need to have my venting read. Sorry if that's selfish. 3) I probably came off as much more serious than the issue deserves and far angrier than I ever actually felt.
I'll just sum it up as: "I vow to never, ever vote on a blog without first looking at the blog itself, and I wish others would do the same."
We now return you to our screed, already in progress.
...
This will be especially tough because I suck at voting industries. I sidetrack to reading the blogs I'm trying to vote on and then never go back to vote. I second-guess myself endlessly about industry choices and wind up voting for 'none of the above'. I stumble over other people's votes: The owner didn't vote it into that category; will I piss him off if I do? ... This person has a +3; if I vote against 'em, will they notice and get ticked off? -minor snip-
So I've taken the Nike approach. (Well, not the sweatshop part of the Nike approach. Nor the truly vile free-speech-for-corporations- but- maybe-not-for-individuals part of the Nike approach.) I've set out to just do it.
First I slogged through 20 or 30 blogs voting... (Click from the list to the blogshares listing page. Click from the listing page to the actual blog. Tab back to the listing. Click for the 'who voted' popup (because I just have to know, you know?). Click for the voting popup. Click-click-click vote. Close popup, close popup, close tab, close tab. Lather, rinse, repeat.) And I thought: There's gotta be a way to streamline this. Wouldn't it be nice to have the voting stuff framed up with the actual blog?
I think it is. See for yourself.
I'm not announcing this on blogshares because it's missing an obvious front-end part: the list of links to blogs you'd vote on, as seen through the CGI. To try and compile such lists would be to shape how people choose which blogs to vote on, cramping some folks' style while at the same time helping crowd me out of the methods that *I* use to find candidates for voting (not that there's a lack of them, but the options for finding them nicely listed together are finite). Also, the API is limited in terms of querying blogs by industry or lack thereof and it's a no-no for automata to fetch pages from the site proper. That's another dilemma, and I don't have a good solution yet.
What I do have is a trivial script that I run locally to produce such lists from HTML pages. I don't really want to hand-hold anyone through installing perl and learning how to run scripts from the command line, so posting it on the forum is probably not an option. But here it is, in case you need it:
# Sorting out PersianBlog links because:
# a) It's just mind-numbing after a while voting Farsi, Farsi, Farsi, Farsi, (not Farsi), Farsi.
# b) Moderation concerns:
# b1) Voting Iran is, IMHO, slightly questionable when you can't read Farsi.
# (Seyed's comfortable with it, tho, judging from the +10s)
# b2) Mods may be passing over Persian entries for the same reason cited in (a).
# c) The Farsi charset + a profusion of flash banners makes my system crawl when preloading a series of pages.
# d) We still save them because they are, after all, low-hanging fruit (go ahead, just please DO look first, right?)
open(IN, "whatever-file-you've-saved-from-blogshares.html");
open(OUT1, ">munged_persian.html");
open(OUT2, ">munged_nopersian.html");
while(<IN>) {
if (m{(<a.+href="blogs.php\?.+</a>)}i) {
$link = $1;
$link =~ s{href="(blogs.php\?.+?)"}{href="http://testbed.dothanarea.com/vote_frames.cgi?link=$1&midrow=no"}g;
if ($link =~ /PersianBlog/) { # Add an i to prevent some few slipping in; I find it brings them down to an acceptable level this way
print OUT1 "$link<BR>\n";
} else {
print OUT2 "$link<BR>\n";
}
}
}
close(IN);
close(OUT1);
close(OUT2);
Boomtime, 58 Bureaucracy 3169 @ 12:05 PM
Your thoughts on industry voting mirror mine. I really think the people that take time out to try to vote blogs in are really doing good things for the community. Thanks to everyone who does it of course. However, I can definately see why people don't vote more blogs in (it's a pain and a half to just try to see where a blog should be, and always the worry that someone will disagree.)
Can't wait to see more of the cgi script in action. Keep up the good work.
Boomtime, 58 Bureaucracy 3169 @ 02:44 PM
Thanks, Kyrah!
Actually, I realized that a bookmarklet is probably the answer to feeding sites to the CGI (someone better with javascript might even be able to obviate the CGI; it's just writing a frameset after all) but I'm still going to hold off for now.
It occurs to me that lots of new votes are not what's needed at the moment - right now we need more moderators and to give them a chance to get through the backlog. I've slowed my own voting way down for that reason.
As soon as things settle down some, I'll pursue this and see where it goes... Framing people's sites is a bit questionable and I suspect that's why Seyed doesn't have something like this already integrated. Then again, doing it on my own site will keep the heat off blogshares if anyone does complain.
