billythekid's blogshares blog

Yes, after a long holiday from the game I’m back doing a little bit here and there. I’m trying to make a dent on the almost 300 new artefacts that have been introduced since I was last ‘active’. At the time of writing this post I have 225 to go.

How do I go about collecting my artes? Well, firstly I create this sort in the ideas page to let me see what artes I need in ascending price order. This is simply a preference of mine, snag all the cheap artes first.

Then I load up my text editor and Stud to get some linking done. Hovering over the industry name on the ideas page shows me the industry ID. I type this ID into stud’s listmaker box, choose “hidden” from the buttons and then click on the word “Listmaker” (the cursor changes to a cross). The wait image comes on and when it goes away I have a link saying “Click Here For Your List For The XYZ Industry.”

Clicking this link takes me to a page(example) where I am presented with a list of links to all(up to 100) blogs in that industry. I copy this list into my text editor and start again with the next industry.

Soon I have a big text file full of links to all the blogs in industries I want for their artefact. I can then paste this link into any blogs I have in the game and reindex them, making all the blogs in the list have incoming links. I then reindex outgoing on any of my blogs holding the list.

To wait on the drop I sit on this page which will show me when there are ideas available in industries for which I don’t have the artefact, yet.

Hi anyone! In doing the changeover I’ve managed to break a few things. Like the blog finder tool, it’s all screwed up!

There are also going to be broken links throughout the site, which I’ll attempt to repair as I find them, if I’m able to do so… There’s every chance that the places where the links point could be dead as well as the, very real, possibility that I’ll just neglect to do these. I’ll strike through any broken links I find that I can’t repair as I go along.

Please feel free to inform me in the comments here as to any you particularly want fixed…

Thanks

Ken’s working on trying to get something working on this problem. I suspect Immunis will soon release a lot of blogless artes just to spite us! The problem is that the machine which handles blog additions is down and needs hard-rebooting or something. I think they need to get blogshares into the clouds, don’t you?

In other news, this blog is not dead yet!

I’ve put this blog on a new home, as part of the love-pain blogging network. Makes sense right? ;oP
I encourage you all to join the lovepain network and get blogging! (about anything, not just blogshares!)

I’ve been playing with the Twitter API recently to make a blogshares web-app for posting various events to twitter to help publicise the game and perhaps attract new players. In the process I had an idea of making a script that’ll autmatically identify if a twitter is dead or alive, based on the 6 months posting rule. (In blogshares if a listed blog has had no new posts in 6 months it is considered a dead blog and can be removed from the game).

So I made a script that did that, then I thought, well, “what other APIs are available to me while I’m at this?”

First port of call for all things web related of course is Google, who I know have a whole host of APIs available for the things they own, youtube, google charts and most importantly for our reasons, Blogspot/Blogger. So I added blogger blogs to the script. Then I headed off to a B$ voter/moderator’s nemesis, Windows Spaces Live blogs. Wouldn’t you know it, they also run an API.

So I added those to the script too. I put them all together in a nice, no-frills, php script at http://blogshares.the-kid.org/bs/doa.php but don’t get too excited just yet. This post is to tell you about a greasemonkey script that’ll partner it in the game.

Load up any blogs.php page and the greasemonkey script will hit the php script on my blogshares site and return the information to the blogs.php page below the “General” table…

The advantage of this script is that it actually hits the blogs themselves and does a comparison before reporting them as dead or alive so it’s 99% certain a dead here is a bona fidé dead. If you hit a non-blogger/twitter/livespace site it’ll just send back a message you can ignore.

You can also manually check blogs by putting the URL on the end of http://blogshares.the-kid.org/bs/doa.php?URL= (which is all the greasemonkey script really does, just a bit fancier)

Please note that the twitter API limit is returned and if it’s showing none left(I’ve asked twitter to increase it but we’ll see if they actually do) please don’t hit twitter blogs until the time stated, cheers. Post any bugs here or in the forum post accompanying this.

you’re looking at it!

Get it here

I’ve finally gotten round to porting the majority of stud’s list makers into his new web interface. You get up to the top 100 blogs in the industry with links in the old plain/dropdown/hidden formats for your blog linking fun and games.

I used this kind of tool to get my artes back in the day and it’s great for linking up a whole industry then reindexing outgoings on your own blog to drop loads.

Play nice now…

All new Stud’s been released into the wild with some very basic functionality. I’m adding to this all the time and we should have a decent bot soon enough.

As of this post game related commands consist of a Turbo-PM Bidder(makes a clickable Player Market list of industries you still need at a single price) and a Blogless Lister(makes a clickable list of all industries with no blogs in them, as well as links to google’s blogsearch and twitter searches for these industries)

You can play with him over here.

I’ve recently completed a little project for the GIC which will hopefully make your blogshares and real lives coincide a bit easier.

It’s a simple Not Safe For Work flagging system so that you can decide if it’s appropriate for you at that time to click through to an actual blog and it works like this…

There is an added link next to the “Report an Error with this listing” link in the table to “Flag Blog As NSFW”. If you have clicked through to the blog to moderate or vote and find it to be not safe for work, i.e featuring nudity/bad language/loud background music etc. you can click this link and it will be flagged as Not Safe For Work.

So then what? Well a couple of things happen. Firstly the link you just clicked changes to bold red “Not Safe For Work!” also the table changes colour to red from green…

This is stored in the database so that any future visitor to the page is met with a red table and the not bold red flagged text.

Just waiting on it being rolled out now by someone who has write privs ;oP

Guess who’s in the early stages of his reincarnation?

Stud v2.0 – watch this space!