David's dashboard

A comment on the problem "Karma Bots" in Plurk:

True. That bot should be unfriended, or the bot should be changed to be less noisy. The plurker runs the risk of being unfriended by humans if her plurks only get activity created by bots. She should keep that in mind. – David, on September 03, 2008 17:03

A comment on the problem "Karma Bots" in Plurk:

Greg, read the replies yourself. Nobody else is calling for @martinbogo's karma to be stripped. Either we like to read his plurks, or we don't. (I don't.)

My peeve is People who care about karma enough to plurk things like, "good morning!" "karma maintenance :)" and "good night!" Those are the plurks that aren't interesting and are pure noise. I don't care if a bot plurks them or a human. That kind of plurk is noise to me either way.

It's not the bot. It's the content of the message that matters.

So, what do I do about all those plurkers who who write karma maintaining plurks like, "good morning plurktopia!" There's THOUSANDS of them! I don't friend them. They're out of my life, and I'm happy for it. I could care less what their karma is. – David, on September 01, 2008 23:29

David asked a question in Plurk on August 31, 2008 16:44:

Why is the API 'posted' field changing and breaking apps?

Is plurk going to keep changing the format of the 'posted' field in the API? It's changed back and forth a couple of times in the past two days between the "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z AB" format and dates like, "Sun Aug 31 08:05:31 2008"

This breaks every application using the API.

Here's a recent history of the way Plurk's been changing the API. (Just look at Aug 30th and Aug 31st.) http://plurk.dlma.com/stats.txt

A comment on the problem "Karma Bots" in Plurk:

Instead of bringing @williamshakespeare into it, I should have just said that content should be king. My apologies, Bard. – David, on August 26, 2008 18:21

David replied on August 26, 2008 17:38 to the problem "Karma Bots" in Plurk:

There's a difference between @martinbogo and @williamshakespeare. Some bots are loved, and some are despised. Let their friends vote by unfriending. (Utilizing a sort of RL karma.) We'd hate to lose the bots we love just because of some losers.

For example, I'm not friends with, nor following @martinbogo. Tada!

A comment on the question "Plurk extremely slow, timelines fail to load." in Plurk:

Better than yesterday, not as good as last week. http://plurk.dlma.com/stats.txt – David, on August 19, 2008 23:18

David asked a question in Plurk on August 19, 2008 07:40:

Conditional GETs might help with Plurk's performance

I notice in my lifestream that Plurk is one of only two sites that doesn't support Conditional GETs for its RSS feeds. Plurk always serves up the whole thing, with every request.

http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2002/10/...

>>> import feedparser # from http://feedparser.org/
>>> d = feedparser.parse('http://www.plurk.com/user/plurkbuddy.xml')
>>> d.etag or hasattr(d, 'modified')
False

If you haven't already tried them, give them a try, and see if they help.

David asked a question in Plurk on August 18, 2008 01:22:

Why so many 504 errors since 21:52, 2008-08-14?

A cron job that makes some plurk api calls used to take just 25 seconds until last Thursday. Since then, everything still works, but a whole lot more 504 errors are occurring.

When I, as a human, use plurk, I've also seen some plurks not expand and show their comments lately, too. (Try again later, and it'll work.)

Did plurk change something on the backend? The service was more responsive before Thursday. Here's a log: http://plurk.dlma.com/stats.txt

That's [time] [date] [duration] [error list]

[duration] should be less than 30s. Always used to be, before Thursday, as you can see, if you scroll down a little bit. Nowadays, every other run is peppered with 504s.

A comment on the question "Google reader twitter RSS broken?" in Twitter:

Poor lordgilman, we keep talking about the authentication issue. Anyway, to further expand what gpjt says, you can also use private strings to keep your username or password private while sharing the pipe. Here's how: http://dblume.livejournal.com/112262.... – David, on August 06, 2008 15:45

A comment on the question "Google reader twitter RSS broken?" in Twitter:

lordgilman, it may please you to know that yahoo pipes has a similar problem (http://blog.pipes.yahoo.net/2008/07/2...) to the one google reader has. :) And FWIW, those of us searching the web for solutions to the "with friends" issue keep winding up here. So it's handy that that fix can be found here. Your pain has brought some relief to others. – David, on August 05, 2008 22:52

A comment on the question "Google reader twitter RSS broken?" in Twitter:

@lordgilman, I can reproduce your problem. That sucks. Also note that the Atom feeds you provided do not validate at http://feedvalidator.org. But BarbInNebraska's RSS feed does validate and is still wrong in Google Reader. http://twitter.com/statuses/user_time.... Now *that's* definitely not Twitter's fault. The feed is good and current. That complaint has to go to Google. – David, on July 30, 2008 23:23

David replied on July 30, 2008 22:53 to the question "Google reader twitter RSS broken?" in Twitter:

If you're willing to run a cron job to get your friends RSS feed, you could do so the way I do with the twitter api. Details at my blog entry about it.

Basically, you use the twitter api to authenticate and get the feed, then save the feed someplace where Google Reader can access it.