LJFM rides again

[feren]

Okay, does anybody else remember the wonderful piece of work that skx put together and called the LiveJournal Friends Monitor? If you do, you might remember that it was forced offline by LiveJournal around October 1st of 2003. I really missed LJFM because it automated a number of tasks for me and simplified how I kept track of everyone who was friending and unfriending me on LiveJournal. Ultimately it was sort of one of those "set it and forget it" systems, I told it to alert me of changes and never heard from it again unless there was something to report.

Well, to paraphrase Milhouse, LJFM is back.... in pog form. Thanks to Steve's generosity I was able to retrieve the source code to the LJFM and, after a bit of tinkering, I got the database built out and had the scripts up and running on my new server. So here's the deal: if you like the features of marnanel's Joule the friends-list analyser but hate having to manually run the Joule script every day you should go over to the newly reincarnated LJFM at http://ljfm.black-panther.us and get signed up. The system will take two days to start tracking and notifying you of changes -- this is because the system has to pull down the list of who has friended you on the first day, and has to pull down a fresh list on the second day to compare against for changes.

All of you are welcome to use the reincarnated LJFM, but please don't pass it around too much because I want to keep the load it generates on LJ to a minimum. I think when the site was running on Steve's server he had something like 6,000 users and it definately got LiveJournal's attention in a bad way. I'd like to avoid a similar situation so my server doesn't get banned like Steve's did.

Speaking of generosity, if you like the LJFM I suggest you throw a couple of dollar's Steve's way as a "thank you" for putting it all together originally. He didn't have to share the source code after he got shut down, but he did.

Calling all angels

Comments

[feren.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking that if I ever get to a number of subscribers that I have to start worrying about drawing undo attention to my server I will rework the code (it's pretty straightforward and hackable, Steve documented the hell out of its internals like a good coder should) so that it runs through users in alphabetical order, with two letters each hour. So the run schedule would be like:

0000 to 0100 hours: Livejournal accounts beginning with A or B

0100 to 0200 hours: Livejournal accounts beginning with C or D

0300 to 0400 hours: Livejournal accounts beginning with E or F

... and so on.

[skx.livejournal.com]

That's a stunningly simple idea; which would distribute the load perfectly.

(OK it's not perfect, there do seem to be clear frequency differences.. (http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/Livejournal/Usernames/index.php))

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll remember that.