LJFM rides again
Nov. 4th, 2003 09:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ferenOkay, does anybody else remember the wonderful piece of work that ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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 ofmarnanel'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
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
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-11-07 05:51 am (UTC)It worked just fine for me when I ran it through testing earlier this week. That's really odd! Can you do me an immense favor and e-mail me (via feren -at- livejournal-dot-com) the link the e-mail updates were giving you? I'd really appreciate it because it would help me further dissect this issue and determine where things went awry.
[Can you unsubscribe me?]
No problem! You're officially out of the system as of now.
[You might want to add an email address or something.]
Mmm, good point. I generally dislike putting email addresses on the web, it makes life so much easier for spammers when they can send a bot out to harvest innocent addresses from the web. I thought that if anybody had an issue they'd just mail me back at the address the updates are sent from -- but I forget I don't think like everyone else. I appreciate the feedback and will work on those issues.
Incidentally, if I built the system out to send non-HTML e-mails would you be interested in rejoining?
no subject
Date: 2003-11-07 06:00 am (UTC)Some of us just assume that automatically generated email won't include a reply-to address that's seen by a human :)
I would be interested if you set it up for plaintext emails. For now, I'll just keep checking Joule.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-07 06:58 am (UTC)In the end I tracked this down to the behaviour of their web browsers - as you can see the way these scripts work is that they generate a request to a file that isn't found; which would normally generate a 404 error.
Instead the .htaccess file invokes the validate/remove script and all is well.
It appears that some browsers will get a 404 error some of the time; I believe this is related to the IE setting "show friendly HTTP error messages", but some people seemed to see this because they had strange IE plugins loaded.
With regard to the email address; I used a real address for a long time, but then switched to a dedicated account so that I didn't get bothered with bounces. (I recieved 20-50 a day on average).
I think it'd be nice to extend the code to handle this magically, and set the from address to be "bounce-user-host@sending-domain.com", but I didn't have time.