To do: auto-linkbacks

I need to spend some of this weekend looking into automatic linkbacks/referrals. I was looking at Mark’s referrers list (which now includes automatically discovered RSS feed links), and saw PapaScott, which reminded me that I meant to link to his link to my blogroll script, because I already liked the circular serendipity of him using a script which I finally wrote after several months of looking at my link to his script (to do a blogroll from weblogs.com’s changes.xml file) without ever getting up the energy to set up a cron job to keep the local copy up to date, even before the added serendipity of being reminded by something that’s intended to produce a different sort of serendipity.

While my first thought was “small world!”, my second thought (both times) was “big world that needs a lot more connections to keep track of stuff.” So auto-linkbacks (without a damn cron job) are on the weekend study list.

10 Comments

Comment by Phil's Bitch #
2002-05-31 21:10:34

Yeah, you get on that. Right now. Could you also work on a script that sucks fractions of a penny from the bank accounts of various world leaders each time anyone visits… anyone?

I could really use something like that.

 
2002-05-31 21:27:23

The way waxpancake does it here for example is super cool. I want one of them there gagdets.

 
Comment by Phil's Bitch #
2002-05-31 21:33:52

Now that is cool. And look at you, throwin’ mad links.

 
Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2002-05-31 21:48:29

Very cool, very quick, and it shouldn’t take me more than six or seven hours to translate the Perl to PHP.

I wish I hadn’t skipped school the day they taught Perl.

 
Comment by nick #
2002-06-01 00:00:54

that first paragraph there melted a lobe or two. i’m really lightheaded now.

 
Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2002-06-01 00:19:02

Probably didn’t help that you made me look at it, and realize that I left off one whole clause at the end, with two more uses of ”serendipity”. With any luck, I’ll get a few more links as a counter-example of how you shouldn’t write in long, complicated sentences online.

The Hemingway version:

I looked at Mark’s referrers. One was PapaScott. He linked to my blogroll script. I linked to his script before. It was good, but hard. A real man would have used it. I was a lazy man.

 
Comment by Andy #
2002-06-01 11:08:25

Glad you like it. Post your PHP version and I’ll link to it.

 
Comment by PapaScott #
2002-06-02 12:06:11

Hmm, I thought that blogroll.php script looked familiar. No wonder I was able to adapt it so easily! :-)

 
Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2002-06-02 12:21:09

That’s actually the bigger circle of everyone who uses expat in PHP stealing someone else’s code and function names, since I didn’t even actually look at your script again when I started mine – I stole from an expat example linked from php.net instead. And then had to go back and rename everything, after I messed up ruzz’s blog where he was already using the standard function names for something else.

I keep meaning to look into some better way of doing it, especially some way of skipping all the globals, but when push comes to shove it’s just easier to throw in the same old ugly stuff I’m used to.

 
Comment by Jonathan Peterson #
2002-08-20 19:47:27

My php is a bit slow, so I decided a more elegant way to implement this would be a crontabed version. If anyone else wants to try it this way, the code is here.

 
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