Blog Change Bot Scares Me
posted on july 30, 2003, tag: software
I have a group of about 15 weblogs I check twice a day. Once in the morning when I get to work, once at about 8PM after I eat dinner. It's a daily routine, and it's nice. Often at work, I'll randomly check a few of the 15 weblogs to see if they've been updated since I last checked. This is bad. It leads to further checking, and very frequently I end up having looked at the same sights 10 times in one day—none of them having changed. If you suffer from the same problem, you might want to check out Blog Change Bot (via WDIK):
Blog Change Bot (blogchangebot on AIM) is a blog monitoring service which updates you via AOL Instant Messanger when a blog you are interested [in] is updated. Subscribe via AIM or iChat to be automatically notified when the blog is updated.
Now you don't even have to type a URL! Or click a mouse button! This scares me. Terrifies me, really. It's one step closer to the inevitable point where I will wake up in the morning, and while still lying there I will shit and be showered, followed by having eggs and toast crammed into my mouth. Then, a robot will pick me up (my legs and arms won't work at this point, and I'll always drool) and put me in a chair. It will wheel me to a large white wall on which tons of visual information will flash and animate and get right in my pale face. Then I'll have all the contents of millions of websites screamed at me in thousands of languages. I'll probably shit again at that point.
It's all terrifying. Blog Change Bot is the beginning!
Update: I'll have you know that I tested BCB with this update (subscribed to codebucket.com), and it didn't work. Whew! I can still use my legs!
Second Update: It did work... it just took 4 minutes to come through. I just shit in my bed!
Comments
There are 7 comments, comments are closed
Shawn on 07/30/2003:
This seems like a pretty cool service. The only problem I see is in following comments. Sometimes that's part of what I check for, though I don't think adding a comment would ping weblogs.com. So I guess we can't stop checking our favorite sites 10 times a day quite yet. (unless of course you decide to become a sane person, and check sites no more than twice a day).
Ben Hosken on 07/30/2003:
Ha ha ha....this is great. Thanks for the fun comments!!!
Brice on 07/31/2003:
If the bot is checking for changes to the index page, it will catch the comments; at least on this site. The difference will show up in the number of comments displayed. I've used similar tricks to update all pages on my site when I make a single change somewhere (subtle tooltips).
Garrett on 07/31/2003:
Actually, as it says on the website, it checks for recently changed blogs on blo.gs, weblogs.com and pyra's blogger—so it won't see comment updates, etc. It will only see changes that ping those sites (which is only new entries usually, sometimes edited entries).
And Ben (in case others didn't get it, Ben is the creator of BCB)—in all seriousness it's a good idea. I've decided to subscribe to a few sites to try it out.
Brice on 07/31/2003:
Ok, perhaps there's something about this that I've yet to really worry about and/or research, but from briefly reading the XML-RPC interface for weblogs.com, I don't see what problem there is for getting BCB to work with comments. All the owner would have to do is simply inform weblogs.com that the journal changed and provide a link to the updated index page. The "ping" back is actually a page read (which threw me for a bit being a computer nerd), which should notice that the site has been updated following what I wrote about before.
Is there something that I've overlooked greatly?
Shawn on 08/01/2003:
Out of the box MT will only send out pings when you post an entry for the first time. Not for edits and not for comments. I assume Blogger is the same way. I'm sure someone crafty could ping weblogs.com after every change, but something about that feels rude and also, if every weblog pinged weblogs.com after every single change, I think the internet would blow up. (But I'm the kinda guy who still pictures a submarine when I hear "ping" and could easily be wrong about the blowing up part).
Brice on 08/01/2003:
Ahh, now this makes a lot more sense. I wasn't originally limiting myself to the confines of some of the content managers out there.