0xDECAFBAD

It's all spinning wheels and self-doubt until the first pot of coffee.

Identifying RSS readers, and obsessively watching referrers in RSS

Okay, starting to poke at my referrer scripts again and produced two new things: Recent Referrers in RSS (src) and RSS Feed Readers (src). I simplified my database a bit, collapsing multiple rows into single rows with a hit count column. Also squashed a few stupid bugs that had cropped up in the Great Site Move a month or so ago. Realized that the counts were insanely wrong, sometimes showing a count as high as 15 for a post that might have only 3 back links.

Likely the referers in RSS will be of interest only to me as I obsessively watch my site (though I do subscribe to Disenchanted's Recent Inbound, since it gives me a stream of new sites to visit). But, the RSS feed readers list is a few steps closer to the friends-of list I want to move from LiveJournal out into the blogosphere proper.

One of the next things I want to do is start cobbling a fairly modular & general URL investigator - that is, give it a url, and have it try to track down title, author, contents page, RSS feed, location, and any other metadata that comes up. I could then use this to flesh out all the links everywhere, from backlinks to the friends-of list. Basically what many other people have been doing for different semantic aspects, but all rolled into one agent.

Along with that, I want to implement some manual annotation of sites known by my site. Thinking that, between per-post backlinks and RSS reader links, I could eventually build a decent database of metadata here. With that, all kinds of nifty things could happen...

Okay, time for bed. Starting to ramble, or at least be tempted to do so.

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Archived Comments

  • Nice scripts, combine that with Bills RSS comments script and you never have to visit your own site again :)
  • Yay, I forgot about that. All done: http://www.decafbad.com/recent_comments_rss.xml
  • Heh, it's really amazing to see how a series of really simple scripts and templates leads to all sorts of unexpected associations. The aggregator is indeed becoming much of what exists in Digital Dashboard sort of implementations.