Sometimes, people are just awesome
January 14th, 2007
Is it just me, or is there an abnormally large number of great folks in the new web communities that have sprung up in the past few years? Maybe it’s the fact that most of the people I’m working with lately are into the idea of creating or participating in something great, rather than making a boatload of money, but I’ve met more than my fair share of kick-ass people this year.
That said, even among these great people, it’s not often you meet someone who is genuinely cool and also willing to give you their time and enthusiasm with no thoughts of what they’ll get in return.
I’ve been developing a Wordpress widget for Clipmarks that allows you to add clips to the side of your blog. It’s only my second wordpress plugin, so I figured it would be a bit rough around the edges and would benefit from some true beta testing. We invited the incredibly awesome Torley to be our first beta tester Thursday night, and not only did he test it out and give us great feedback, but he’s also blogged about the tool and has done the legwork of installing an updated version of the beta just a day later!
I’ve spent the past year getting involved in communities and meeting amazing people, but it still always astounds me when people are this cool. It makes me really excited for the things that we’re capable of building if we continue to work together!
Long blog-post short: Thanks Torley!
PS - I’d love to test this widget out on a bunch of blogs before we go live with it, and could really use the help, if you’ve got a wordpress blog. Just drop me a comment on this post and I’ll get in touch!
The First Great Coding Binge of 2006
January 3rd, 2006
Well, I don’t know if it was the fact that I was laid up for a good portion of the past week or just that my brain was rested and ready to churn out something creative, but last night I was struck by inspiration, and couldn’t stop coding for hours.
I’ll release the results here in the next day or two under the GPL (I’m working out some final bugs right now), but basically I’ve written an open source myspace friend adder in Perl. At first I was wary of all the steps involved but I’ve done some web automation before and the WWW::Mechanize library is amazing. It really makes jobs like this easy. I went from concept to working code in about 4 hours.
The script literally logs in as you, goes to the pages you specify in a simple comma separated CSV file, and then adds all of the friend IDs that are on those pages. It’s been working amazingly, as there are a lot of great bands that we’ve played on the GlitchCast. The theory is that if they like the music they’re “friends” with, they might also like our show and the other music we feature.
Part of me feels a little grey about the spammy nature of these invites, but I’m not just sending this to users at random, these are people I think genuinely might be interested in our show.
Myspace makes you enter a “captcha” after every few friends you add, so I’ve added a simple “pause” mechanism to the code, prompting you to go and add a friend by hand so it can continue on it’s merry way.
Adding friend 1468183…captcha detected. Go add a friend manually.
Here’s the current page:
http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=invite.addfriend_verify&friendID=1468183
Hit enter to continue.
If I had any doubts as to whether this was worth the effort, they’ve already been put to rest. Four bands have written me just this afternoon, asking to be included in the GlitchCast.
Outstanding.
At the moment, I’m getting hit with the captchas pretty frequently, so I’ll have to tweak the “sleep” time between adding friends a bit and see if that helps. I’ve also got 33 pages of pending friend requests, so that might have me in a higher “penalty bracket” or some such.
It’s been fun to play with myspace and hand-craft some of the tools I need. Being that I run on Linux here at home and didn’t really want to run this stuff on the work PCs, there were no commercial options available for me anyway.
Once I get this properly cleaned up and released, I’m going to start working on some ways to stay in contact with those on my friends list. It should be fairly easy to modify this script to log in and message those on our friends pages and do things like “thanks for the add” and “Check out the next show, it features Edie Carey” to all the Edie fans that have friended us.
Now, there’s a good chance that if you’re reading this, you found this page through google looking for a free and open source myspace friend adder. The perl code will be available here soon (either tonight, 2005-01-03, or tomorrow). In the meantime, check out the podcast that got me excited enough to put in all this effort just to promote it: The GlitchCast - bringing great independent and under-appreciated music to the Podsafe Music Network
GlitchNYC is the personal blog of Eric Skiff, Community Evangelist for 
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