LiveMarks on SWiK

Boox: Livemark Enhancements

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 09:31:37 -0800

New post status, rich tooltips.

Spam removal

Sun, 21 Jan 2007 07:19:20 -0800

del.icio.us is heavily spammed now all the time, I put a couple of simple filters in place to block the spam from the popular view.

This was already in tagdigest, but I’ve moved the code higher up so now they should be blocked from LiveMarks too.

The anti-spam measures are fairly simplistic, so they might not hold forever—it’s really in del.icio.us’s hands to ensure that their service doesn’t become riddled with spam.

Del.icio.us is not updating their feeds again

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 13:17:02 -0800

If you are using LiveMarks or the tag digest page, the reason it’s empty is that del.icio.us has stopped updating its RSS feeds.

This happens a lot and there’s not much I can do about it, just have to wait till they turn the feeds back on again, it’s usually not much longer than a couple days.

Here’s a traffic graph of del.icio.us

New Feature - Inline Tag Filter

Mon, 15 May 2006 01:16:48 -0700

Now you can filter the livemarks flow of bookmarks – by highlighting the tag bookmarks you are most interested in.

Optionally, you may also hide bookmarks that do not match the list of tags you want.

Stay classy!

Improved International Character Support

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 09:57:01 -0700

LiveMarks international character support has been upgraded, after some very long and frustrating debugging, I think LiveMarks shouldn’t show so many wonky screwed up characters instead of consistent good looking Unicode.

Stay classy…

Service Outage

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 22:53:19 -0800

we had a service outage tonight—ran out of the disk space, oops!

turns out that apache logs get big quickly when you are doing a lot of ajax requests

mysql doestn’ appreciate not having any disk space, so table done got corrupted

table is repaired, service is up again, yay….

LiveMarks not updating frequently

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 15:56:30 -0800

del.icio.us feeds are broked thus LiveMarks can’t get any bookmarks.

Likely this will be fixed soon enough, until then you can see del.icio.us’ cool Mason error messages on the feeds:

http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/ajax#raw

Can't use string ("") as a HASH ref while "strict refs" in use at  /www/del.icio.us/comp/posts/fetch line 218.

Trace begun at  /home/y/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 131

Fixed LiVEMARKS blog spam

Fri, 03 Mar 2006 19:12:18 -0800

There was a problem in which spam tagger urls were being seen as ‘popular’ – new filter implemented to prevent this from happening.

This effects LiVEMARKS and the livemarks popular display on the left.

What do the stars Mean?

Thu, 02 Feb 2006 14:19:01 -0800

On some of the scrolling bookmarks you’ll notice that there is a ★ character – this means the bookmark is a solidly popular bookmark that is continuing to get attention.

The star is calculated based on velocity of bookmark activity, if a URL is getting bookmarked every day, it should have a star next to it.

Something's Wrong

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 12:33:13 -0800

I see that there is a problem with the bookmarks importing from del.icio.us – I’ll look into it…

...Fixed – del.icio.us had a problem with serving new bookmarks that cleared up

...Kind of broken again – del.icio.us just has problems delivering their rss feeds, nothing I can do about this other than ask for people to contribute more mirrors

New Release

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 18:42:26 -0800

Update: Trying out the scroll with a little meta-data helper tags to let you know what’s new and what’s cool in the right side feed.

Milestone

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 01:40:13 -0800

Since I started counting a while back, LiveMarks has scrolled more than 2 million social bookmarks, and more than 1 million unique urls.

That’s a lot of bookmarks!

Repeating Links

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 13:43:48 -0800

I noticed an annoying bug in LiveMarks that I had been ignoring, there’s an issue with the RSS unique item identifier where it gets confused on long URLs.

The MySQL database setup stores urls as 255 varchars, the max size for a varchar. Unfortunately, there is no such limit of 255 characters for URLs. When the importer is looking if a link already exists, it’s looking for a link that’s chopped off by MySQL (when MySQL attempts to put in a long string where only 255 chars are allocated, it just silently chops the string).

I did think ahead for this, as you can see in the code I also generate a hash that I should be doing my unique comparisons by, but I guess somewhere I forgot to use it…

I’ll look into fixing it, plz stay tuned.

New Feature - All Time Popular

Sat, 31 Dec 2005 00:23:20 -0800

There’s now an ‘all time popular’ view available.

You can check it out here

I’ll probably do paging or some other cool fancy pants stuff in a bit.

Random downtimes

Wed, 28 Dec 2005 18:38:21 -0800

I think I’ve got a hold on why there are random downtimes. It seems that a few ips are asking for a highly database intensive page every second over and over again. That’s not good for the server.

I’m going to try to reduce the load required to produce this page – stay tuned…

PS: here’s a cool unix tip: watch tail /path/to/apache/access_log will show you who is currently requesting what from your apache.

Update: fix rolled out. Loading the front page should be faster for everyone.

LiveMarks is firing on all cylinders again, yay

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 15:37:00 -0800

OK del.icio.us is back up and everything is working again – LiveMarks, delimages, priv.at, even BozPages tag search.

I’ve added in redundant social bookmarking services so LiveMarks isn’t so much at the mercy of del.icio.us. Now if you bookmark something on del.irio.us or any of the other social-bookmarking sites that are wise enough to offer a feed of their bookmarks, it will scroll by just like the del.icio.us bookmarks.

Del.icio.us is down

Sun, 18 Dec 2005 10:46:19 -0800

If you are wonder why LiveMarks isn’t working atm – it’s because del.icio.us isn’t working and we’re pretty dependent on them being up.

Thx for your patience.

Teaching and Developing online

Fri, 16 Dec 2005 23:11:45 -0800

New Feature - Web comments

Fri, 16 Dec 2005 19:45:51 -0800

Now you can see other people’s reactions to bookmarks, or post your own.

Click on the ‘M’ link to go to the comment pages for an url

New Style Option

Fri, 16 Dec 2005 11:10:51 -0800

I’m testing out a new style option – you can check it out by clicking tst in the top right.

I’ve found it suprisingly challenging to make what is essentially a huge page of links look good, but the style option in testing is the candidate to replace the current style.

LiveMarks down

Wed, 14 Dec 2005 14:14:27 -0800

I thought it was b/c del.icio.us wasn’t returning info, but something else seems to be wrong?

- – investigating – -

further investigation seems to reveal that del.icio.us rss feeds are returning old data and are not updating at all.

Livemarks will have technical difficulties until this problem is resolved at del.icio.us.

Attack of the non-unicode chars

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 23:42:38 -0800

Somehow non unicode characters have begun to seep into livemarks. I don’t know where they are coming from, but they scare me.

I’m working on it…

Down again - damn gremlins

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 16:07:25 -0800

Arg LiveMarks is down again, someone call the bloglines plumber

This goes for priv.at and bozpages too dagnabit

Again – Colo drive required to fix – stay tuned.

Update: up again, that was quick – and a total mystery :/

LiveMarks down - mysterious problem

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 12:05:15 -0800

LiveMarks is unconnectable – resetting the box at the colo, should be back up in a bit.

Update: Kicked the server and it restarted – was at 100 load – that’s not good.

New Feature - Paging

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 15:11:22 -0800

LiveMarks blog view now has next and previous paging (at the bottom of the page). Now you can go back in time to discover what wonderous bookmarks lie in the past.

New RSS Feed - recent del.icio.us posts

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 19:45:29 -0800

Here’s my cached picture of del.icio.us – you can use this to make your own del.icio.us visualization thing or however you want (make sure you read up on del.icio.us terms of use though).

http://sandbox.sourcelabs.com/livemarks/rss.php

This will give you 500 del.icio.us links every half hour, please don’t hit it too often.

Problems accessing LiveMarks?

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 16:52:58 -0800

I’ve been having some problems recently accessing LiveMarks, it seems sometimes it will just time out. Sometimes it works again if I quit and restart FireFox completely, but that might just because I switch between internal and external networks.

I think it must be something with DNS or with Apache or FireFox, or maybe a combination of different things.

If you are seeing any similar problems, please post a comment to let me know it’s not just me.

SterryIT.com - trend sweet trend

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 13:42:51 -0800

LiveMarks trends

Dave Sterry creates - LiveMarks trends

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 10:41:34 -0800

Here’s an hourly trend chart of LiveMarks popular – http://www.sterryit.com/trends.shtml

Very cool – thanks Dave !

-btw open data rocks – this is a service that is consuming a service that is consuming another service, and all three deliver different and cool things.

New Feature: Unicode

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 14:46:05 -0800

Finally LiveMarks is Unicode enabled, which turned out to be more complicated than it needed to be.

I already had MySQL set to unicode, so that wasn’t the problem. Unfortunately PHP doesn’t support unicode by default, so I had to switch to a compile of PHP with the mb_string configuration flags set in order to work with multi-byte characters.

I use by default Perl regex functionality in PHP, which is faster and more powerful than POSIX regex. Except that it doesn’t support multibyte characters, which is very lame, so I changed all my preg calls to ereg and made sure the expressions were POSIX regex.

Next, by default the mysql connection PHP makes doesn’t support Unicode. So one must insert this line after every connection to mysql: mysql_query("SET NAMES 'UTF-8'");

Finally, Apache doesn’t automatically realize I want to serve unicode text. So everywhere I must set the response header to “Content-Type:type/type; charset=utf-8“

So after those simple fixes, LiveMarks is now internationally friendly :)