Saturday, April 10, 2004

The WebJ we weave   It would be hard not to notice all the WEBJAY icons now on my main page.  They are there because I am trying integrate a WEB MP3 playlist service, WEBJAY into my audioblog. If you click any of the WEBJAY icons it sends you to a page over at WEBJAY's site that aggregates that day's MP3s into a MP3 playlist that you can send to your PC's MP3 player. Example:   Click the WEBJAY icon to listen to the MP3s I linked to on Thursday, March 25, 2004. I seem to have just ran into a bug or oversight of the WEBJAY audioblogging feature.  The first time you make a call to WEBJAY it scrapes the calling page's MP3s to create a playlist.  The problem comes the second time you call the same page.  The second time WEBJAY seems to check to see if it already scraped the same page and if has, WEBJAY uses what it has stored and doesn't do a second scrape.  The problem appears when you add another MP3(s) to the same day after a prior WEBJAY scraping.  If WEBJAY already scraped the page the new MP3 does not get added.  Seems like WEBJAY should either be checking the calling page's last modified date before making the choice to use what it has stored or give you the choice to force a new scraping. I think I will send an email to Lucas to see if I am missing something or if there is a way to make WEBJAY re-scrape.  Stay tuned for an update. Update from Lucas: Good thing to bring up. This is about a tradeoff between latency for picking up additions and load on servers being scraped.  If you could really depend on servers to support etags or if-modified-since the problem wouldn't exist, but you can't.  The compromise made in the scraper is that it won't issue a re-scrape more often than every three hours. That three hour number was more or less picked out of a hat.  :)   The real latency can't be zero, because then the scraper would be abusive, but maybe every hour, or even every 30 minutes, wouldn't be too gross. 12:01:16 PM  comment []    trackback []     Blood is thicker then water   audiolink: Ears -> On a dark, disturbing Friday night, Chris talks about his family crying and why he doesn't believe that blood is more inportant then water. 8:24:12 AM  comment []    trackback []     Babble on and on ... Glovebox Sandwich -> Kristine reminded me of a site I used to run, called "Voices Behind the Text". It housed audio clips of bloggers, so readers could hear what other bloggers sounded like. Now there are more professional sites like Audblog, so listening to another blogger isn't so rare anymore. Anyway, I digress. I dug up my old audio file from three years ago, and thought I'd share it with you. If there was any doubt in your mind that I was a dork, let it be settled now. 8:19:19 AM  comment []    trackback []

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