Russell Beattie

Everything seems to be fine today. Like nothing happened... cool. Bygones.

Jim sent me some more suggestions for BlogAgent below. (Jim is very cool, kept me sane the other day during the crisis... We swap Dad stories, he's my first Dad-buddy. We met via my blog. This blogging stuff is cool.)

Hi Russ,

I had a couple of ideas last night about some things that might be useful in blogAgent, once you get the current version to stop throwing hissy fits.

One thing that the Jabber rss 'bot does that is useful but a little irritating is send IM messages whether you're connected or not, so the first thing i get when I sign into Jabber is a load of messages about stuff that happened when I was offline, it'd be nice if blogAgent could do something like this, maybe just as a summary, for instance I don't need to be told ten times that your 'blog has updated, just the once would do fine :-)

An alternative approach (or maybe yet another feature) might be to show the time and date of the last update for each item in the "list" command.

Do you think there's anything unethical in pinging weblogs.com when someone else's weblog changes? There's a couple that I read that don't ping weblogs themselves, but I reckon they deserve more coverage so when I spot they change I ping weblogs.

I'm doing this manually, I've got the ping forms bookmarked and I just select them when I see that their pages have changed, is there any chance you could add this to a twice daily cron job for me? Maybe blogAgent could do something like this and automagically ping weblogs daily for the sites in the watchlist?

Cheers

Jim.

Hmmm. BlogAgent does keep sending pings regardless if you're online or not. MSN might be easy to detect presence because you have to have a session to send a message. Jabber also, but AIM I'm not sure about. It's definitely somethign I've thought about while developing.

Maybe a PingAgent would be cool too... you could add weblogs you'd like to see on Weblogs.com and it would make sure to monitor those sites for changes and do the ping themselves... I'm sure Dave would LOVE the extra traffic. ;-) I'm sure his servers are already feeling the load from Blogging's popularity surge lately. The highwater marks seem to go up every day.

Here's a list of commands I'm working on for BlogAgent...

on
off

add "url"
delete "url"
list
import "url.opml"
clear

rss add "url"
rss delete "url"
rss list
rss clear

who
who url
who bloglist
who off
who on

announce "message"
announce url message
announce on
announce off

newslist
getnews "newsname"

blogset id "blogid"
blogset user "username"
blogset password "password"
blogset clear
blog "content"

google "googlesearch"

help "command"

We'll see how far I get. ;-)

-Russ