now there's an idea

[rone]

The redoubtable Dave Zuckerman writes:

I'm not a huge blog fan.  Every once in a while, just to be contrarian, I think about doing periodic .plan updates, just so I can tell people who ask if I blog that they'll have to finger me to find out!  Bwahahahah!

Now i'm tempted to figure a way to stick my latest LJ entry into my .plan.

Comments

[lusercop.livejournal.com]

Does anyone still use finger(1)?

I find I tend to log into machines and use w(1).

[wisn.livejournal.com]

I was thinking, "Hey, isn't that what John Carmack was doing?" and googled and found http://www.webdog.org which archives .plan messages for a variety of software developers. For what it's worth, Carmack's last archived update was Jan 23 of last year, and finger johnc@idsoftware.com yields 'connection refused'.

[bivaughn.livejournal.com]

I'll write you something in PHP if you want.

No problemo!

[fabio-heinz.livejournal.com]

perl -MLWP::Simple -e 'getprint "http://www.livejournal.com/users/ronebofh"' > $HOME/.plan

HTH! HAND! SEND ME A DOLLAR!

Re: No problemo!

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

"latest LJ entry".

While I'll grant that "the entire damn page" does indeed include "latest entry", I'm not sure this is what was meant :)

rone - what client do you use? the update.bml web page? Because a client side hack is easiest, but a cron post harvester should be easy enough using Simes' LJ::Simple.

sol.
.

Re: No problemo!

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Ah. rone is a paid user and therfore has the full article text inthe rss feed. So stripping the most recent article from the rss page is even easier than parsing the html page.
The serious way involves an XML parser - the easy way involves the LWP trick with the rss page and split() :)

But I'm not going to do it as an on-the-fly one liner :)

sol.
.

Re: No problemo!

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I am, actually, not a paid user.

Re: No problemo!

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Hm.

Then either LJ now includes the entire post in the rss description for everyone (it used to truncate unpaid users), or you have short posts :)

Seems they include the whole post for everyone. Oh huzzah.

If you're serious, consider it done - I have code for much of this at home, so given a weekend it should be doable.

sol.
.

Re: No problemo!

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

You are a bad man to tempt me with such toylike trivialities.

Re: No problemo!

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

I was going to say the same to you.

sol.
.

While you americans sleep ...

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

We antipodean munchkins toil to make you wondrous gifts. Behold:

9:35pm@kittling~...perl/rone>roneme -u ronebofh

_now there's an idea_

The redoubtable Dave Zuckerman (http://www.panix.com/~daz/) writes:

I'm not a huge blog fan.  Every once in a while, just to be contrarian, I think about doing periodic .plan updates, just so I can tell people who ask if I blog that they'll have to finger me to find out!  Bwahahahah!

Now i'm tempted to figure a way to stick my latest LJ entry into my .plan (http://www.vetmed.auburn.edu/cgi-bin/finger?rone%40ennui.org).

===================================


Now for the *hard* cutting and pasting - stripping the HTML.

sol.
.

munch, munch

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

9:50pm@kittling~...perl/rone>roneme -t -u ronebofh

_now there's an idea_

The redoubtable Dave Zuckerman writes:

I'm not a huge blog fan. Every once in a while, just to be
contrarian, I think about doing periodic .plan updates, just so I
can tell people who ask if I blog that they'll have to finger me
to find out! Bwahahahah!

Now i'm tempted to figure a way to stick my latest LJ entry into my
.plan.


===================================


The formatting may need tweaking, but I'm sure you can pipe it to fmt before .planning it


Oh, and:
9:50pm@kittling~...perl/rone>roneme -t -i2 -u ronebofh

_now there's an idea_

The redoubtable Dave Zuckerman writes:

I'm not a huge blog fan. Every once in a while, just to be
contrarian, I think about doing periodic .plan updates, just so I
can tell people who ask if I blog that they'll have to finger me
to find out! Bwahahahah!

Now i'm tempted to figure a way to stick my latest LJ entry into my
.plan.


===================================

_blogulate_

Bob Mould has a Web log. His new stuff doesn't appeal to me,
unfortunately. Any comments from anyone out there who's a fan of his
old AND his new stuff?


===================================


You'll need:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use Getopt::Std;
use XML::Simple;
use HTML::FormatText;


Which I consider pretty standard, but then I do this shit for a living.

Let me know your email address (I'm solitaire@tygger.net), and I'll let you know where to pick up the first cut. I'd like to polish it a little before I release it to the world at large.\

Though it's 77 lines of perl. I could just email it to you :)

sol.
.

Re: No problemo!

[fabio-heinz.livejournal.com]

While I'll grant that "the entire damn page" does indeed include "latest entry", I'm not sure this is what was meant :)

Meh, changing specifications!
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use LWP::Simple;

my $content = get("http://www.livejournal.com/users/ronebofh/");
local($/);

if ($content =~ m|<div class="entry">(.*?)</div>|ms)
{
my $latest_entry = $1;
#strip tags and crap
$latest_entry =~ s/<.*?>//g;
$latest_entry =~ s/&nbsp;/ /g;

open PLAN, ">$ENV{HOME}/.plan" or die "can't open .plan: $!";
print PLAN $latest_entry;
close PLAN or die "can't close .plan: $!";
}

__END__

Re: No problemo!

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Fragile :)
It breaks as soon as he changes layout/format. Or at least has the potential to break - some layouts don't even use the div.

Splitting the RSS feed is the way to go.

my $content = get("http://livejournal.com/users/ronebofh/rss");

Then split on "", chop off everything after , de-htmlise as you do, and you're good to go. Though I'd run it through HTML::Parser to expand the entities rather than trusting to  , and I'd use an XML parser anyway.

sol.
.

Re: No problemo!

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Fuck it :)

"split on <description>", and you want the second element of the array thus produced. Then discard everything after "</description>", etc.

I can't be expected to be thinking right, I'm at work!

sol.
.

Re: No problemo!

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I use Semagic on Windows and Logjam on FreeBSD.

Re: No problemo!

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Ah.
So a cronned or otherwise triggered screenscraper will in fact be easier than a client hack.

sol.
.

[eviltofu.livejournal.com]

Can you run a python? If so that possibly I can hack an xml-rpc -> ftp script.

[eviltofu.livejournal.com]

Here is my python version.

---
import xmlrpclib,string,ftplib,os

ljUserName = "put your lj name here"
ljPassword = "put your lj password here"
tempFileName = "MyPlan"
fingerHost = "put the ip or hostname of the ftp site where you want to put your plan"
fingerUserName = "put the account name of the ftp account on the finger site"
fingerPassword = "put the password of the ftp account on the finger site"
fingerFile = ".plan"

server = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy(uri="http://www.livejournal.com/interface/xmlrpc",verbose=False)
result = {}
plan = ""

result = server.LJ.XMLRPC.getevents({"username": ljUserName,"password": ljPassword,"selecttype":"one","itemid":"-1"})
plan = string.join(
[ result['events'][0]['eventtime'],
result['events'][0]['subject'],
"",
result['events'][0]['event']],
"\n")

temp = file(tempFileName,"w+a")
temp.write(plan)
temp.close()

storeCommand = "STOR " + fingerFile

temp = file(tempFileName)
ftpClient = ftplib.FTP(fingerHost, fingerUserName, fingerPassword)
ftpClient.storlines(storeCommand,temp)
ftpClient.quit()
temp.close()

os.remove(tempFileName)
---

Simple no?

[eviltofu.livejournal.com]

bah! I forgot to take into account how html would warp formatting and Python is formatting sensitive. Here is the URL to the python file.

http://home.earthlink.net/~eviltofu/ljfinger.py

[fabio-heinz.livejournal.com]

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I don't like Python. Significant whitespace SUCKS!