August 20, 2001

5:15 PM

Hot damn, look at all the cool blogging tools that have come out of Blogger API. In the last few days industrious developers have come out with wapblogger, jabber-blog-it, BlogBuddy, and my personal choice for coolest thing ever: ( blogdex ), which daily indexes the most-linked-to sites in the blogging community. (And yes, it really works!) How are you putting these tools to use on your own site?
posted by tweebiscuit (14 comments total)

Blogdex doesn't have anything to do with the Blogger API; it's just a page scanner.

I can see how these are cool tools, though I'm still quite happy with the functionality of the BlogThis! script. I guess I'm waiting for the API interfaces to offer something more than the web interface, or conglomerate a blog with one or more other tools.

And I don't expect it soon, but I would really, really like something that would let me fix my archives. I had managed to get something like 60% of them back on the index page by republishing after a minor change (add/delete a space), but now I'm down to eight weeks again. (Heck, I'd settle for being able to give the archive index logic a once-over...)
posted by dhartung at 5:35 PM on August 20, 2001

I'd like to see something with more image-related tools. I guess bridging the gap between a Word Processor and HTML...
posted by owillis at 5:38 PM on August 20, 2001

Actually, from what I gather, blogdex uses Blogger's XML interface -- it's definitely using the Blogger database, because it would be impossible to do simply by scanning the HTML of the pages themselves...
posted by tweebiscuit at 5:45 PM on August 20, 2001

it would be impossible to do simply by scanning the HTML of the pages themselves

It would?? Google will be mortified. Who's gonna tell Larry??
posted by fooljay at 5:54 PM on August 20, 2001

It's a spider... A robot... Focused on blogs. All blogs. Not just Blogger blogs
posted by fooljay at 5:55 PM on August 20, 2001

blogdex is not mentioned once in the Blogger API yahoo group, and they don't mention the API on their about page. If you have more information, of course ....
posted by dhartung at 5:57 PM on August 20, 2001

And passing username/password combos in plain text through this API (and this method in general) is not bad because...??!?!?!?

Haven't we learned anything from packet sniffers, folks?? Gee, now you've gone and provided a very easy method for me to go and get a hold of a few hundred new blog accounts...
posted by yarf at 6:12 PM on August 20, 2001

Er, passwords are always sent in plain text. When you create your account, when you login to Blogger, when you ftp, when Blogger ftps, when Blogger spits your ftp password in the html of the settings page, ad nauseam...
posted by sja at 6:24 PM on August 20, 2001

Blogdex is not only Blogger blogs. The proof is that my site is in there already, and it does not use Blogger in any form.
posted by Mo Nickels at 6:33 PM on August 20, 2001

I find blogdex kind of scary. Auto-blogging seems to miss the point a bit, no?
posted by D at 7:46 PM on August 20, 2001

Blogdex is just a spider, it was around before the blogger API was released.
I think part of the confusion is originally blogdex only spidered public blogger blogs. Now, anyone can add a page.
posted by alan at 7:59 PM on August 20, 2001

Ok, ok, I'm wrong. Sorry. I had assumed that blogdex simply hooked into Blogger, since I would assume that would be easier than devising an algorithm that could identify which entries were from that day based on HTML alone. I've actually been to a search page (a secret search! no, i won't link it. you probably know about it already) that does search Blogger's database, and did so before the API, so I figured that blogdex worked the same way. Sue me!

Now can we discuss the potential of the API technology in the first place? Doesn't anyone at least thing it's cool?
posted by tweebiscuit at 10:03 PM on August 20, 2001

Blogdex uses LWP::Parallel to parallel scan Web pages. With MIT's bandwidth, this is pretty easy.
posted by wackybrit at 9:30 AM on August 21, 2001

> And passing username/password combos in plain text
> through this API (and this method in general) is not bad
> because...??!?!?!?
> Er, passwords are always sent in plain text. When you
> create your account, when you login to Blogger, when
> you ftp, when Blogger ftps, when Blogger spits your ftp
> password in the html of the settings page, ad nauseam...

When I first heard about Blogger, I wanted to sign up and check it out, to see what all the commotion was about. However, the idea of giving my web host login and password to a site I did not have any reason to trust just didn't sit well with me. I put money down every month for access to my web host, so allowing some random site that has no affiliiation with my web host to access my account just doesn't sound right at all.

It amazes me that so many people have no problem with this concept. Although Blogger doesn't have to save your password, there's so much potential for wrongdoings that it just seems like common sense to avoid..
posted by valerie at 9:41 AM on August 23, 2001