I’ve had quite a lot of interest about the MyBlogLogDogg (R.I.P), I made it to see if it was possible to parse my page of MBL contacts and then visit their profile pages and extract the url to their website.

That was easy, next I upgraded the dogg to log in to MBL with my username and password, and use the cookie it got sent after logging in to visit the contacts profile page thus registering a “user who recently visited this page” hit so the contact would see it when they logged on, that too was fairly easy.

Next came the bit where I wanted it to visit the contacts profile page (again with the cookie) and then register a hit on their personal page so my profile picture would appear there.

Not so easy, because to register a hit on someones personal site you need to execute the javascript code that does the MBL tracking and that’s something that CURL in PHP can’t do, it can however, parse the page, look for the url for the javascript code and then ‘finger’ that to register a hit…that didn’t work too well either (but I did find some interesting things when that happened like a reference to a script written by Jim Rutherford that the MBL widget uses to track adsense clicks).

Quite a few of the people that have sites on MBL don’t have the widget there or have the widget but not the tracking script (they have that on another page of theirs and share the widget on both sites) but I found that I wouldn’t need to visit their personal site, I could just grab the url to their tracking script from their profile page!

The hard bit came constructing the proper GET items for the url, essentially, their MBLID, site, referrer and the correct date and time. I only tried it on my own page, my missus’s page and a couple of pages that I made especially for testing the dogg. I did get it working now and then but to really test it, I would have had to send it out to visit a number of MBL users profile pages and that’s where I decided not to do it.

Namely, it was an ethics thing, not really a good idea to swarm MBL with a bot that could potentially visit EVERY member they have! I had already decided to put the dogg down and made a post about it. Later that day I got a visit from Robyn of MBL here and she left a comment pretty much confirming my own guess - “bots are not allowed!”. My MBL widget stopped working for a while but came back after I had sent a reply to Robyn telling her the dog had been melted down and that I wouldn’t use it anymore.

I was expecting a “you are BANNED” reply but instead, I got a nice polite response and an offer to let me know when the MBL API’s were coming out so I didn’t get to initiate my “lets make a post about how I wrote the dogg code” post. It’s better I suppose, I wouldn’t really like to cause a problem with anyone so early in this blogs life

It did give me some ideas for widgets to make, like a “show the last 5 contacts to join me on MBL” or a “see how many contacts I have” or “see how big my MBL network is”. I guess I’ll wait for the API to come out for those though.

A few people have mentioned that they’d like to see the code, I doubt MBL would like that but, it would be nice traffic generator so I think I’ll do a tutorial on how to do the same sort of thing with Stumbleupon. Visit your stumbleupon homepage and see who’s visited it recently, then go and visit their pages so they see you’ve been there. Probably get banned for that too! nice idea though, what do you think?…

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