Musings for a bot friendly profile info page

[foxfirefey]

It might be nice to have a bot friendly profile page. It should contain the following information, assuming this information is judged to be okay to have easily bot accessible:

Not needed

• Subscribe/access data -- this will be a separate page like fdata.bml was
• Interest data -- already a page for this
• Userpic data

Would be handy

• Number of entries
• Number of tags
• Number of userpics
• Bio text
• Total numbers of subscriptions, access
• Total number of communities and feeds
• account type
• Account created on
• entries and comments posted
• Location, if public
• Birthday, if public

Probably not good

1. Email -- bad for harvesters

Comments

[zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com]

Would you want the rss/atom URLs also available from the profile page?

[foxfirefey]

Wouldn't be a bad thing, indeed. Not too concerned about it though, because people writing bots from LJ can easily know where those are for each user.

I want this because in the past, I've written profile screen scrapers to get information about networks of users, and that's just dumb and a waste of my resources and the service's.

[janinedog]

Some of these are already available in the FOAF file (which currently doesn't work on DW because it needs to be updated to work with WTF). Here's mine from LJ:

http://janinedog.livejournal.com/data/foaf

[foxfirefey]

Nifty! I didn't know some of those things were in FOAF.

Yeah, I made a rundown of data generation that needs updating.

FOAF has the birthdate, location, bio text, number of posts, journal title and subtitle which I didn't even think of. Not sure about anything else at the moment.

One problem I can see with FOAF: it's comparatively huge, and if you're only wanting a few bits of data, it's a real waste, especially since it has ALL the interests and friends listed on it. That's pretty unwieldy for simple thing that don't need it all. I think probably separating out the bio with the other smaller bits of info up there and making them bot accessible is good.

Hello my friends!

[(Anonymous)]

Hello my friends!