Memewidth

Some changes made to the edges file

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:17:51 GMT

Posted by: foxfirefey

* Now, the username and account number are available, as "name" and "account_id" values.
* OpenID accounts now use their username forms (ext_12345) to simplify spidering (some OpenID URLs are tricky to fetch as a URL parameter), and have "display_name" values for their edges.

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Edges patch is committed!

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 03:00:13 GMT

Posted by: foxfirefey

After some further refinements by mark, edge patches have been committed! That means they're going out in the next code push! Exciting!

You can see the format here (I recommend JSONView) for viewing):

http://www.dev.memewidth.org/data/edges?user=amy

Names have been replaced with userids, which are then defined with username/type in a different struct.

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Turn data/interests into JSON?

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:28:50 GMT

Posted by: foxfirefey

Now that fdata.bml is in JSON, would it be expedient to make interests.bml into JSON?

Pros: would be easier for Javascript mashups to load, is a standard format for parsing
Cons: would break compatibility with older LJ-based tools, would take up a bit more space than the current file.

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Let's talk about FOAF

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 01:26:55 GMT

Posted by: foxfirefey

All users have a FOAF file, like so:

http://foxfirefey.dreamwidth.org/data/foaf

There's a lot of useful data here, but I think it could be expanded to have some more data. ( Onward and out! )

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Upcoming fdata replacement: edges

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 02:41:02 GMT

Posted by: foxfirefey

So far Dreamwidth has been sorely lacking an equivalent to LJ's fdata, the data file that told you the relationships of a user with other users. Our new equivalent to that will be called edges. Because of the new complexity of DW's relationship structure, and due to a desire to use more standards, this data file will be in the JSON format. The bug for it is Bug 857.

I currently have my proposed patch in. It's not committed yet, or live on the site, but I think it probably will be within the next month. If you want a chance to prepare, I have my patch applied on my development server. It's possible that details will change with feedback, though, so be forewarned! My server has open registration, so you can feel free to create accounts and play around, but I've made a small set of test accounts such as this one. You can view an example edge data file here:

http://www.dev.memewidth.org/data/edges?account=amy

Here is an example of a community's edges file:

http://www.dev.memewidth.org/data/edges?account=bonny_bunnies

The data is in one big hash. There is an "account_type" variable, set to the type of the account. That makes it easy to determine what kind of account you are fetching data for. The other base variables are relationship types, such as "watched", "watched_by", or "member_of", that are a hash of arrays--all the accounts with a given relationship are split up into account types.

Any commentary on this planned data file? Problems you want to fix now, before it's implemented? Any plans for it you want to share?

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