Street Cred

New idea for Blogabond here, though not really related to the blogger import. I want to do an 8a.nu style scoring system for backpackers. Give points for days on the road, countries & continents visited, etc. Let users vote to give eachother extra points for tales of hardship and coolness.

Publish the rankings by year, trip, and lifetime. Declare champions, award prizes. Bring in the MySpace kids that want the world to recognize how cool they are. This idea worked wonders at 8a.nu, with climbers posting every detail about the climbs they've done and even fudging the details a bit to get extra points.

Should be easy enough to do. Most of the stored procderes are written already. Just gotta implement voting.

1 - day on the road
10 - country visited
50 - continent visited
5 - peer vote
100 point antarctica bonus?

API Woes - Intermittent Outages

Been having some trouble with the API lately. It seems that there is some sort of traffic limiter in place that will shut you out for making repeated API requests. For me, it translates into a major headache for development.

Here's what I see:
Assume an Http Request to the API, correctly formatted to request a list of blogs for a given username and password. Now, issue that request about 3 times a minute, as you would during a routine code/build/test/debug session. Notice that the request works as advertised for about 5 minutes of this sort of activity. Notice that after those 5 minutes, the request starts returning Blogger error screens instead of XML data. Notice that after about 10 more minutes of inactivity, the request starts working again.

To me, that looks like something put in place by the Blogger team to discourage Spammers from abusing the API. Unfortunately, it also discourages application developers from using the API, since it is basically unusable.

I've posted my experiences over at the Blogger API discussion group. Let's hope that somebody knows a workaround!