23.07.2004 22:56 - The Blog Improveth
As regular readers may know, (and if you\'re not regular, then I recommend the occasional tin of prunes) part of this blog is the list of friends who also blog. The problem is that some of them haven\'t been able to add many entries of late. This means that you end up clicking through them to find the ones that are updated recently.
Well, now the links are stored in a database, and they\'re regularly checked once a day by a little cronjob I\'ve written to see if they\'ve changed. For the technically-minded, the page is downloaded and then the md5 hash key is calculated and compared to a previously-stored one. This is basically because the md5 key takes up only 32 characters, whereas storing the complete page could waste tons of space.
So the links on the left should gradually sort themselves out into a league table of who is updating regularly and who is not. It may not be perfect, as some people have bits on their pages that change daily, but it should weed out the less-inclined to update.
