In my previous post, I blogged about how to access the Socialcast community data without using the API. This is usually necessary when the API doesnt support any particular functionality which is provided by the site. This is true of the usecase of updating of the user’s profile avatar. Though there is a way to Read More…
The Socialcast REST API provides programmatic access to the Socialcast community data with XML and JSON endpoints. The API provides most of the information one would require to extract out of the site but there are still gaps where the API is not up to date. This made me look into the possibility of scraping Read More…
Oh how I wish there was a out of the box solution to do this where you could just enter the source and destination urls and voila! the entire blog was migrated. Unfortunately there isnt (or atleast I am not aware of one). So when I set out to migrate around a 1000 posts from Read More…
I did some changes to the plugin in the last post – including an option in the admin dashboard to enable/disable shortcodes and the ability to directly add buttons to the post without having to modify the theme php file. Future changes planned are to allow admins to add the widgets through the options screen Read More…
I installed WordPress at work and have been trying to make a multisite installation work as an enterprise blogging platform. During one of the discussions around it, a colleague asked me if it was possible to integrate the blog comments system with Socialcast (the microblogging tool which is quite popular at work). I initially thought Read More…
Reusability is one of the most underrated aspects of software development. The focus on meeting functional requirements in a product as quickly as possible often overshadows the reusability and maintainability part. Code duplication, poor adherence to design are often symptoms of such development which increase costs in the long term in favour of short term Read More…
I wrote a small application to extract post and user data for groups in the popular enterprise microblogging portal, Socialcast. It lets users access data instantly about the activity going on in their groups and the number of likes/comments being posted by group members. The details about the API can be found here and their side demo.socialcast.com can Read More…
I have been spending some of my free time trying to build a complete cricket statistics database by parsing records from Cricinfo. However scraping HTML pages is an ardous task. There is simply no standard way of achieving it and often becomes a struggle with regular expressions. A good solution to this problem is the Read More…
Selectors often are faced with a dilemma after a budding talent plays a few matches only to not justify his talent with his performances. To find out how much rope selectors have given players who have ended up perfoming quite well, I took out the figures of all batsmen who averaged above 40 for India Read More…
Last week I found a bug in Firefox/Chrome while rendering HTML pages. If the script tag is self closed, then the rest of the page is not rendered. The tag needs to be closed with </script> and not />. I spent nearly 2 hours in trying to find why it was not working before finally Read More…