Update on the changes to brps.js

After the post about potential upcoming change to brps.js. As of writing this post, the change has been taking effective.

For last two weeks, I tried to block bad IPs, which I found some blogs use bots repeatedly to bloat their viewer statistics. And the scale is quite high, by blocking subnets, the CPU cost reducing from $3+ to $0.

However, it's still not enough, datastore operations still cause $0.03 a day at least. Which, obviously, I wouldn't want to pay for. Heck, this is free app, I won't pay for anything to service.

It's a shame, crappy blogs cause me to take some measures in order to keep this service free.

Blocking IPs is not a good idea because they come from everywhere and many legitimate requests are also blocked. So I decided to do something on the client script.

I thought I would redirect, but I would like to try to make the list loading manual first to see if that would reduce requests.

From my experiences, I know less than one percent of people would really want to read you related posts list. The actually number is lower. Some people probably not notice you have such list on your blog if your blog looks like being splashed by colorful inks.

Anyway, at this moment, you should see a button instead of a list. I have updated the documentation, you can actually use own text for the button or set up automatically loading as before. But please, if you don't have no good reason, please don't turn on autoload.

It would be better if you can switch to the newer client script.

There might be a change to brps.js

This only affects brps.js users.

Long story short: In order to keep BRPS free, I most likely would redirect brps.js script to gas.js.

Currently, brps.js uses 96% of overall processing and GAE will start to use new charging model, which is certainly cause BRPS using all free quota and more. Please read this post for little more on it.

Basically, you don't need to do anything, at least not now. But some feature might be missing, I am not quite sure if two scripts have same features. It's been too long since last time I read them.

This is just a quick update. If you see something wrong with your widget on November 1st, you know what's going on.

Future of BRPS

After I released the new client script, gas.js, I was very happy with it. Few modifications were made after, also included a piece of code for tracking usage using Google Analytics on around 9/21/2010. Here is a quick peek of statistics:

Few days ago, Google Code announced a new APIs console for easily monitoring API usage. I thought I might switch to this new stuff. But then I found out, they has deprecated Web Search API.

I'm officially doomed.

They promote Custom Search API as a successor. If you ever use Custom Search on your website, you know they are not the same. Custom Search API does provide APIs to create custom search engine and to retrieve the results. But that is not what BRPS needs. BRPS needs to search for any website which include the client script, creating custom search engine for each website isn't doable.

So, I have been thinking what options would I need to take once Web Search API is discontinued after three years:

• Accepting new brps.js client users,
• Using other search engine API, such as Yahoo!,
• Implementing Version 2 of BRPS,
• Waiting for enough developers whimpering and Google make changes to Custom Search API, or, my best option,
• Waiting for Blogger to release Related Posts gadget.

Who knows, we may see a new post on Blogger Buzz saying Related Posts is ready for you to try out.

So, the future of BRPS is we are still waiting to see.

New client script!

New client script! Faster and No Key required and No Bans!

No needs to ask for unblocking, no need to get the key. You just install new code, only three lines, too!

Here is quick list:

• It's faster. Because it do not use BRPS database, therefore BRPS do not need to search for labels via Blogger API. It directly uses Google Search with labels as search keyword.
• It supports multi-blog, even multi-site, because it uses Google search operator site:example.com | site:someblog.blogspot.com | ...
• It can now work on any page of your Blogger blog, but it will use all labels from that page to do the search. In other words, the search keywords can come from labels of different posts on that page which user is visiting. It will only use top 20 frequent label to query.
• No Key required! No blocking!

Go get it!

Installing BRPS in classic templates

Someone asked how to install in classic templates, so I checked up and found the code provided from BRPS wasn't working. There is an issue with HTML, so I updated the code. It should be working in classic templates.

The question is where to install those three lines. My suggestion is

At sidebar

Find the following and insert the code before:

</div></div>
<!-- End #sidebar -->

The related list will show up at the bottom of sidebar.

If you want to move the list up, just observe the code before these two lines, you can see each gadget of sidebar is a block of code, put the BRPS code between, usually above <h2> will do.

At post end

Find the following and insert the code before:

  </div>
  <!-- End .post -->

Hope this helps.

Planning Version 2

Firstly to clarify, nothing is getting started, don't be excited.

Here is some ideas:

• Label Exclusion [group]
• List Order: alphabetical, oldest-to-newest, newest-to-oldest, etc. [blog]
• Preview thumbnail
• Score Indicator (bar)
• Score Threshold: Absolute value, percentage
• Layouts: Plain text list, vertical, horizontal
• Authenticaion
• Open ID authentication: No more key (or just OAuth?)
• Support private blogs: AuthSub or OAuth
• Label Weighting and Content Weighting
• View Count
• Click Count
• View and Click Statistics
• Popular Posts based on Views and Clicks
• Non-single Post Page Allowed

I am asking you for help if you would like to see these above. If you know Python, JavaScript, or webdesign and you are willing to spend time to develop version 2, leave me a message.

I have no schedule to see those happening, so please don't expect to see version 2. I might or might not to code for it if no one joins. Unless someone is with me doing development, it's most likely, version 2 wouldn't be born.

If I start, it will be developing in another GAE app and accept few testers. Once it's done, that app will be deleted and move back to brps since brps is a short app id. The code is still Open Source and the service will still free and you still won't see any ads on your blogs or links to here if  client script runs successfully.

The design process will be open for discussion somewhere (the group, I think) and the code will be still at Google Code same repo.

I guess that's all, now it's your move.

Visualization of BRPS Code

This post is off-topic but I feel it's fun to share. The following videos are generated by Gource. They visualize how the code of BRPS were committed.

BRPS had stayed in one of my repos, the first one is a extraction version of that repo. As of April 2009, it moved into its only repo, and the second video shows the activities in its repo after.

Go to video page on YouTube

Go to video page on YouTube

If this kind of video catch your eyes, here are more of mine.