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.