Hey! News!

So people keep submitting blogs to animenano. I'd like to add more and more, but I feel like I should "clean house" first. Like dreamhost recently moved me to another server to "balance loads." That's probably like a warning that I'm pissing off the other users on my machine.

I've been really busy with school and Notecentric (tell your friends!), so hopefully within the next few days I can work on anime nano a little bit.

If you have a blog which you are not updating anymore, I'd like to know about it. Y'see, Anime Nano uses processor time on blogs whether or not the blog is actually updated with a new entry. So you can help out by letting me know whether to check your blog or not. I was thinking of making this a blog option for hiatuses and whatnot.

I also might just set some blogs to "hiatus" myself. Y'know, blogs that haven't updated since July or something. Then I'll feel better about adding new blogs.

Just to further explain, I don't think I'd ever "remove" a blog and deny its existence or anything. I'd just stop updating its entries, so it would remain in the directory etc. This would really help with optimizing the site's efficiency. Lemme know what you think about this. 

Actually sounds pretty good. I like the hiatus over deletion idea.

What is tying up the server? Combing through RSS feeds? Some means by which individual bloggers could specify a "don't check my site more than once a day" option (or other levels of granularity, whatever you think is reasonable) may be useful, as could a "only check my feed if I ping animenano with a new post" option.

Okay, I know I'm a little late on this issue since Hung already implemented the “Hiatus” option. 

In regard to burrowowl “ping” suggestion. The issue there is abuse, so a unique URL would need to be created for each user.

Something like:

http://www.animenano.com/userping?user=qubed&code=[CODE]

Where [CODE] is some unique value for each user.  The code could be a hashed value of some other secret phase.

Or you could have a “ping” page on our CP pages that has a big “ping” button. Seriously, it can be a huge “PING” button like 600x300 pixels…it would be hilarious!

I prefer the URL because it can be automated. Perhaps a “pingnano” utility that would do it automatically when run?

Hiatus, yes.

Though it could be automated. (Your choice.)

All it takes is a simple if-else statement (or it's equivalent in Rails), if I'm not wrong.

Like if(<blogname>notupdated == <arbitary time>){
set to hiatus
} 

Or something to that extent. 

Oh, but I like the huge shiny NanoPing button. 

WTF is an if else statement!?

I think it's the same as an "unless" in perl.

WTF is perl!?

>>WTF is an if else statement

Judging by the syntax Drm used, it looks like a PHP conditional statement. Basically, 

if(something) {then this happens;} else {this happens;}

And that kind of statement should have an equivalent in whatever language you're using- Rails, right? 

WTF IS PROGRAMMING!?

So....Am I gonna' get my big ass "ping" button or what?

 ..

>>WTF IS PROGRAMMING!?

O_O

T_T 

Okay, so I was messing with you people. Seriously, I wrote this website; you people think I don't know what a conditional statement is? That's a serious insult!

I don't wanna make a big ass ping button, because people will abuse it. I don't care if there's a password thing on it or whatever, someone somewhere will abuse it.

C'mon, Anime Nano updates every 30 minutes already. That should be fast enough. I already implemented the hiatus thing, so yeah, use it. 

WTF is a Hiatus Thing!?…I was just playing around. We all love the amazingly beautiful Animenano (**strokes ego**)

EDIT: 

In all seriousness, I’ve always been impressed with the site. I’m actually trying to find the time to do some development with ruby on rails because of what you’ve done here. Of course, that’s after my god-damned midterms and some other projects.

Out of curiosity, is the major processor-time issue of having more blogs checking all the feeds?  Or is it something else.

Edit: Actually I was curious because I had an idea, but I guess I could just post the idea.  It would be a fair bit of extra work, but if as ANO lives on you get more and more blogs that *are* updating regularly and are having issues with processor-time, one thing you might be able to do (I'm not totally sure how RSS works, so maybe not) is track how often blogs are updating and keep some kind of average update frequency, so when it is time to check feeds, in addition to ignoring those on hiatus it would check against the update frequency and maybe or maybe not actually get the feed.

What would be even cooler and totally way overkill, but also really innovative for an RSS aggregator as far as I know, would be to work out a system for predicting not only how often, but at what time of day each blog tends to update.  Some (mine) are pretty erratic, but I think some people probably write updates at the same time of day pretty much all the time.  It could be possible to get some insanely fast response times this way without eating up too much processor time.  The prediction algorithm would take some innovation though.