The Release Note

Hi Folks,

One of the really cool features about Flock is the ability for it to automatically detect a login page of the services we support such as Facebook, Flickr and Photobucket and prompt a user to login to configure Flock for these services.  For those of you that remember 0.7 (a.k.a. Cardinal) you had to know Flock supported a particular service and then configure it through a series of dialog boxes.

As we started to design this feature in 0.9 we realized we’d be parsing the raw HTML (otherwise known as page scraping) to understand how to get the login information to pass on to the services’ API.  For example, when logging into Flickr on their website, we understand that someone has logged in and we pass the credentials onto the Flickr API so that people can use the uploader and media bar. As we began developing this functionality we realized that the web pages we were scraping are under constant change and we’d would need away to react to these changes quickly.  Thus, Web Detective was born.

 If you look in Flock’s profile folder you’ll see a sub folder called “detect”.  Inside that folder is set of .xml files, one for each service that Flock supports.  These files can be updated without having to do a complete point release.  Once a day, Flock calls home to see if any of these files have an update to be automatically downloaded.  For example, last week Xanga changed their login page on Tuesday and by Thursday we had an update available to be downloaded so login detection worked again.

I’ll announce such Web Detective updates on this blog as well starting with last week’s update for Xanga to fix the login detection and to Facebook to remove the “is” from being displayed in the sidebar’s people status (We’re going to have a separate fix to remove the “is” from the Me Card which is the top part of the people sidebar).

Thx,
Mike

Blogged with Flock

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 16th, 2007 at 7:52 pm and is filed under Service Availability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.