Man, it has been quite a while since I have seen new web hacks that have completely blown me away. Today I get two! No sooner had I posed about Niall Kennedy’s Browser Sniffer magic than Ian Kennedy (no relation) sends me another really slick hack.
Ian pointed me to the Intense Debate website. I first met the Intense Debate guys last Summer when Eric & I were mentors at TechStars. They are a great group of guys. Since I only recently re-launched my blog, I haven’t have much of a need for a comments service. As such, I hadn’t seen their site in quite some time. (I have since agreed to try out the Disqus comment system as soon as they integrate OpenID; but that is beside the point.)
When I first pulled up the site, I didn’t even notice the feature. Then it jumped out at me:
The site had auto-detected my blog. How cool is that!
So, how does it work? Like most great things, it is actually quite simple. Not only that, it uses MyBlogLog!!
- When you first land on IntenseDebate.com, the site uses JavaScript to open MyBlogLog.com in an invisible Div.
- The MyBlogLog website automatically redirects logged-in users to their MyBlogLog member page. (e.g. When I go to www.mybloglog.com I am redirected to http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/toddsampson/)
- The script looks at the URL of the site shown in the invisible Div. If the URL is www.mybloglog.com, the script does nothing. If the URL has changed, it means that the person is a MyBlogLog member. The script then grabs the member name from the URL. (e.g. In my example above, it would grab “toddsampson”.)
- The member name is then passed to a PHP script. While I can’t see the PHP source code, the script must open the page for the selected user and determine which blog to push into the signup box.
Like I said — simple. Simple, but brilliant. Doing this kind of thing will become much easier and much more powerful once the MyBlogLog API comes out of Beta very soon. But, in the mean time, thanks for making my day guys.
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7 responses so far ↓
1 More New Web Magic « PHP Net // Feb 8, 2008 at 4:05 pm
[...] entry was written by Todd Sampson. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.Content related [...]
2 Chris // Feb 8, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Hey Todd, here is what i gathered from their hack, its a bit different:
1) Load Reader Roll through javascript.
2) Wait for onload function of body to be called
3) Look at first person image, run a regular expression validator on code and if an ID proceed.
4) If an ID, run it through scrapper to see if valid member, if so, success!
3 Todd Sampson // Feb 8, 2008 at 4:43 pm
Thanks for the clarification Chris. It is still really good voodoo.
- T
4 Tom // Feb 8, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Todd -
Thanks for the compliments! “Simple, but brilliant!” You certainly put a smile on our faces. (Can you see my MBL avatar’s new smile?)
We’d love to have you as a customer…there’s more magic to be discovered in our system, and much more coming - and we already support OpenID!
Let us know if there’s anything we can do to help!
Tom
Intense Debate
5 Rob Johnson // Feb 8, 2008 at 10:21 pm
Todd — I knew the Intense Debate guys rocked before I even knew they did this magic
This is sweet.
6 Josh Fraser // Feb 9, 2008 at 9:44 am
I love it! I might have to steal that hack for EventVue.
7 Todd Sampson // Feb 21, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Just to make sure the love is shared. Jon from Intense Debate pointed out that the guys at Lijit helped in giving them the idea. So, thanks also go out to Todd and his great crew at Lijit.
And, if you haven’t see Lijit’s first MyBlogLog API hack, you should check it out in the right side-bar on Todd’s blog:
http://falseprecision.typepad.com/
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