populate blogs from myspace.

given a myspace homepage of a dolphin user i want a cron job to spider through the myspace blog page and events for this user and ad there blog and events they posted in my space to Dolphin. This job would run once a day looking at all profiles for a myspace URL and then import required information.

once you are logged into myspace getting the list of blogs is simple the url is

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog&friendID=9973187

each blog is in a table row named
tr id="blog-1"
tr id="blog-2"
tr id="blog-3"
tr id="blog-4"

so all the information for this blog can be found with in each of these labels. since myspace uses style sheets to formate there pages the class names can be used as key words to find the information with in this table that we needed to import the blog into dolphin.

the class name "blogSubject" is the subject.
with in the subject is the key word "Category" so we can save this information also.

the class name "blogContent" is the blog

the myspace blog id can be found in the class "blogContentInfo" there are a list of URL and the blog id is part of the URL.


we need to ad 2 columns to the table blogs blog_from and remote_id.

the blog_from would be equal to myspace
the remote_id would be the blog id from myspace.

now as the cron job finds blogs it sees if they are already cataloged by the remote_id if they are it goes to the next blog if not it ads the remote blog to the database.

all the information needed to create the blog is there and it looks like there are key words that can be used to find all the fields.


ok this is just a draft of a way to retrieve a blog from myspace automatically and insert it into Dolphin. i believe the same basic step can be used to get the events and insert them into the system as well.