Lewies Blog

I’ve started making my program log into HaloScan and request individual comments. The reason - I think a lot of people have free HaloScan accounts.


Shabooty suggested that it would be a great feature. I try my best to please.

My program can finally do this - but at a price. After each page request, I set the client to pause for a few seconds. If it is any less, then I start hitting the server too hard and risk making a DOS (Denial of Service) attack.

Doing this causes a lot of unnecessary traffic between haloscan and the client application. It takes a lot of resources on both ends to transfer the data. Each comment has to be downloaded individually.

If you have a lot of comments, you could be spending a long time downloading them. I need to build in a caching mechanism for subsequent downloads. Still - the initial query is going to eat up time.

I’m debating just removing support for free haloscan accounts. The reason being is that HaloScan only requires $12 per year to begin with. It is very cheap for the service that they provide. Please go ahead and register - it is worth it.

Maybe I’ll set it up to only download the first 20 comments listed on the first page so that you can at least try it out. I have over 925 comments spanned over 47 pages on haloscan, so it takes a long time to go through and parse 972 pages. It’s doable, but not efficient.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 25th, 2005 at 2:22 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. 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.