Thread: BMD Update

I bought Bookmarking Demon (BMD) a few months back but really didn't use it much. Various reasons; mostly because I'm a lazy and shiftless clod.

So I started really learning the thing over the weekend, and I came upon the limitations of the Add Social Site dialog. You can only add ~850 sites at a time in that dialog's textarea widget. If you search BHW with BMD there is a thread where this came up over the weekend. I'm not the only one to notice this. If you get ahold of one of the giant Pligg and Scuttle site lists floating around here and elsewhere, you'll find they are a helluva lot larger than 850 sites. Many thousands in fact.

Anyway, I had to file a ticket on an semi-related matter and Edwin and me exchanged a few emails and ta-da, he just released an update of BMD that cranks the Add Social Site list capacity to 300K characters, a ten-fold increase.

Bigtime props to Edwin for putting in this update. If you're not a BMD user but were considering a purchase, you might want to consider this. If you are, go get your update by getting the download URL:

Code:

https://edwinsoft.net/licenses/retrieve

And then, if this helps, you might thank me maybe?

So has he added more sites to the list or is that up to the user? Thanks for the heads up

No, you're still responsible for adding the sites yourself. But you could only add about 850 sites at a time. Now its ten times that.

Thanks - out of interest how many urls do you submit to your list? I am only using the default list as I have been too lazy to take time to setup accounts, and just submit 2 urls @ a time

I emailed him though and told him about being able to export the sites in a sharable format, he said he will put that into the next update so that we can all build lists together.

Bit lost here - the download page is still just showing the February update.

Actually, the real problem is manipulating the data in the social networks table - deleting and ordering just don't happen, so the table is always way bigger than it needs to be.

Yeah, you've got to delete sites that failed the account creation attempt manually. I've mentioned this in support as well.

I tried a different technique last night. I renamed my default.accounts.bmd file. BMD builds a new one with the default site listing when you do this. Then I added a huge list of several thousand Pligg sites, set to no Captcha. Then I auto-checked all sites in the site grid. Then I un-checked the 119 default sites and hit the Create Now button in Create Accounts screen. Left the machine working overnight. This morning before leaving for work I checked up on BMD. It had finished the list. I didn't have time to delete all the failed sites. I estimate that I've got at least 1K new Pligg accounts set up that way.

Later, when I want to merge that list into my main default.accounts.bmd file I'll save last night's run in text format, then resurrect the old default.accounts.bmd file. Start up BMD and then do a Load Accounts from txt/csv should do the trick.

Next up is doing the same thing on the Scuttle side. Oh, and writing a small Delphi 7 program that takes my Pligg site listing and grabs available categories from them. That I can probably get done this weekend.

freller: the version number doesn't seem to have incremented on this. Just dl the available file and you'll get the upgrade.

Thanks TheEditor. That's an excellent method for just loading the active sites. Edwin admitted to me that he really bummed out in the first place choosing a flat text file format for keeping the data as it makes further manipulation nigh on impossible. Got to admit, I've been there, done that, felt the pain. SQL is so easy I don't know why programmers choose anything else.

I think a text format can be just fine for an app like this. Depends on how you structure the file. The way Edwin does it though does make things awfully difficult. Just load up that default.accounts.bmd file in your text editor - I love EditPad Pro - and you'll see what I mean. The file reminds me very much of a Rebol statement.

And having the ability to import/export to a txt/csv is a must, must, must.

The grid control Edwin uses is shockingly primitive. I'd expect the ability to sort the grid by clicking on column headers. That would allow you to isolate the sites for whom account creation failed on a given run. Deleting them from the grid then would be a snap.

And there ought to be a panel off to the side where you can select various checkboxes, "Select All Pligg Sites", "Select All Your Pligg Sites", etc.

Plus the way BMD hangs when you have a mass addition/deletion is diappointing. That's pretty much down to grid selection I think.

Still, I think/hope BMD is going to be an effective tool once I get over this learning curve and setup work.