Comments | lj_nifty: Tag all your old entries based on regexp patterns

threeleet in lj_nifty

Tag all your old entries based on regexp patterns

Jun 29, 2005 23:34

Got hundreds of old entries, and don't feel like going through every single one of them to add tags? Discovered a cool new tag that you want to add, but don't want to look through lots of entries to figure out where to add it? Then look no further...

( LJ Tagger will do it for you! )

Leave a comment

Back to all threads

aspiring2live July 1 2005, 04:59:26 UTC

Any chance this will ever be user friendly for non-code geeks like me? I mean, like a lame GUI or something that I can understand? PERL? don't have it, don't know where to get it or why I need it? See where I'm coming from?

(I can feel all those eyes rolling out there!)

z3bulin July 1 2005, 05:36:28 UTC

No no! I understand.

Perl? I'm sure I could figure it out...but the time... If there was an easier way, that would be keen.

threeleet July 1 2005, 05:39:00 UTC

Unfortunately, probably not- I'm mostly a web programmer, & have no GUI experience whatsoever. Even if I did try to hack a GUI onto it, it'd probably be in gtk-perl or something, and I don't really know if it's possible to package something like that into a downloadable bundle that'll work on all platforms. And even if I knew how to write something in a compiled language, I don't have a Windows box to compile that version on (and so far all but 1 of the downloads have been Windows).

Anyone else know a way to make a (GUI-fied or otherwise) perl script into a self-contained program?

satanicsocks July 1 2005, 07:14:36 UTC

Hmm, maybe use Mason to make a web UI out of it?

threeleet July 1 2005, 07:31:37 UTC

Problem w/ a web interface is you'd have to give your password to an untrusted server, which is never fun, even if it is a temporary one. Plus, since it wouldn't have local access to your archive, you'd either have to upload them, or it'd have to download an export from LJ to search it. Not very bandwidth-friendly, esp. as it would have to do this every time.

The UI probably wouldn't be very nice, either, as it'd either have to be one long-ass page with every match followed by a 'tag?' checkbox, or else it'd have each match on a separate page, and have to deal w/ states & sessions to go through them all sequentially, which would be horrendously complicated and probably require a database to implement even semi-cleanly.

Of course, none of that would be a problem if such a thing were built directly into LJ itself. :) But since they don't allow searching your entries, I doubt it'll happen.

satanicsocks July 1 2005, 07:39:09 UTC

Well, you can use AJAX to simplify the UI a bit, though to be honest it was just a throwaway thought; certainly web-interfaces are more accessible to many people than command line Perl, despite the horrors of security, bandwidth and the munginess of the scripts that result :)

rog July 1 2005, 07:32:11 UTC

That'd probably be a bandwidth/support/security killer for the poor sap who ends up hosting it.

shatterstripes July 1 2005, 09:02:48 UTC

Web gui.

Package it up as a .tgz that'll expand into a folder. Include an .htaccess file to try and make sure that the webserver will allow execution of stuff in the directory.

Build a simple little quick and dirty webby front-end.

Mac users can just drop the whole folder into ~/Sites, turn on web serving, and go to localhost/~username/lj_tagger/ and proceed.

People without a copy of Apache hiding inside their default install can upload it to their web-host. If they have one.

threeleet July 2 2005, 23:22:08 UTC

The problem with that is that you'd still have to have perl & all the required modules installed... and if people can't get that part done, a web gui isn't going to help very much.

(The comment has been removed)

omey December 5 2005, 00:40:43 UTC

I installed expat from scatch (not fink) and that fixed that problem but it is still failing with warnings ( ... )

Back to all threads