Skin Spider : Miscellaneous Updates
Posted November 15, 2006 at 8:22 AM by Ben Nadel
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To view the current code base, click here.
Just a few minor updates that I wanted to post before I moved onto some bigger changes.
Spider Gallery
I have updated the spider_gallery.cfm ColdFusion template to use a CFTry / CFCatch tag set wrapped around the Web Shot CMD CFExecute tag. The Web Shot application is set to have a timeout of 120 seconds. Some sites were causing this to crash (go longer than the timeout). I am not sure what causes that, but I think sites with lots of DHTML and stuff cause the app to get all confused. I don't know... that's one of the down sides to using 3rd party software - you just don't know how to fix it.
Now, it should work fine, just as it did before, but if the executable times out then it just displays a nice error message and the page keeps on processing.
Clean Library
Now that we have a nice video rating system in place, I have added a "Ratings Based Criteria" to the clean_library.cfm ColdFusion template. This allows the user to delete all videos below a given rating. There a few caveats here. Since it is not an inclusive delete, it means that you cannot use this to delete any videos with a rating of "10." But come on, whose gonna do that?!? Also, since all non-rated videos have a default rating of "0" it means that any video that has not been explicitly rated will be deleted regardless of which rating was selected (as a delete criteria). I think this actually works out quite nicely. And, as usual, no video that has been flagged as being a favorite video will be deleted.
Spider Content
I have added a "clear queue" link to the spider.cfm ColdFusion template. This just deletes all records from the queue. Right now, the link just calls the spider.cfm ColdFusion template and passes along the URL "Action" variable set to "clear." Then, during pre-page processing, I check to see if the action is set to "clear" and act accordingly. I am not sure if this is the best way to do it. I don't like that the clear functionality feels like such an after-thought (which it was). We can always move it later when a better place presents itself.
