Listing the tags from a given date

December 5, 2010 4:17 AM

If I could do magic I would create an application which does the following: Input: A date Output: An .html file contating a list of all metafilter.com FPP tags from that date, with a link to the corresponding FPP. How would you go about creating such an application?

For example, let's pretend that there were only two FPP's on December 4th, 2010. Then the output for this day would be something like this :

beamweapons --> Link to the '"More Nukes, Less Kooks"' FPP
cliche --> Link to the 'I must be cruel to be kind' FPP
cosmoetica --> I must be cruel to be kind
danschneider --> I must be cruel to be kind
fusion --> "More Nukes, Less Kooks"
heroiclevelsofineptitudeandhubris --> I must be cruel to be kind
laborparty --> "More Nukes, Less Kooks"
LaRouche --> "More Nukes, Less Kooks"
plasmaphysics --> "More Nukes, Less Kooks"
poetry --> I must be cruel to be kind
SDI --> "More Nukes, Less Kooks"

If the same tag is used in x different FPP's then the tag should be listed x times.

I am using Windows and Firefox, and I have some skill in C# and HTML. However, please feel free to suggest tools and ideas specific to any platform. Finally, a disclaimer: I'm lazy, so there's no guarantee that I'll implement anything myself.

posted by WalkingAround to Feature Requests at 4:17 AM (5 comments total)

The good news is that most of the work has already been done for you by the Infodump. Grab the tagdata_mefi file, for example, if you want to do this specifically for posts to the front page. Creating your notional app would just be a straightforward job of parsing the file.

The data there is listed in chronological order with time stamps, so if you decided that the app was too much work, you can browse it pretty easily too by just searching for the datestring you're interested in (e.g. 2010-12-02 will take you to Dec 2 of this year). You might still want to do a little bit of sorting in excel or something if you're interested specifically in looking for multiples of a single tag over a short window like that, though.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:49 AM on December 5, 2010

Without needing to parse the files at the dump (didn't know about that, thanks for the link, Cortex!), you can Google for (include the quotes):

"December 4, 2010" "RSS feed for this thread" site:www.metafilter.com

This will give you something pretty close to what you ask for - I tried a few dates and although I saw a few (but not a lot of) extra results, it otherwise had a complete set of FPPs - Including, interestingly enough, deleted posts.
posted by pla at 8:37 AM on December 5, 2010

Including, interestingly enough, deleted posts.

Google indexes us pretty aggressively, but isn't apparently so aggressive about reindexing with an eye for the "noindex" tag that gets added to deleted posts. So if it catches a post before it gets deleted, it'll stick around in the index for a bit.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:46 AM on December 5, 2010

Here's a bit of perl to do it using the infodump. The output for 2010-12-03 looks like this. I couldn't tell if you wanted the post titles actually there or if you were just using that as a means of demonstration, but if you do then you can do it like this which produces this.
posted by Rhomboid at 9:31 AM on December 5, 2010

(BTW the latter needs the title HTML escaped if you plan to use it in a non-toy situation.)
posted by Rhomboid at 9:39 AM on December 5, 2010