Entrecard Drop list

I've been trying to come up with an easy way to fulfill my Entrecard dropping responsibilities, and until now I couldn't figure out a way that reconciled fairness with my absolute laziness. So I decided to create an Entrecard drop list.

It's not as neato as Matthias', in that it doesn't check for widgets. I figure I'll just manually ban people from it if I go to their site and they don't have a widget. What I do is have a script that checks my drop list periodically, and then adds an entry when someone drops.

Then when I go to the drop list page, it organizes the list by the number of times each user has dropped on me in the last 30 days. That way I'm dropping on the folks who religiously drop on me first, instead of using the toolbar which neglects some really fanatical droppers if they should wait until after I've done my run to drop on my site.

Previous to this, I was using the toolbar to drop (because it's faster than dropping from the EC website, which is heinously slow these days). I was putting people who drop a lot into my favourites, but maintaining that system was time consuming, so I neglected it. I get the feeling that I might have been dropping on some people daily who weren't reciprocating, I was just dragging people around like dead weight in Delsey luggage. :-(

So yeah, that's my grand plan #2 to organize my drops. Previous mentioned rules will of course land people in the drop slammer. :-D

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hi, can you teach me how to create a drop list? because I too feel that I've been dropping more ec's on people who don't really reciprocate and i lose precious time and end up not being able to drop on my religious droppers, i usually open the campaign tab, choose the category and then drop on sites, i need a better technique, so if you can help, it'll be really appreciated and it'll be really great.... thanks! :-)
Hi there,

Unfortunately I don't want to just go ahead and release the script, for two reasons. First of all, it's an ugly, nasty hack job that I'd be ashamed if it saw the light of day, and secondly it uses the Postgresql database which not many hosts use these days, so it would require additional work to change over.

If you knew enough PHP to do that, you could just write one from scratch, it's pretty trivial. The first thing you need to know is the RSS URL for your inbox. To find that, I simply guessed it by going to the RSS feed for my top droppers (which will look something like this: http://entrecard.com/feeds/top_droppers/XXXXXXXXX/rss2.0, where the Xs are is a unique ID for your account). Simply replace "top_droppers" with "inbox" and you have an RSS feed of your most recent droppers. Parsing RSS isn't too tough in PHP, so then what I do is check the PubDate field, and I only add a new record to my database if there isn't already one for that date.

The script for this runs every 10 minutes but of course if your website will attract more than 50 drops in 10 minutes you will need to ramp this up a bit. Then it's simply a matter of counting the number of records, grouping by the URL, and organizing them into a "top droppers" list of your own. The bad news is that your website appears to be hosted on blogspot, and they won't give you access to run such a script.

Of course this entire system could be rendered redundant by Entrecard simply expanding their "top droppers" RSS list to 300 entries, but I'm not sure if they'll do that. ;[
Doing it in php sounds like it could be pretty tricky. Maybe I'm just more of a bash fan, but I think I'd go that route instead. It won't be as pretty as Matthias', but it doesn't really matter to me.
First, I would write a script to curl/wget the pages and grep for the ec widget code. This could be done weekly via cron. Then, it would be a piece of cake to have it write the working pages to an html file that you could use Snaplinks on for fast dropping.
You could go further by pinging each site and only allowing fast servers in the list, or even tell grep to only add sites with the widget in the first 20 lines or so to only allow pages with the widget somewhere near the header.

I think I'll call it the Darwinian droplist :-)

As for the initial list, a simple google query will yield quite a few Top Dropper lists:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22top+droppers+on+entrecard%22
Nukeit: I chose PHP because it has a rather trivial XML parser already built in it, and it's the only language other than C that I have any experience parsing XML in (and I didn't feel like taking all day to write it in C and debug all the little issues, hehe).

I'm not very good at shell scripting at all, but even if I was I'm not entirely sure it'd be the right tool for the job. Keep in mind I'm not interested in Entrecard's top droppers, I'm interested in my top droppers, hence the need to consult my RSS feed, and thus parse XML. Parsing XML in a shell script doesn't sound like fun - it's more suited to strings and arrays, in my very limited experience. Not even to mention interacting with an SQL database, it just sounds like a really hard way to do it for no gain whatsoever. :-(

As for slow websites, I use the "Linky" plugin to load 50 tabs at a time - they're all slow in those circumstances. :-D
Here is a sample of the output from my own top droppers:
http://nukeit.org/pub/droplist.html

And here is the script:
http://nukeit.org/pub/ddc.sh

I know it's ugly :-D
I've been creating a site called dropaholics.com which may be of interest, you register just your blog and it keeps track or your top dropaholics - top 25 droppers on your site and a list of registerred blogs that you are a top dropper (dropaholic) on. It is basic at the moment but work is still being done on it.

It has faults in that it just reads the top_droppers feed for each of the registered blogs and using your method would be better, but as the site is monitoring hundreds of blogs and the inbox is best checked at the end of the day it could cause problems for EC if it checked everyone's inbox in the last few minutes of the day.
I just started using entrecard yesterday and immediately saw the need for something like this. Aside from scripting this out myself is there a WordPress/Entrecard plugin that'll do it for me?
Caleb: I'm afraid there doesn't seem to be any plugins that'll do things like this. There's the Entrecard toolbar plugin, which to be honest is quite shoddy and unfair - hopefully a new version will be released soon that fixes these issues.

The problems with the toolbar is 1) it's FF3 only, it fails ambiguously in many ways if you try it in FF2; 2) If you hide it, parts still show up. 3) Dropping from your Inbox will only show sites that have dropped on you *today*, so unless you wait until 11:30 at night to drop, you are sure to miss the afternoon people.. and if you do drop at 11:30, then people who drop exclusively from the toolbar will miss you.

I use the toolbar to drop on random sites or popular sites periodically to troll for new drops, but other than that it's really not usable yet.

As far as I know there aren't any Wordpress plugins that implement anything even remotely close to this. :-(
Hi everyone,

I have also been looking for a drop list that caters for my needs and to be shown on my website. dropaholics.com has a good list if you register.
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