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errantemberI belong to The Voluptuaries, a writer's group started by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kitfox and eposia. The requirement is to post at least one work for critique per month, and two critiques of other's work per month. Previously this was enforced by hand, which, on an ever-expanding body of work coming from as many as ten writers, is a daunting task. Recently its difficulty combined with busyness on the part of our admin has led to no enforcement, which, naturally, has led to laxity. We've only had one contribution at all in February.
Thinking on this conundrum, I realized it was probably possible to do this accounting programmatically.
I managed to find some Python code that will pull the contents of LJ onto your local system, but the accounting rules for the Voluptuaries were too unique for anyone to have written code for them. So *I* wrote it. I've been programming since I was in elementary school, but recently my career has had me doing very low-level, close-to-the-hardware work. This is the first web application programming I've done in probably ten years, and although re-learning PERL's data structures has nearly killed me on several occasions, I'm still have a fabulous time doing something I love.
While the final program still needs work, I've reached a point where it appears to be counting correctly. One can specify the month and year (the present is the default) and the program skims through the archive and counts all the appropriate posts. Unlike an over-burdened human being, it can find critiques posted this month on older works easily. It generates links to all posts involved, allowing easy auditing of it's correctness. For the final version, I'd like to get everyone in the group to upload good-writer/bad-writer pictures so we can use them in a visual graph to show who is in compliance and who isn't.
kitfox and eposia. The requirement is to post at least one work for critique per month, and two critiques of other's work per month. Previously this was enforced by hand, which, on an ever-expanding body of work coming from as many as ten writers, is a daunting task. Recently its difficulty combined with busyness on the part of our admin has led to no enforcement, which, naturally, has led to laxity. We've only had one contribution at all in February. Thinking on this conundrum, I realized it was probably possible to do this accounting programmatically.
I managed to find some Python code that will pull the contents of LJ onto your local system, but the accounting rules for the Voluptuaries were too unique for anyone to have written code for them. So *I* wrote it. I've been programming since I was in elementary school, but recently my career has had me doing very low-level, close-to-the-hardware work. This is the first web application programming I've done in probably ten years, and although re-learning PERL's data structures has nearly killed me on several occasions, I'm still have a fabulous time doing something I love.
While the final program still needs work, I've reached a point where it appears to be counting correctly. One can specify the month and year (the present is the default) and the program skims through the archive and counts all the appropriate posts. Unlike an over-burdened human being, it can find critiques posted this month on older works easily. It generates links to all posts involved, allowing easy auditing of it's correctness. For the final version, I'd like to get everyone in the group to upload good-writer/bad-writer pictures so we can use them in a visual graph to show who is in compliance and who isn't.
