Get your favourite authors, favourite authors.
Hey Everyone,
I've got something a little different for you today... I hope you like it as much as I do.
Recommended Users to Follow Tool
Ooh pretty, but... What does it do?
Alot in a small way. I wanted to find more users producing content I enjoy and relate to. I figured the best way to go about this would be to see who my favourite authors are following since we have similar interests and vioala!
What it really does:
- Gets all your voting history & a list of everyone you follow.
- Tallies all the data and returns the users that are statistically your favourite (most up voted) authors.
- Repeats step 1 & 2 for the top 5 users you vote for.
- Compares thier favourite lists to your own.
- Returns the popular authors that they follow and you don't. Ocassionally it will also include authors that you commonly vote for but don't follow. Try it out
Recommended Users to Follow Tool
Neat huh?
Personally I found the list of users recommended to me highly relevant. Sadly I will not be expanding the result set for the forseeble future. The proccess is messy.
To retrieve a small result set thousands of potential records are analysed and compared. That means in order to keep it accurate and have it respond to a request in an acceptable time frame I would have to put considerable effort into caching, background processing & monitoring aswell as maintain and optimise a very large database of aggregated and graphed user data. Oh... and I forgot to mention I am also inherently lazy.
Background Story:
Right now all the work is actually done in your browser, client side. This is actually a small part of a personal project I last worked on about 2 months ago, but I had to put it aside temporarily while I signed off a large work project and got divorced simultaneously. The code it's running was literally my proof of concept, for this I apologise - while it works I feel a bit like I've hung out my dirty laundry behind your DOM.
The idea behind the project is that I want to get as much value out the Steemit platform as I can with as little effort as possible. Personally I'm finding it increasingly more difficult to find posts and good authors that are of real value to me and didn't just get a Ned vote; Also finding new content aside, I hate to say it but Steemit does a really shoddy job of allowing you to actually follow the people you are following.
Often I get busy and go a week or two without reading any blogs and when I try to pick up from where I left off I have no idea which posts I have missed because they were paid out and went to the same place lost socks go to. This is a major peeve of mine since the earnings of a post have absolutley nothing to do with my choice to follow its creator.
TL:DR;
I said fuck it, challenge accepted. I was looking for an excuse to play with a decent dataset anyway and I actually like alot of the authors I follow so i decided to create tools to help me follow them and also find new content based on whatever topics are relevant to my current flavour of the month.
