‘MySpace’ is right here.

MySpace is a great site for people to network, but as a blog, it’s terrible in my opinion.

So why do people continue to use MySpace, when there are so many other blog services available to them? Probably because the mere idea of losing their current social network terrifies them.

Today I decided it was time to convince people to visit me at my blog. Until now my MySpace page has been a blank slate, not even a picture to show. So I stuck a picture on my profile, as an indication of update, and set off on my adventure.

I placed a DIV overlay on my page to cover up all of the hideous tables MySpace has to offer (leaving room for the sacred banner though, let us not break the Terms of Service). And one large font link later, it was done. Okay, Okay… It’s not pretty, but who cares, it looks better than before.

Unfortunately though, the fears of a million MySpace slaves ran through me. How would this effect my (anti-)social lifestyle? No friends list, no friends. I am all alone now, ‘MySpace’ is a lonely one. I guess this means it is time to go off on another adventure, this time though with a friend… The mighty XSLT will accompany me now.

I have decided to create a web scraping MySpace API to download and extract the contents of my friends list, and prepare them for absorbition (I give up on spelling that word for now) into my page. Few have completed this task, and the ones that did, were met with disaster as MySpace constantly changed their format. I hope to combat this using XPath and XSLT with a SAX capable parser like TSaxon. If anybody has any ideas, feel free to leave a comment.

Doubt I will continue with this project? Well so do I.

Goodnight.