Last Thursday, I started a new weekly feature here at my HOT blog (HOT = Herculean, Outgoing, Timely in April 2007) called Blogger Challenge.
The burning question asked in the inaugural Blogger Challenge:
"You are given a list of 100 blog URLs. You must find out the number of comments posted in March 2007 at each blog on the list. What's the fastest way to complete the assignment?"
Several of you submitted answers via blog comments and emails before the deadline (last night at midnight Pacific time) and say THANKS to all all who participated. After carefully reviewing all replies, I decided on the single best answer …
Congratulations to our Week 1 winner: Vincent McBurney! Vincent offered the following answer to the Blogger Challenge question:
"Couldn't you have started with an easier challenge?
I work in IT consulting so our solution would be to offshore the work and have 100 staff in solution centers spending a finding all posts for a URL for March and submitting the count into a shared spreadsheet for summing!
I had a look at Yahoo Pipes, thought you might be able to paste the URLs on a source stage, send it through a filter for dates, send it into a Regex stage and use a Perl Script to scrape the part that says how many comments there are, dump the result into Excel for summing. Not clever enough to get this working."
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Vincent wins his choice of a thorough SOAPing from me OR a nice big virtual pat on the back. Yes, I know.
Stay tuned for the next weekly Blogger Challenge this Thusday, April 12. Ideas for future challenge questions or prizes? Let me know!