Splinder

Splinder.com has been the main blog hosting company in Italy for a while (see Wikipedia:it:Splinder). It was founded in 2001 and it hosts about half a million blogs and over 55 millions pages. Since 8th November, 2011 a warning on the home page says that no new PRO accounts are being created since the 1st June. The company has confirmed that the website will close on the 24th.[1]

How to help archiving

There is a distributed download script that gets usernames from a tracker and downloads the data.

Make sure you are on Linux, that you have curl, git, a recent version of Bash. Your system must also be able to compile wget.

1. Get the code: git clone https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/splinder-grab
2. Get and compile the latest version of wget-warc: ./get-wget-warc.sh
3. Think of a nickname for yourself (preferably use your IRC name).
4. Run the download script with ./dld-client.sh "<YOURNICK>"
5. To stop the script gracefully, run touch STOP in the script's working directory. It will finish the current task and stop.

Notes

• Compiling wget-warc will require dev packages for the various libraries that it needs. Most questions have been about gnutls; install the gnutls-devel or gnutls-dev package with your favorite package manager.
• Downloading one user's data can take between 10 seconds and a few hours.
• The data for one user is equally varied, from a few kB to several GB.
• The downloaded data will be saved in the ./data/ subdirectory.
• Download speeds from me.com are not that high. You can run multiple clients to speed things up.

External links

• http://www.splinder.com/
• http://www.us.splinder.com/

Site structure

The users are identified by their usernames. Fortunately, the side provides a list of all users. Usernames are not case-sensitive, but there is a case preference.

Example URLs

User profile: http://www.splinder.com/profile/<<username>>

Example profile:
http://www.splinder.com/profile/difficilifoglie

View count on profile page:
http://www.splinder.com/ajax.php?type=counter&op=profile&profile=Romanticdreamer

Example of friends list paging: (160 per page, starting at 0)
http://www.splinder.com/profile/difficilifoglie/friends
http://www.splinder.com/profile/difficilifoglie/friends/160

Inverse friends (probably also paged):
http://www.splinder.com/profile/difficilifoglie/friendof

Link to blog: (note: not always the same as the username)
http://difficilifoglie.splinder.com/
http://learnonline.splinder.com/

Photo:
http://www.splinder.com/profile/difficilifoglie/photo
http://www.splinder.com/mediablog/wondermum/media/24544805

Video:
http://www.splinder.com/profile/wondermum/video
http://www.splinder.com/mediablog/wondermum/media/25737390

Audio:
Not a separate user feed, but only accessible via mediablog
http://www.splinder.com/mediablog/learnonline/media/25727030

Mediablog: combination of the audio + video + photo lists
http://www.splinder.com/mediablog/learnonline
(16 per page, starting at 0)
http://www.splinder.com/mediablog/learnonline/16

Mediablog has PowerPoint, Word files:
http://www.splinder.com/mediablog/learnonline/media/25641346
http://www.splinder.com/mediablog/learnonline/media/25546305
http://www.splinder.com/mediablog/learnonline/media/21901634
http://www.splinder.com/mediablog/learnonline/media/24875290

User avatar: grab url from profile page

Photo file: grab url from photo page and remove _medium to get original picture
http://files.splinder.com/d5e492233631af39212268593afca02d_square.jpg
http://files.splinder.com/d5e492233631af39212268593afca02d_medium.jpg
http://files.splinder.com/d5e492233631af39212268593afca02d.jpg
older photos do not have this structure, different ids for each size:
http://www.splinder.com/mediablog/babboramo/media/17359043
http://files.splinder.com/13b615ccbd75354ee4e0d973da66c2b2.jpeg
http://files.splinder.com/770d7b9ecac27083d9204af327ebe743.jpeg

PowerPoint, Word files: grab url from media page
http://files.splinder.com/46dbf3d5a0b12e490f81ddb8444b4fad.ppt
http://files.splinder.com/ab3ce16c850ac530351d9df0937152c7.pdf

Video items: grab url from media page
http://files.splinder.com/8f5caff20685648bacd4ce1acf90e645_square.jpg
http://files.splinder.com/8f5caff20685648bacd4ce1acf90e645_thumbnail.jpg
http://files.splinder.com/8f5caff20685648bacd4ce1acf90e645_small.flv
note: square, thumbnail, small is not always available, check flashvars for vidpath, imgpath
http://www.splinder.com/mediablog/babboramo/media/13131052
http://files.splinder.com/e067653e1532e55ee208605fcb84361a.flv
http://files.splinder.com/f56060b7fef139f03b72e06ca9fcba55.jpeg

Audio items: grab url from media page, flashvars
sometimes there is a _thumbnail, remove that to get a better quality
http://files.splinder.com/a5043c34a12ee66f5ad995ffd14493ef_thumbnail.mp3
http://files.splinder.com/a5043c34a12ee66f5ad995ffd14493ef.mp3

Comments on blog posts:
http://www.splinder.com/myblog/comment/list/25742358
on some, but not on all blogs, those comments are also included in the blog page
http://dal15al25.splinder.com/post/25740180
http://soluzioni.splinder.com/post/2802227/blog-pager-su-piu-righe
http://soluzioni.splinder.com/post/25737683/avviso-per-gli-utenti-ce-da-preoccuparsi/
http://civati.splinder.com/post/25742977
pagination: see media comments

Comments on media items:
http://www.splinder.com/media/comment/list/21254470
http://www.splinder.com/media/comment/list/21254470?from=50
(50 per page, starting at 0)
number of comments is on the media page
http://www.splinder.com/mediablog/danspo/media/21254470


Blog urls:
the blogs have content from their own subdomain, but also from
files.splinder.com
www.splinder.com/misc/ (topbar css, gif)
www.splinder.com/includes/ (js)
www.splinder.com/modules/service_links/ (images)
syndication.splinder.com

links to www.splinder.com that should NOT be followed:
 /myblog/
 /users/
 /media/
 /node/
 /profile/
 /mediablog/
 /community/
 /user/
 /night/
 /home/
 /mysearch/
 /online/
 /trackback/

wget-warc --mirror --page-requisites --span-hosts --domains=learnonline.splinder.com,files.splinder.com,www.splinder.com,syndication.splinder.com --exclude-directories="/users,/media,/node,/profile,/mediablog,/community,/user,/night,/home,/mysearch,/online,/trackback,/myblog/post,/myblog/posts,/myblog/tags,/myblog/tag,/myblog/view,/myblog/latest,/myblog/subscribe" -nv -o wget.log "http://learnonline.splinder.com/"