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posted by LaminatorX on Thursday August 21 2014, @09:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the Soylent+ dept.

I've been trying to research 3D printing for a page on the Shapeoko wiki on 3D printing, with a reasonable bit of success, but now am stymied by trying to browse through all the posts to the 3D Printing Community on Google+. The default is for such Circles to show the newest posts, and for older posts to be added at the bottom as one scrolls down, but attempting to do that to access the entire archive results in an unmanageably long page which brings the performance of the web browser to a crawl and makes it awkward to pull out the specific posts as distinct URLs — is there some feature I'm not finding which would allow browsing all these posts?

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Thursday August 21 2014, @10:08PM

    by Nerdfest (80) on Thursday August 21 2014, @10:08PM (#84122)

    I've found the same thing. It's especially difficult if you come back to it later. Adding to the annoyance, is that when you comment or "+1" a post, it tends to float to the top. I'm a fan of Google+, but there's a lot of room for improvement, especially in using it as an actual data source.

    • (Score: 2) by mojo chan on Friday August 22 2014, @07:34AM

      by mojo chan (266) on Friday August 22 2014, @07:34AM (#84256)

      G+ isn't designed to be a mailing list archive or wiki or blog. It's a social network service where posts are considered transient, read once and dismissed. If the 3D printer community wants to use than that they need to manually archive stuff or switch to another medium.

      Perhaps the OP should write a script to archive the material himself, rather than trying to search back.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 21 2014, @10:10PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 21 2014, @10:10PM (#84124) Journal
    Warning: I haven't used it myself so I don't know if it's an actual solution, but...
    if you are really determined to solve you problem, maybe the G+ API [google.com] could be a starting point?
    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 2) by tibman on Friday August 22 2014, @01:35AM

      by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 22 2014, @01:35AM (#84175)

      I saw two server-side example G+ post fetchers (php and python). Seems like those would be perfect to start from. Taking a peek now : )

      --
      SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday August 22 2014, @12:32AM

    by kaszz (4211) on Friday August 22 2014, @12:32AM (#84159) Journal

    Seems like a bad case of top posters [wikipedia.org] and webhipsters got too much decision power.

    As for a solution. Use an API if you can find and use it. Otherwise write a script and screen-scrape the site.

    • (Score: 2) by tynin on Friday August 22 2014, @02:42AM

      by tynin (2013) on Friday August 22 2014, @02:42AM (#84200) Journal

      Agreed, API or scrape the page. Either way you'll be able to view as much or little at a time as you want.

      • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday August 22 2014, @02:49AM

        by kaszz (4211) on Friday August 22 2014, @02:49AM (#84202) Journal

        One can dump it as NNTP newsgroups. That way one will have reader and database ready to go from the start.

        • (Score: 2) by WillAdams on Friday August 22 2014, @02:59AM

          by WillAdams (1424) on Friday August 22 2014, @02:59AM (#84205)

          This is a Google + / Circle community, not a Google Group --- I'm not seeing a way to access it via NNTP --- the only search result I'm finding isn't helping: http://holdenweb.blogspot.com/2009/01/google-groups-plus.html [blogspot.com]

          • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday August 23 2014, @02:30AM

            by kaszz (4211) on Saturday August 23 2014, @02:30AM (#84571) Journal

            You misunderstood this completely. If you have extracted the posts via API or screen scraping. You can make use of these by creating a local NNTP service. Ie Google (or whatever) provides the posts. You create the NNTP service. The benefit is that servers and clients already exists.

          • (Score: 2) by tibman on Monday August 25 2014, @05:34AM

            by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 25 2014, @05:34AM (#85202)

            Hey man, what's the word with your g+ project? Did you come up with a way to browse the group posts?

            I couldn't see a way to PM another user, so just commented here.

            --
            SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by Subsentient on Friday August 22 2014, @02:32AM

    by Subsentient (1111) on Friday August 22 2014, @02:32AM (#84195) Homepage Journal

    We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.

    --
    "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday August 22 2014, @02:41AM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 22 2014, @02:41AM (#84199) Journal

      Cool answer, buddy. Quite helpful for someone who wants to browse conversations on 3D printing on G+.

      .

      (just from curiosity, with this problems solved, what is the next problem you'll be looking into today: world piss?)

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by Subsentient on Friday August 22 2014, @06:16AM

        by Subsentient (1111) on Friday August 22 2014, @06:16AM (#84240) Homepage Journal

        Yes, it is. Moreso than you understand.

        Google == Borg ??

        --
        "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
        • (Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Friday August 22 2014, @06:46AM

          by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 22 2014, @06:46AM (#84247) Journal

          Google == Borg ??

          Ah, stupid me, how could I have missed the metaphor?!?

          (do I need to use a special tag on this?)

          .

          (wasn't it clear enough for you that WillAdams was well aware of the fact, but was interested enough on the topic to take the risk?)

          --
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
  • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Friday August 22 2014, @06:41AM

    by Aiwendil (531) on Friday August 22 2014, @06:41AM (#84243) Journal

    I have never used google+ but the general trend with most of googles services is that they work a lot better with a much nicer interface when you turn javascript off (for instance, turning off javascript gets rid of the endless scroll on images.google.com )

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 22 2014, @07:10AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 22 2014, @07:10AM (#84253)

      Hah. Google+ without javascript is frequently just a blank page.

      Their engineers are either idiots or assholes.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 24 2014, @01:13AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 24 2014, @01:13AM (#84815)

        Their engineers are either idiots or assholes.

        It's the latter...because the higher-ups that pay them DEMAND it to be done in this maner!

        Google (and all other 'adsavvy' websites) use JavaScript to render pages within the site (along with their ads). Disable JavaScript and the site breaks and you see NOTHING!

        Reading the HTML source code is pointles as it 'minimized' and obsfucated for speed making it unreadable as is.

        Remember years ago when the Google home page was just a .GIF image, a little text, an input box and two clickable buttons? Those days are GONE! The page is now filled with bloated JavaScript routines now. If you are on a pay-as-you-go internet connection, you might have have to code up a little program that calls their search backend directly and you strip out the (obsfucated/trackable) URLs to the destination sites returned by your search query. Years ago, you could have scraped those URLs from the results page but those days are gone as well. As far as I know, only short URLs to YouTube or obscure sites will display in full--otherwise '...' will appear in the URL. :(

        I'll bet anything that you have to have JavaScript running to even 'see' these URLs! o_O;