The Big Picture Analyzer

One of my favorite blogs that I follow is The Big Picture. Its a collection of amazing pictures. Make sure that you go into each article, that single picture is only a teaser and often collections have over 30 images.

At the Big Picture it is very common for commenters to list the numbers of the images that they really liked. This intrigued me a little bit. Also, the comments on the main page are limited to just
100 comments, when there might actually be over 2000 comments on some collections.

So, I wrote a Ruby Script that I call bigpicvotes that takes in the URL to a Big Picture site and analyzes the comments to make a guess at what pictures were voted for the most!

Above is a sample usage on an article with now over 2600 comments. Notice that the URL you provide can be either the “all comments” URL or just the URL with the pictures that you are likely to be looking at. Also, the usage allows for a second optional parameter. This is to show the top N images instead of defaulting to the top 10.

One last thing. To use it you will need the Hpricot gem. That is simple enough to install:

shell> gem install hpricot

Again, the script is available here: bigpicvotes