Handling renamed accounts

[nealrauhauser]

I'm using this simple bit of code in a spider of Substack accounts.

#!/usr/bin/env python
from substack_api import User
import sys
import ujson

user = User(sys.argv[1])

f = open(sys.argv[1] +".json",'w')
profile_data = user.get_raw_data()

f.write(ujson.dumps(profile_data))

f.close()

And it's not handling things that have been renamed. Here are a few examples:

150wordreviews => johndevore

15thcfeminist => 15thcenturyfeminist

300tangpoems => hyunwookimwriter

5thingsyoushouldbuy => beckymalinsky

This content is going to end up in an ArangoDB graph database, I'm focused on that for the moment. If this is still open this evening I'll have a go at fixing the API code myself.

[NHagar]

Thanks for flagging - this is closed by #9!

[nealrauhauser]

Thanks mate. Is there a place where we can talk about this API? I've done large scale stuff with Twitter in the past, I'm planning on going deep into this area. I think there are some things that will require just requests+https to get it right, and I reached out to Substack to find out how they'd take a metrics effort. Ideally OAuth via Substack for it, but after examining the responses closely I get the feeling the API wasn't designed, that it sort of accreted and now you're exposing it.

https://www.rauhauser.net/p/substack-your-world

neal at rauhauser dot net is a good way to reach me.