comp 491: report | introduction

Introduction

The first steps leading to this project were taken in Fall 2004 semester, in MGIS 302 (Software Programming Techniques) course given by Ömer Yedekçioğlu. As the term project, I had presented a program written in Visual Basic 6 to back up Ekşi Sözlük (http://sozluk.sourtimes.org/) entries in an HTML file, which was aimed at being a replacement for SourLemonade (http://213.232.33.34/sourlemonade/default.aspx), the “official” service for Ekşi Sözlük users to backup one’s own entries. The program, dubbed “ek$iBackup”, however, had no such limitation; one could backup the entries of any user (s)he wished to backup. Also, after all the entries by a particular user are scanned by ek$iBackup, it allowed viewing of entries and the titles that the entries pertain to either from the backup or directly from Ekşi Sözlük.

Fig. 1: A screenshot of ek$iBackup, upon scanning entries of user named innu

Following ek$iBackup, intended as a self-assigned programming exercise in C# language, I set on to write a code library that would be used to access and organize Ekşi Sözlük data and came up with ek$iAPI. Then, to acquire the data from Ekşi Sözlük necessary for the graphing application to operate, ek$iDump and ek$iEdgeDump applications were prepared. The final set of data (which is by no means final, as it covers less than 1% of potential linkages between Ekşi Sözlük titles) used was generated by ek$iEdgeDump, which was run on data collected by ek$iDump. Detailed descriptions of ek$iAPI, ek$iDump and ek$iEdgeDump will be given during the course of this report, but one feels it is necessary to explain what Ekşi Sözlük is and what it is so good for, along with entailing jargon.