Artists that rely on blog-img*

A few blogs upload their images to these image servers. The problem is the blog provider will often switch these servers around willynilly, making the artist auto-id less effective.

At one point I tried normalizing these URLs, but bugs popped up and I decided to revert my change. But now, these image servers are common enough that I'm thinking of attempting normalization again.

I would like to hear comments on this, as well as any possible alternatives (maybe adding extra URL fields to artists).

The addresses seem to have a fairly strict pattern:

http:// randomserverid .fc2.com/ first letter OR several first letters of the username /username/occasional subfolder/image.jpg

What kind of issues did you run into the first time while testing normalization?

The username is always unique and I've added a few artists in the past by searching for 'source:*username*'. So maybe something can be built from that unique username? Either a separate visible/editable field for 'blog-imgs' (has to be explained well then, though) or have it generated automatically from the source, should the source include the basic blog-imgs pattern and just have it preserved somewhere in the back.

(Both solutions sound a little hackish, though, since they are only meant to accommodate to a single, specific image host, unless you write a more complex system that would work well across other hosts of this type, should they pop up in the future.)

A separate field for blogs would be good, though. Some artists, for whatever reason, don't have direct links to their blogs on their websites.

I've normalized blog\d+.fc2 and blog-imgs-\d+.fc2 to blog.fc2.