InsideGoogle reports:
Just like I first reported last month, Google has released all of its major free software as a single download, now available on the Google Software Downloads page.
The programs included are Google Toolbar, Google Desktop Search,
Picasa, Google Deskbar, and Gmail Notifier. Expect Hello to join these
whenever Google determines it “ready for prime time”.
(via Dirson)
From the first time I discovered Google WEB APIs, I thought that this thing is ideal to create an “ego-surfing” script, that is a script that looks up google for, let’s say, my name and returns the results.
I have written a small script that does exactly that (and obviously, you can put your name where it says “Panayotis Vryonis”). What you will need to use it, is
You may notice that the actual query is a bit more complex than a simple “Panayotis Vryonis”. The reason is I want to exclude results from my own pages, so I ask Google not to return results from g-metrics.com, vrypan.net and blogshares (which returned a number of results that were useles in this context.
A couple more notes taht could be useful:
You may find a working example here 
I released lilina 0.5.1 today. For most of the changes in this version I have to thank Robert Baker for his great work on the CSS and the UI in general.
lilina is quite stable now, I think you should give it a try.
Magoie 0.7 is out and this has improved character set detection and improved date handling. Read the rest here.
This is great news. I’ll make sure lilina takes advantage of these features…
“You can now put Overture ads in your RSS feed. I don’t plan on doing it yet, but I think its great. Many blogs lose half their traffic to RSS, and for bloggers that make their money that way, ads in RSS had to happen. A tiny text ad doesn’t make it harder to read your favorite blog, but does support your favorite blogger. Bloggers need money, too.”
(via InsideGoogle)
As some of you may know, I have set up a site, g-metrics.com that keeps track of the googlecount of various queries (users can add their own). This way you can see how many results google would return for a cetrain keyword for example, and how this number changes from day to day.
The other day I was wondering arround g-metrics when I noticed something very weird. The graphs returned for “on-line” * betting and “sony ericsson” are identical!
For me this is very strange since the two queries re not related. Well obviously they are in some way. Any ideas?
This is so cool, I couldn’t help linking to it (although it’s late and I ahve to go to bed…) ASCII Generator turns any text into ascii art. Very helpful for e-mail signatures, text-based e-mails, etc. Very nice work.
(by Yna Feng blog)
As a supplement to my previous post, here are some links to what could be the building blocks of the aggregators we will see in the future:
New tools for new needs!
Ok. They said “release early, release often” and that’s what I’m doing. lilina v0.5 has some news features (like favicons) and bug-fixes (thanks to Dimitris for his comments and code!).
There is still one issue with dates, actually two issues. One is timezones that are not taken into account when sorting. The other is that I do not know what to do with feeds that have no <pubdate>. Dimitris sugested using first read time as pubdate but I do not know if this is the right way to solve the problem…
Also. It looks like with blogs booming feed aggregators are hot. Read this posting (and my comments) at Doc Searls’ IT Garage.
We (at work) often offer clients the solution to batch upload data to a web site using excel files. The obvious alternative is to uplad a tab delimeted text file, but then you have to explain to the end user how to save the excel file to text (which is puting the client do our job in a way..).
The solution we had so far was to use xlhtml on the server side to transform the XLS file to XML. Then it is relatively easy to parse it using PHP. This worked quite fine for as long as we were on a Linux server (where compiling and running xlhtml is straight forward).
Lately we had to implement similar functionality (in PHP too) on an IIS (the MS equivelent of Apache) running on Windows NT. The solution Alex came up with was to use PHP-ExcelReader, an excelent library that can parse an XLS file and return a PHP array. It works like a charm!
Do you know of any alternatives?