“Mapping news” everywhere!
- Google releasing Google Earth and Google Maps API
- Yahoo! Maps API is released.
- …and so does A9 Maps…
Wow! RSS feeds and APIs everywhere! Suddenly, in just a month or so, us developers have so many new tools!
Sounds like folksonomy at its best. Looking for something? Your social network is here to help you -and they do not have to do a thing! Jeremy Zawodny explains how My Web 2.0 can be used.
You may also read an interesting review of My Web 2.0 at Planet Ozh.
Apple’s official endorsment of podcasting is something I was not aware of. They have integrated podcast subscriptions into iTunes and are also promoting garageband as the ideal tool for podcast creation! This is good news to all podcasters -and listeners too!
UPDATE: Also read Podcasting Made Easy: FeedBurner support for iTunes, Odeo, and Yahoo Media RSS. I get the feeling that this move by Apple and others will actually make podcasting available to evryone.
Google Launches Personalized Search. Personalized-google-suggest, please?
Impressive news from Inside Google: Google Earch, a stand-alone application resembling google maps. Read the article, lots of interesting screenshots!
Why does it have to be Windows-only? Bad Google, bad! Same problem with Google Video Viewer -but this one is open source, I hope I’ll be able to use a Linux or OS X port soon.
Notice: The following tutorial is not to be used in ways that are against the law. It only demonstrates a problem that can be caused by the way blogger.com uses profile images. A similar technique is used by many ad services.
Suppose you want more info on the traffic, or even trying to find out the real identity of a blogger who maintains a blog at blogger.com -or even their visitors. How can you do this? Here is a simple step-by-step recipe….
What you need (other ingredients can be used too, this is just an example):
1 server running PHP + MySQL
1 blogger.com account
Cooking:
- Choose the jpeg image you will use for your blogger.com profile “photo” (preferably one not bigger than 64×64). Let’s say photo.jpg
- Upload this photo at your server. Let’s say the address is http://myserver/mydir/photo.jpg
- Create the following table at your MySQL db: <pre>create table blogger_stats(dt timestamp, ip varchar(27),
page varchar(255), agent varchar(255)) ;</pre>
- Create the following php script, and upload it as http://myserver/mydir/photo.php
<pre>
require_once 'DB.php' ;
$DSN = "mysql://dbuser:dbpass@localhost/dbname";
$bit_db = DB::connect($DSN);
$res=$bit_db->query("INSERT INTO blogger_stats(ip, page, agent)
VALUES('{$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']}','{$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']}',
'{$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']}') ");
header ('Content-Length: ' . filesize('./photo.jpg') ) ;
header('Content-Type: image/jpeg') ;
readfile('./photo.jpg') ;
</pre>
- If there is not a .htaccess file in this directory, create an empty one.
- put the following lines in this .htaccess file: <pre>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^photo.jpg photo.php
</pre>
- Now use http://myserver/mydir/photo.jpg as your photo in your blogger.com profile.
You are ready!
Just put a comment in any post you want to “keep an eye”. Every time someone visits the comments page, you will have a new entry in the blogger_stats table. Actually this is a nice way to keep your blog’s stats too (this is how it started for me)!
(The technique can be improved with the use of cookies, but this is out of the scope of this article!)
Read at Ken Norton’s blog: How much did VCs make from Google?
Not bad…
It looks like the .com thing works -you just have to be careful…
Feedburner’s Feed Awareness API (read this article at Burning Questions also), allows developers to integrate feed stats to their applications. It gets even better if the feed you are using is a Feedburner “PRO” account. Then you can have views and clicks per item.
Here (look down the page, where this blog is syndicated) is a small example of using the API together with MagpieRSS from PHP. Notice the “views” and “clicks”? They are read using the Awareness API.
The code for the example can be downloaded here: fb_awareness_api_demo.phps.
UPDATE 2005-10-27: I put together a page with all my FeedBurner related code
