Next-gen aggregators?

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!

lilina v0.5

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.

Parsing XLS files with PHP

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?

VA Software: Press Release: Microsoft Launches FlexWiki Open Source Project on SourceForge.net

VA Software: Press Release: Microsoft Launches FlexWiki Open Source Project on SourceForge.net

This is so interesting! Does this mean that OSS is not evil?

In any case, Microsoft releaseing code under CPL, an OSI-approved license is good news.

lilina v0.4 is out!

lilina v0.4 is out. A lot of UI improvments, users can collapse/expand distinct items now, and also add a persistant mark (resembling a bookmark in the traditional way) that will persist between sessions making it easier to keep track of new posts. lilina is a sourseforge project now.

I’m really getting into this DHTML thing!

A good demo of what lilina looks like is my own linkblog.

Two New Ways to Search Froogle Via SMS

froogle result screenshotsearchenginewatch.com reports:
“When Google launched their SMS-based search tool about a month ago you were only able to search the Froogle database by using a specific product name (Treo) or general product category (PDA).

Today, the company added two new search options for SMS-based Froogle searching.

+ Search for books by using its ISBN (International Standard Book Number).

+ Search for a specific product by using its UPC (Universal Product Code).

Smarter.Com’s is another recent entry into SMS search world. It offers pricing info for more than 100,000 computer and consumer electronic products”

Next time you go to a store, make sure you have your mobile with you!

Amazon releases web tools

amazon released “Simple Queue Service” and “Browse Node API”.amazon

Browse Node API is actually a new operation in Amazon E-Commerce Service. According to Amazon, it provides information pertaining to a Browse Node. Browse Nodes are product categories that Amazon creates to segment products based on pre-defined and/or dynamic criteria.

I think that much more interesting is Simple Queue Service, which is (as far as I know) the first “generic” service offered by a big web site. The Simple Queue Service offers a reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for buffering messages between distributed application components! Which means you can use it for any web application, even if it is not related to Amazon!

Search Engines: Preview

Everyone is using one or more search engines on a daily basis, yet few are aware that each one of them has a separate site where it presents “the things to come”. I did a quick research and here they are:

Do you know of other such sites? (about alexa, looksmart, others?)

lilina feed aggregator

My feed aggregator (rss+atom) written in PHP is called “lilina”. For now, this is lilina’s homepage.

Lilina is easy-to-install, easy-to-use does not require a database and features “auto-discovery”. It’s still betta, but quite functional, have a look at my linkblog powered by lilina.

There is still a lot to be done, I’me looking forward to suggestions.

What’s next in search?

It looks like the “what’s next in search” is quite a hot topic these days. Google released Google Desktop Search, Alexa the AWIS (Alexa Web Information API, to allow access through SOAP and REST), and looks like Yahoo! is close to making their move too…

So Jerry’s Take On What’s Next in Search, a Yahoo! insider’s view, is quite interesting reading!

You may also read my suggestion.