I just noticed: http://www.georgewbush.com/ gives me an “Access Denied” message. That’s strange… Is it that my IP is outside the US? Let’s try from an IP located in the US… ssh.. lynx http://www.georgewbush.com/
It works!
It seems that after China Blocking Google (and other IPs), the ” The Official Re-election Site for President George W. Bush “ blocks non-US IPs!
This could be the best thing G.W. Bush did for the world!
I have been thinking for some time if a distributed search engine would be feasible. Usually, when people talk about distributed search engines they have in mind something like a cluster of machines where procesing power and other resources are distributed. My proposal, of a Distributed Query System (Draft, v2.0) is more about delegation than distribution.
My approach could possibly solve three of the main problems (that IMOHO) modern search engines have a hard time dealing with: latency, ignorance and web centrism.
Keep in mind this is just a draft, food for thought. I just thought it would be better to make it public than keep thinking about it until it is outdated. Any comments are more than welcome!
This is groundbreaking! An audio CD included in this month’s issue of the WIRED Magazine includes tracks from artists like Beastie Boys and David Byrne. What’s so interesting? All tracks are relased under a Creative Commons license that allows “noncommercial sharing and commercial sampling, but advertising uses are restricted”…
I guess that some of the people to benefit from such moves are podcasters! Cool.
spreadfirefox.com is organizing what could be the biggest promotion created and paid for by opensource community!
Make sure you join! (I already did 
“Let’s mark the launch of Firefox 1.0 with a community marketing campaign that will take the buzz around Firefox to the next level: the first-ever, full-page advertisement in a major daily newspaper created and paid for by the open source community.”
So, we had to export this MySQL table, nearly 1,000,000 rows. 1m rows is not much, I know, but the machine is a PII with 512MB RAM.
mysqldump --opt dbname mytable >exportfile
took for ever, and I think the machine would crash in the end, anyway…
The solution? Incremental mysqldump:
last=0 ; for i in `seq 1000 1000 999000` ; do mysqldump -c -t -w "id< $i and id>$last" dbname mytable >>exportfile.sql ; last=$i ; done
</>
DONE.
Eliot’s piece on “trackback ethics” brings up an interesting aspect of trackback-ing… On the other hand, why is this different than posting a commnet including a link to your site? It’s not, it just more elegant (technicaly speaking). If you ask me, I’d say TRACKBACK EVERYWHERE!, not just blogs…
Amazon anounced Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS) together with Alexa Web Information Service (AWIS).
AWIS interests me a lot since it is quite close to the Google WEB APIs used by g-metrics.com. So, I had a look at it.
AWIS vs. Google Web APIs
First of all, AWIS seems to provide much more features than the Google Web APIs. It has 5 modes (URL Information, Browse Category, Web Search, Crawl Meta Data and Web Map) [dtls.] that allows for more flexibility (ex. links in-out, usage/traffic stats, etc.).
One more nice thing is that you have the freedom to choose between SOAP and REST to acces the services, while Google only allows for SOAP (which I prefer, but this is another thing).
Finally, by getting “a developer’s key” you are entitled for 10,000 queries/day (Google gives 1,000).
On the other hand: AWIS SOAP does not work out-of-the-box since there seems to be a problem with the wsdl file. In addition, there does not seem to be a way to make complex queries (while Google Web APIs allows a query to have “AND’, ‘OR’, “inurl:”, “allintext:”, “allinlinks:”, “site:”, etc.)
Conclusion
If for one thing, it get is becoming clear that we are going towards a Web of Services. More and more websites are turning into “web services providers”, transforming the net to a real Application Platform… I am not to say if AWIS is better than Google Web APIs, especially considering that they are both in Beta.
What’s more, Alexa.com declares to be “powered by Google”!?? (have a look at www.alexa.com). If we are talking about the same underlying database, then developers just have two alternative ways to access it -and THAT is really interesting!!!.
I will definitely add AWIS support to g-metrics.com, so stay tuned.
spreadfirefox.com mentions g-metrics in their article Climbing in the charts! Hooray!
BTW, I have to say that spreadfirefox.com is probably one of the the best on-line campaigns I’ve seen -a great product helps too..
From Jeff Barr’s Blog:
“We rolled out the new release of the Amazon Web Services today. This release includes the E-Commerce Service and a beta of the Alexa Web Information Service.CNet already has the story.”
I should have a look at this…
I love trackback. Using trackback, the link between web pages becomes a both-ways communication, a “discussion” between web pages. Trackback has been introduced by weblogs, but I do not understand why it has to be limited to them. I would like to see more trackback-aware web pages, not only blogs.
So, I decided to make the report pages of g-metrics.com trackback-aware. These URLs have the form of http://g-metrics.com/index.php?act=details&ID=xxx where xxx is the internal id of the report. They display the history of a query to google, the number of results returned by google on a daily basis. People tend to link to these pages as an extra source of data to prove a point. I am interested to be able to link back to these pages, so trackback sounds like the right tool.
Writing the code to support trackback turned out to be quite simple, following th instructions I found at http://www.hitormiss.org/projects/trackback/.
Then I added a link to it from all reports pages. I also added some code in the reports page that looks for trackbacks stored in the database and displays them.
As simple as that. I am really qurious to see how this will turn out to be. There are some issues that may need to be taken care of such as spam profing the whole system so that it won’t be used by a robot to add the same trackback to every page.
I am also curious if g-metrics.com should send a pingback to the top-10 URLs presented in these reports. I am afraid it could be considered spam so I need to give it some more thought first.
(Example: this page tracked back http://g-metrics.com/index.php?act=details&ID=56)