urlB.org: subsrcibe to search results

urlB.org’s search is a great tool for site owners that want to keep an eye on shortcuts going to their site.

Now, you can subscribe to search results (RSS feed)!

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urlb.org news

I keep adding new features to urlB.org:
- a basic API: read the developer’s page
- the new search page lets you search for shortcuts going to a specific domain and you can see usage stats for each one.
- if you are a regular user of urlB.org, you will like the bookmarklet.

urlB.org 301 redirects

I have decided to make the HTTP redirects by urlb.org permanent. From now on, redirects are done with a “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” header.

What this means is that search engines (like google) will give credit (pagerank) to the target URL and not to urlb.org -fair enough, no?

urlB.org

Check out my new project: urlB.org (pronounced “URL Borg”).

It’s like tinyurl.com, rurl.com and many more services that create short URLs that are much more manageable in SMS or emails. I just want to “do it right”, I feel other services leave much to be desired.

Here are a couple of things that stand out in urlB.org:
- If you are a site owner, you can tell when a page of your site is “urlBorg-ed” by looking at your logs.
- If possible, a cached version of the page that was urlBorg-ed is kept. This is useful if the page is moved or changed and you can’t find what you linked to in the first place.

If you are a developer, have a look at the developers page.

what’s wrong with broadcast networks? what’s their problem with bittorrent?

Could someone please explain why broadcast networks don’t set up their own bittorrent trackers sharing their movies and series with ads?

Why do I have to download a ripped version of my favorite series (that isn’t broadcasted here in Greece) instead of downloading it from the official site together and watch the ads in it just like I would if it was broadcasted?

And if they are not into this business, why hasn’t someone set up a legal bittorrent tracker much like they would set up a TV station? They would by the rights to the series or movies and sell ad space in them…

Yahoo! wake up!!!

What the hell is Yahoo! doing? They have a couple of the first and best social networking sites, like del.icio.us and flickr. They have an IM. They have Yahoo!Mail with people’s contacts. They have a lot of eyeballs on them.

Why can’t the just come up with a simple site to integrate all of my and my friends activity, in one page? Not some fancy, complicated, Yahoo360 thing. A simple page, where I can see all my friends activity -just copy facebook News Feed.

And a “friends” page where all my friends, will be listed -as flickr friend, del.icio.us follower, addressbook contact, messenger contact etc.

Then, join on the Open Social thing.

Com’on Yahoo!, pull yourself together!

Google CSE for WordPress plugin v0.2

I just released v0.2 of Google CSE for WordPress.

The new version includes a widget making it very easy to integrate the search box in you sidebar.

Other changes include:
- cse_search_box_tags() that if used in single.php will pre-fill the search box with the post’s tags.
- automatically inserted in page headers. Of no use so far, but who knows? :-)

flickr CC licensing

Shouldn’t Flickr let us users decide on the jurisdiction of the CC license we use for our photos?

Google Reader stoped reporting subsriber numbers?

Suddenly, today I noticed that my feedburner stats don’t include Google Feedfetcher subscribers!!!

Is it a Feedburner (now Google) problem or a Google Reader problem? Is it a hickup, or a new policy?

UPDATE: others report the same problem too.

UPDATE #2 It was Google feedfetcher’s fault :-)

using wordpress as an OPML manager (for my N95 podcast subscriptions)

My Nokia N95 mobile phone has this cool feature that allows you to subscribe to podcasts. Given that it has wifi support, I use it to download and listen to podcasts without using a computer (in contrast to the iTunes-iPod model).

The podcast client is not great, but it will allow you to use any OPML URL as a podcast directory, making it much easier to subscribe to new podcasts without having to enter long URLs using the phone keyboard.

So, I needed an “OPML manager”, a web application that will allow me to ad and remove podcast feeds and then export this list as OPML. Once I subscribed to this OPML from my mobile, adding new podcasts would just be a mater of adding new feeds to the (hopefully) much easier to use “OPML manager” via its web interface.

It turns out that wordpress blogrolls can be used as a simple OPML manager [*] which is cool because I can use a single app to advertise the podcasts I listen too on my web and use the same list on my phone!

In order to use this feature, you have to add the feed URL of each podcast, when you add them to your blogroll. I have made a single category called “Podcasts”, with ID 45 (sorry, the examples are from my greek blog). The list can be seen here: scroll down and you will see that I have two link categories called “Blogroll” and “Podcasts”.

Now the OPML for category #45 (in this example) can be found at http://vrypan.net/weblog/wp-links-opml.php?link_cat=45!

(If you are using a Nokia N95, go to Applications->Podcasting->Directories->Options->New and add a new Directory using the above URL)

Dynamicly generated OPML URLs (also called “Reading Lists”) can also be used by other apps. It’s such a shame Bloglines and Google Reader don’t support them (yet?).

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[*] IMPORTANT! The current version of wordpress (2.3.1) has a bug. In order to get a single category in the OPML file you will have to edit wp-links-opml.php and replace the line

$cats = array (get_category($link_cat));
with
$cats = get_categories("type=link&hierarchical=0&include=$link_cat");