Tech Corner

Grooveshark releases Last.FM scrobbling

James Hartig — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 01:45:21 +0000

Grooveshark has just released their Last.FM scrobbling features to VIP-only users, along with a new settings page and Chinese language support. Check out the original post here.

TwURLa: Domain stats : Needs your help!

James Hartig — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 23:26:59 +0000

TwURLa is a new site where developers of all kinds can search and find stats for their domain and how it performs on Twitter. The site aggregates your daily “hits”, which are the amount of times that your site appears on Twitter. The site is currently in development, however they have hit a roadblock from the Twitter team:

We have been in contact with Twitter regarding their API use and about what data we are “allowed” to show on our site. At this point, we are not allowed to show ANY of the data we were planning on showing. Twitter is not allowing us to proceed because we are not big enough to be allowed to do this. Who says that we will not be huge when we launch? Twitter should not have this power! If you wish to give us a chance and allow us to continue development:

Tweet for TwURLa

I hope you choose to help us, it is only 1 tweet and it will greatly help us. For everyone that tweets, we will publish your username on our new site.

From Twurla: My new site needs your help!

-James Hartig
@fastest963

Stix Social Networking

Travis Cunningham — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 04:51:35 +0000

As you may have noticed, this website has not been updated in a while. This is because all 3 of the writers are busy on some projects — These are Stix and iSociale. Jimmy and Colum have done much work on the iSociale project, but after the Stix project gets going and done, I will be helping out with iSociale by combining the design aspects with the backend system. But here I would like to write about the Stix social networking application that will be soon released to the public. Here you will find some previews and our goals as a web startup team.

At the very beginning, I was encountered by Todd Oh (long story) from SpotEngine to develop a micro-blogging system. Through a long time of planning, Todd and I have turned a micro-blogging idea into a social networking application. We have also recruited Colum McGaley to help with the design of Stix because of the tremendous work load I have had recently. Here is the staff listing on the SpotEngine website: Stix Staff

The sweet part about this is, we got a nice and short domain name. www.stix.me. Easy to type in on mobile devices and web browsers.

So here is the main idea of Stix — A Facebook-like application that includes geotagged media. This includes blogging, photos, and video. Of course we do not have the server power that Twitter or Facebook have, but we would like to build the next generation of social networking. We have 3 servers to run Stix on, and this still will not be sufficient if we get many users to use Stix. This would mean we would have to acquire more servers later on if Stix gets popular.

Geotagged media would allow you to view where your friends collect media on a map. There will also be “real-time” viewing features as well as advanced filters for viewing (such as photos only, or only from a certain location). Users will be able to see what other users are doing and where they are. Media collected is put in the “Library” in “Books” where other users can view.

Stix Library Book

Our main focus is to keep it as simple as possible and still provide great features within the application. It is similiar to Twitter’s status update system, only with an added field to updates — which is just the location. Read more on the SpotEngine website here. The next thumbnail is a preview of our homepage.

Stix Home

Geographic tagging was very easy to build. The hardest part about this was building the query system to enable users to quickly find media on a map. The search concept is still being sketched up. The next thumbnail is the Flickr geographic search mode integrated into Stix (We will be designing another system). We call it “Stix Wave”.

Stix Wave

Mobile device support is currently in progress and will not be released until after the API is released to the public. We currently have planned several mobile devices to build a Stix application for.

We are currently a Microsoft BizSpark member and Neowiz startup incubation #4 team.

Thanks to Todd, we have also had many people interested in our startup and we were featured on KBS Korea in a new years special.

We plan on releasing very soon, hopefully in June sometime. With this release will be the release of the API for developers to create applications to work with the Stix program.

So check out Stix and keep watching for a release. It is coming soon.

www.stix.me – www.spotengine.net

- Travis Cunningham

Google SearchWiki with Sound

Travis Cunningham — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 12:17:16 +0000

Just as you like it, when signed in with your Google account, you can change the search results based on your choosing. A great feature (still experimental, not sure if it will be released as a full service) called SearchWiki with sound adds an explosion sound effect every time you remove a search result you don’t like.

- This is definitely a great way to receive input from Google users (its just like a voting system, only way cooler)

Having a bad day at work and feel like killing some of those search results? Give it a shot at Google Experimental.

- Travis Cunningham

5 Ways to Improve your Twitter Experience

Travis Cunningham — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 03:13:58 +0000

There are several features that are missing from Twitter home page, such as Mentions, Translations, Searching from the homepage, and Popular Trends. I was disappointed that Twitter did not already have some of these features built it. Thanks to a few Greasemonkey (Requires Mozilla Firefox) scripts, this is now possible.

Twitter Translate – If you are following someone on Twitter who speaks a different language than you, the Twitter translate greasemonkey script will automatically translate their tweets into your language.

Twitter Search Bar – The Greasemonkey script is called “Enhance Twitter” but I think my description fits better. This script adds a search bar to the top of Twitter (Why haven’t they added this to Twitter already?).

Popular Trends – Adds a “popular trends” to the right sidebar and includes the most popular talked about keywords.

@User Unread Count + Mentions – Adds an unread count to the @User tab as well as a mentions tab on the right side bar. The mentions feature will allow you to see who talks about you in their tweets (different from a reply).

If you are not satisfied with the web version of Twitter, there are several downloadable programs to manage Twitter from your desktop. We recommend Destroy Twitter.

Travis Cunningham

ClickFont – One Click Font Install

Travis Cunningham — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 02:46:50 +0000

The process to install fonts on Windows is somewhat lengthy, especially if you have multiple font files to install.

Thanks to ClickFont, installing fonts is a one step process. ClickFont allows you to right click on a font file and install it with an added right click extension. If you have a folder with multiple font files in it, ClickFont will automatically recognize the fonts and install them.

The ClickFont developer(s) says it is different from the SendTo function in Windows because ClickFont registers installed fonts properly with a system call.

Download ClickFont

Travis Cunningham

Trapcall Unmasks Blocked Calls

Travis Cunningham — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 01:04:39 +0000

Trapcall unmasks restricted calls to your phone automatically, all for free. If you have ever gotten a prank call or a call from a telemarketer and they call you restricted, you will not ever have to worry again.

The setup takes about a minute (a step by step process to reroute your calls through Trapcall before going to your phone). When you recieve a restricted call after you have setup Trapcall on your phone, first ignore the call. Then the servers at Trapcall will unmask the restricted call and will dial your phone with the actual callers number. On the callers end, they will hear ringing the entire time this process is going on.

Trapcall does more than just unmask your calls. When a call goes to voicemail, the Trapcall servers record the voice mail and allow you to access it through an easily search-able web interface. Although you can access this through the internet, it disables the voicemail system your phone service provides and you will not be able to call voicemail. — (People text me more than call me anyways and they don’t leave a voicemail.) There is also a feature that lets you block calls from certain people (enabled by clicking icon near the right on the image above).

Trapcall

Travis Cunningham

A Trick to Increase Website Pagerank

Travis Cunningham — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 17:21:38 +0000

I’ve learned a few tricks to increasing your pagerank with only a few easy steps…

Here’s what you will need: Patience and a web browser.

Google Pagerank works by reviewing what sites link to who. Here’s a better way to look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank. So now you are wondering “How do I get high pagerank websites to link to mine?” I thought about this when I was at school a few months ago. Using the iWebTool Backlink Checker, I was able to accomplish this. This is what I was going to do: Get blogs (that allowed comment posting, with high pageranks) to link to mine, using the comment system.

In the iWebTool Backlink Checker, I started off with Zendurl.com (Discontinued) and a few other cool domains. First check to see if the site has a high pagerank, then check to see if it is a blog or not. The easy way to tell if the links on there are blogs is by the URL format, and here are the different formats for example:

http://methelight.wordpress.com/2007/10/14/zotag-lovecms-new-website-and-stuff/ (Notice that it has a date and month in the URL. It will most likely have the blog post name also)

http://thetechcorner.net/blog/?p=2 (Notice it has ?p=53 or any number… it could also be index.php?p=63…)

Those are both formats for blogs. When you post a comment, make sure your first name, real email, and your website are filled in. When making your comment, make it a legit comment (seriously, don’t start spamming people), or they will simply not accept it and/or a spam filter might catch it.

If you are a part of a forum, make your forum signature have a link to your website. Google will also crawl the amount of pages with links to your site.

The last step to gaining pagerank is patience. Google’s pagerank updates every 1-3 months, so it won’t show up automatically. Make sure that your site has a lot of content also. Googlebot likes sites with a lot of pages to crawl.

Travis Cunningham – (originally posted at my personal blog and slightly edited)

Easy Google Pagerank Determination

Travis Cunningham — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 03:03:42 +0000

Here is a very cool trick (Found by Jimmy) to determine Google Pagerank on websites by modifying your search query URL on Google Search. The best part about this is that it returns the output in plain text, making it easier for developers to get this information without long scripts. This means you could write a Sphider Mod to get better search results or use it within a custom program to see how popular (or important) a website is on the internet.

Get the Pagerank:
To get pagerank, type in: http://www.google.com/search?client=navclient-auto&ch=656688533331624&features=Rank&q=info:google.com

To change the website in the request, simply change “info:google.com” to “info:” and the website domain of your choice (I.E. “info:thetechcorner.net”)

Be sure to change the value of “ch” (656688533331624) to a new number every time you request the page or else Google will deny the request to the server.
Note: Not all numbers will work, but keep trying random numbers until it works. There might be a reason for this number and it may have to do with the length of the url.

Reading the Output:
When you request the pagerank of twitter.com, you should get the return of: Rank_1:1:9
The last number (which is 9) would be the pagerank of the site. I don’t know what the other two numbers mean in front of that (maybe the version of the system??).

If you do not know how to write a script to find the pagerank from a PHP program, there is a great one here: DevPapers Google PageRank

Travis Cunningham

Lets DestroyTwitter!

Colum McGaley — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 01:13:38 +0000

This maybe the best air app I have ever used! I use twinkle for my ipod updates, and my phone for on the go, but how do I update my twitter status on my desktop? I Destroy Twitter. By now your guessing that Destroy Twitter is an app. Not just a twitter app, but also an Adobe Air app. So you can Destroy Twitter on Mac OS X, Linux and another platform that supports Air. Using the app is just a joy to use, with all the effects. And its clean. Clean and Easy :)

As you can see in the screenshot below, the interface is a clean cut “blocky” interface, with 2 dominant colors. Now what sets this app aside from other twitter apps, is the interface. Everything seems well throughout and very clean. As well as the effects, clean and simple but really help the user experience. But it dosent get in the way. It stays hidden on the taskbar, and displays a very nice looking message when you get a new tweet! I really recommend just trying this app. Its nice!

Developed at Distroy Today

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