mark.bockenstedt.net » Internet

StarPlayr, a Sirius Streaming App

Mark — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:08:59 +0000

Sirius has a web client you can use to stream their music to your computer, but it’s pretty lame (or it was last time I checked). Enter NiceMac LLC, creators of StarPlayr for Windows [alpha, download], Mac [download], and soon on the iPhone.

StarPlayr’s features include setting presets, choosing a high or low bitrate, tracking what songs are playing on stations, and a one-click button to Amazon’s product page for the CD of the song that’s playing. It’s somewhat tricky to figure out at first without looking at the documentation, but once you figure out what the buttons do, it’s easy to navigate and use. It doesn’t look like it’s synced with the new channels, but a new version of the software is expected in early 2009.

There’s also a lighter version of StarPlayr called StarLight (Mac only) that’s worth checking out.

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Timeline of Internet Memes

Mark — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:53:44 +0000

I was stumbling around recently when I came across this gem someone created on Dipity, a way to put events on a horizontal scrolling timeline. The service itself is a pretty good idea and there are surely other great timelines out there. For now, enjoy this one.

Full Version

DIY Craigslist Super Feed

Mark — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:31:44 +0000

A while back I had a neat idea to build a service that would allow me to select a list of Craigslist feeds for a location (or locations) and aggregate it into a single feed. You could add any of the categories from any of the cities just by going to a website and it’d do all the work for you. However, I’ve found a much easier solution using Yahoo! Pipes.

If you’re unfamiliar with Pipes, it’s a way of aggregating data from a ton of different sources and pulling it into one channel. This is a perfect way to build a single RSS feed from multiple feeds. Here’s a diagram of what the finished product looks like:

Build Your Pipe

The basic idea is to create multiple instances of the Fetch Feed entity and join them together with a Union. You’ll want to create a Fetch Feed entity for each of the categories you want to aggregate, such as electronics, games/toys, etc. Simply click the output button from the feed entity and drag it to an input on the union entity to join the two. You can pipe multiple unions together if you need to scale the diagram.

Once you’ve joined your feeds into a union, you should add a Sort entity to sort the results by date in descending order. Drag the Sort entity to the sandbox and connect its input with the output from the union. Then, select “item.pubDate” as the sort field and “Descending” as the order (as shown in the diagram). Once you’ve done that, you can send its output to the input of the Pipe Output entity.

Run Your Pipe

When that’s all finished, save your pipe. At the top of the screen there will be a link labeled “Run Pipe…”, so click on that to get the results. After it’s been run, click More Options and select Get as RSS. Copy the URL and add that to your feed reader. Voila, you’ve now got a single feed for your city on Craigslist.

Tab Mix Plus 0.3.7 Released

Mark — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:15:40 +0000

The official Firefox 3-compatible release for Tab Mix Plus is out. There are a number of improvements over the previous version, but the important thing is that it’s finally official. I hacked together a version a couple months back, and while I’m glad I was able to help, I’m even more glad that a true update is available for download. Head here to grab the file.

Cli.gs – URL Shortening with Analytics

Mark — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:00:45 +0000

You can add another name to the pool of URL shortening services – Cligs. This service performs the same basic routines that others perform, but with analysis on the links you’ve created. It’s got a pretty decent set of analysis tools including referrer statistics, search engine bot sightings, social media mentions, and hits per day. It’s comparable to BudURL which is currently free, but not for long.

One thing Cligs does that others don’t do is allows a user to create multiple cligs per destination URL. If you went to TinyURL and entered http://microblink.com/, everyone who entered that would get the same URL back. With Cligs, you can create multiple short URLs for the same destination and seed them to different sources. For instance, if you create one for Facebook and one for Twitter, you’ll be able to see if those two paths ever cross. This helps you see the viral nature of links floating around the internet. If your Facebook link appears on Twitter, you know someone on Facebook is sharing it on Twitter.

Cligs currently lacks an API, which makes it somewhat worthless to me as I do almost all of my short URL creation through scripted tools. I’ve heard the API is coming this week, so hopefully I’ll be able to start using it for analytics when I farm out updates using mu. For the time being, there’s a bookmarklet you can use when you create your account.

For more info, follow @cligs on Twitter

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Username Availability Checker

Mark — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:00:59 +0000

Ever wonder if a username is taken on a certain site? Scared that other people might have snatched up your oh so precious net handle? Curious if you actually registered your handle on a site? Check out usernamecheck.com. It’s a simple way to determine if a username is available on a site.

All you have to do is enter the handle you want to check and it does the rest. It will report back with either “taken” or “available”. It checks around 30 sites in a matter of a minute or so. This isn’t a substitute for coming up with a username for registration, but rather allows you to determine where your preferred name is taken.

In my opinion, there’s not much utility to this site for most people. It’s cool to see it all come through, but unless you’ve got a name you’re trying to protect, it doesn’t hold much value. At the very least, it’s worth a look.

Creating a Fluid-Based Google Reader App

Mark — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:44:55 +0000

For Mac OS X: I’ve been looking for a solution to feed my addiction to Google Reader without having to go the the website every time. There’s an AIR application called ReadAIR, but I didn’t like it very much. I really like the usability of the Reader interface, so I would be hard-pressed to use anything else.

I found a solution over on FlingMedia that allowed me to use Fluid to create an SSB (Site Specific Browser) for Google Reader. The end result is that I have a dedicated “application” that does Reader and only Reader. I decided to install the theme as described in the article and am pleased with the end result.

There were a few modifications I made to the CSS for the Fluid app. For everything else, you can get directions from the article on FlingMedia. If you want to use my CSS modifications, you can get them here. Go ahead and modify them to your needs if you so desire. Since Fluid also supports user scripts, you can also use JavaScript to customize the page if you so desire. If you want to get really fancy, you can even add Growl notifications and Dock badge updates to tell you when new items arrive.

Screenshot

Using Netvibes as a Personal Start Page

Mark — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:00:35 +0000

A personal start page is a single page that can be accessed from any computer and typically serves as the homepage for a browser. There are many solutions for personal start pages, including a homebrewed page, iGoogle, and Netvibes. I’ve used both homebrewed pages and iGoogle in the past, but eventually stray from them.

I thought I’d give Netvibes a try. It offers a broad range of dashlets (individual panes you place on the page) that cover a ton of topics. The neat thing about Netvibes is you can drag and drop your dashlets in any configuration you want. You can also create multiple tabs for specific content groups. The page in general is pretty customizable.

The reason Netvibes a good personal start page manager is that creating a page is extremely easy. It’s literally drag and drop to get things where you want. You can even customize the dashlet colors, how many columns there are, etc. There is even a wizard that will create a custom page based on your likes and location. The key selling point of the service is simplicity.

If you’re using Netvibes, what do you like and dislike about it?

ColorZilla: Name That Color!

Mark — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:45:02 +0000

Ever wonder what color an element on a web page is? Ever try to recreate that color, only to be greeted by painful headaches and an impossible time at recreating that color? ColorZilla takes all the guess work out of figuring out the code behind a color.

To use the addon, all you have to do is click the eyedropper icon and hover over the color in question. The screenshot below shows the RGB and hex values for the orange text of Firefox.

These display bars are a few examples of the information shown by ColorZilla. Some if it has to do with CSS and some with the color saturation, hue, and value.

Here’s the description of the addon as provided by the author:

With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes. DOM spying features allow getting various information about DOM elements quickly and easily. And there’s more…

OAuth Explained

Mark — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:30:14 +0000

A few days I wrote a post about OpenID. There’s another authentication method similar to, but different from, OpenID called OAuth. OAuth stands for Open Authentication and was formed by a committee of users. The original spec for OAuth was released in late 2007. OpenID and OAuth were conceived for the same general purpose, but have little in common.

Imagine you own an expensive luxury car. A night on the town could put you at a fancy restaurant that offers valet service. Instead of giving the valet your owner’s key, you could hand the valet a less privileged key that would only start the car, allow it to be driven for one mile, and also lock out non-essential services (address book, navigation, etc). This is the basic concept of OAuth.

When you pass your username and password to an API, you’re giving it complete access to your account. If the wrong people get a hold of your credentials, they could use it maliciously and potentially lock you out of your account. Giving an API a password that only allows it to perform certain actions is the basis for OAuth and protects your identity from being used by others.

In the social networking world, FriendFeed allows services to interface with the API using a username and key that is separate from the password (Oauth in a nutshell). Other sites that tell you to use a secondary password or a key are operating under the same premise. Twitter also supports OAuth, but has little documentation on using it.

While OpenID mainly controls your information for websites as a whole, OAuth is primarily used for API access delegation. With OAuth, you can share information between websites without handing out your username and password. Neither one can (or should) be used mutually exclusive from the other service. Not all sites support OAuth, but it’s a growing trend that is catching steam.

Interested in a more in-depth analysis of OAuth? Check it out on Hueniverse.

mark.bockenstedt.net » Internet

StarPlayr, a Sirius Streaming App

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Timeline of Internet Memes

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DIY Craigslist Super Feed

Build Your Pipe

Run Your Pipe

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Tab Mix Plus 0.3.7 Released

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Cli.gs – URL Shortening with Analytics

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Username Availability Checker

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Creating a Fluid-Based Google Reader App

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Using Netvibes as a Personal Start Page

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ColorZilla: Name That Color!

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OAuth Explained

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