TailRank API for blogosphere snapshots

Blog zeitgeist tool TailRank is opening up its parsed feed update stream to third-party developers through a new feed delta API. Developers can request the latest 100 posts discovered and parsed by TailRank’s spiders. The API is a good way to capture a snapshot of the most active and highly linked blogs written in English at any one time. Past research and development projects have seeded their data sets from Weblogs.com and perhaps TailRank can be a new source of information for newcomers to analyze the blogosphere in different ways. API keys will be available at no cost for non-profits…

Week of the APIs

The latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available. This week’s theme is APIs and the new opportunities for service providers, developers, and end users. Kevin Burton of TailRank joined us to add an independent developer perspective to this week’s discussion. This week’s session is 26 minutes and 28 seconds in length and a 12.2 MB download. Topics Amazon introduced its Alexa web search platform on Monday. The new services give developers the ability to use content from Alexa’s crawler data and other web services in a hosted environment. Amazon is letting developers upload their own data, process…

Ruby on Rails 1.0

Congratulations to David Heinemeier Hansson and the rest of the Ruby on Rails team for releasing version 1.0 of the development framework. It’s an important milestone and the framework has made a big impact over the last 15 months and changed the way some people think of programming online applications. Tags: rubyonrails, rails, ruby…

Podcast with 37signals

Earlier today I had the opportunity to interview Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals for my podcast with Om Malik. We talked about scalability’s role in business planning, built-to-flip startup companies, and programming using the Ruby on Rails framework. Our interview with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson is 29 minutes and 50 seconds in length and a 13.7 MB download. Om posted earlier this week about companies that don’t take scale into account when building a web service. David Heinemeier Hansson responded to Om with his own experiences building Basecamp and other hosted applications. We took the…

Quotes from Oddpost source code

The basic Oddpost JavaScript is broken up between a few JavaScript files including new code from Yahoo! with comments dated throughout the past couple months. Part of the new Yahoo! Mail is a straight drop-in from Oddpost, including some developer fun in the “SubjectOMatique” complete with references to He-Man, The Simpsons, and Zoolander. BY THE POWER OF GRAYSKULL! Get out of my dreams, get into my car. Up ahead! It’s a DONUT HUT!! When Lawyers Attack Joey Jo Jo Junior Shabadu Hold me closer, Tony Danza The Dreaded Executive Spousal Review It’s funny to see old jokes live on even…

Simple Sharing Extensions for NetNewsWire

I created a Simple Sharing Extensions exporter for NetNewsWire followed links as a proof of concept. The OPML SSE exporter is written in AppleScript. It iterates through each subscription feed and its items, outputting every feed and the descriptive data about the items you have opened in a browser. If you are a Mac user with NetNewsWire installed you can download the AppleScript or view some of the outputted OPML. Example output <outline type=”feed” text=”Greg Reinacker” htmlUrl=”http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog” description=”Greg Reinacker: Greg Reinacker’s Weblog” xmlUrl=”http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/rss.aspx”> <outline type=”item” text=”NewsGator acquires NetNewsWire” htmlUrl=”http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/archive.aspx?post=783″ created=”Tue, 4 Oct 2005 01:27:16 GMT” /> <sx:sync id=”http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/archive.aspx?post=783″ version=”1″> <sx:history…

Movable Type developers event tonight

Six Apart is hosting the San Francisco Perl Users Group tonight at 8 p.m. for a behind-the-scenes look at Movable Type. Byrne Reese will discuss the underpinning of Movable Type’s architecture and design decisions. The meeting is free and open to all attendees. Topics Template tags Text fliters Callbacks Alternate templates MT::Plugin MT::Object MT:App Tags: movabletype, perl…

TailRank experiments with community funding

Kevin Burton has been working on a new ranking system for webpages to help sort through the data overload faced by readers. TailRank is currently in an experimental stage and using the Wikipedia database to make sense of a known set of about 800,000 articles. Kevin is currently looking to expand TailRank to the world of weblogs and eventually to the people behind those weblogs. He would ideally like to link authors to their multiple blogs, podcasts, events, and jobs for a more complete view of online activity and content of interest. Kevin needs some servers. He is a huge…

Bugzilla queries as RSS

The latest stable version of Bugzilla, 2.20, outputs queries in RSS 1.0 format. The new feature cuts down on the notifications flooding your inbox and will probably lead to more developers following more product changes. Tags: bugzilla, RDF, RSS…

Paul Graham on blogging and open source

I just finished reading Paul Graham’s latest essay he prepared for OSCON: What Business Can Learn from Open Source. Paul is an excellent writer and hit on a few key points I want to emphasize here. I think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is that people work a lot harder on stuff they like. Well, that’s news to no one. So how can I claim business has to learn it? When I say business doesn’t know this, I mean the structure of business doesn’t reflect it. Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by…