While all the developers in the blogosphere are working themselves into a tizzy over the new Yahoo Mail Service, Frank Gruber forwarded me an even cooler service for developers. Yesterday, Tailrank launched a new service called Spinn3r. Spinn3r provides developers with direct access to the Tailrank spider. I’ve been trying to come up with methods for my social media monitoring application and I think this service may be the best option. While I’m not sure about what the cost is for licensing access, I’m sure it is reasonably priced. While I was going to use Google’s Blogsearch, I quickly realized that any automated crawling of Google’s feeds are prohibited. This is going to open up a new segment in the web crawler marketplace. Now smaller companies can have access to large scaled crawlers. When will Google go open source with their crawler? Doubt I’ll ever live to see the day.

Let me preface this post with the fact that this is a technically oriented post. If you don’t program Wordpress then this post will be of no use to you. After browsing the web trying to find an effective recent posts plugin for a client’s website, I decided to make my own. I couldn’t find a plugin that made it easy to completely customize how recent posts are displayed. The version that I made includes a template system. As of now I have added support for the post title, date, permalink, and comment content. After uploading the plugin into your plugins directory, simply call the function neo_recent_posts().

The function has six arguments:

• Number of Posts - This is the number of posts that you would like to have displayed.
• Offset - Offset is how many posts you would like to skip over.
• Post Length - Post length will limit the length of the post comment to the number of words specified.
• Before - Any html that you would like before each post.
• After - Any html that you would like after each post.
• Post Style - This argument provides the main benefit of this plugin. Currently accepted tags are:
  • {POST} - This is the content of the post.
  • {TITLE} - This is the title of the post.
  • {DATE} or {DATE, dateformat} - These two tags will display the date. If you would like to customize the date format, simply append the date format to the tag using standard MySQL DATE_FORMAT specifiers.
  • {PERMALINK} - This is the post permalink.

I will be adding additional functionality in later versions to include categories, and post author. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me. You can view an example of the recent posts in action over at Bluey Blog. Take a look at the “Recent Posts” on the sidebar.

Download the Recent Posts Plugin

This article is for those people managing their site’s analytics with Urchin. Yesterday I spent hours trying to figure out why I couldn’t view sessions and page views after I had installed Urchin’s UTM analytics on a client’s site. The only thing that was displaying was hits. The reason ended up being that the utm.gif file was not located in the website’s document root. If you are having troubles with Urchin UTM then check out the Urchin troubleshooting page.

Yesterday Yahoo launched a new service called Pipes. The service is an extension of the pipes Unix feature. As yahoo describes it:

Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

Ultimately, Pipes enables users to take various data feeds and then perform various operations on the data (sort, merge, loop, cut, count, etc). The output of your filtering can come in the forms of RSS, text, SMS, and JSON. This is kind of a hybrid of the features that I said would be useful in Google reader in a prior post.

The power of Yahoo Pipes is pretty incredible. Ultimately, users can create their own custom search engine and perform a variety of operations on the result set, all from the comfort of a nice user interface. As of now, the average internet user probably won’t take advantage of this service. I could see a future add-on to the service in which Yahoo aggregates the various query strings of each feed and presents the various variables to the users in the form of simple drop-down menus.

If you want to read more about the new Pipes service I recommend checking out the following articles by Brady Forrest, Tim O’Reilly, and Jeremy Zawodny.

There has been a fair amount of hype/discussion recently over the fairly new JSON format. JSON is a lightweight data-interchange format based on a subset of the JavaScript programming language. Since many people that read my blog do not program for a living, I will try to spare the details (let alone the fact that most programmers will know what JSON is and don’t need a repeat explanation). If you want to read a great analysis of JSON you might want to check out a great entry from Dave Winer’s blog. To be honest, I’m not quite sure that I’m even qualified to talk about comparing XML and JavaScript, so I’ll just point you in the direction of a few articles that summarize everything pretty darn well.

• Why JSON isn’t just for JavaScript
• I can’t believe it’s not XML!
• JSON vs. XML as a data interchange format
• Examining JSON