October 30, 2003

Your Mom is so versatile you can now have her in RSS

Yes, indeed it’s true yourmom.com now has her very own set of RSS feeds!

I’m sure you’ll sleep better with this wonderful news. In fact, there’s more! Your mom even comes in Atom 0.1 format — thanks to FeedCreator class v1.3

New Joke Updates: RSS 0.91, 1.0, 2.0 and Atom 0.1
Most Emailed Jokes: RSS 0.91, 1.0, 2.0 and Atom 0.1
Most Highly Rated Jokes: RSS 0.91, 1.0, 2.0 and Atom 0.1

Enjoy :-)

October 29, 2003

JavaScript: Search word hit-highlighting

I found searchhi, which is a slick JavaScript library by Stuart Langridge that will highlight keywords in your documents when the referring link to you page comes in from a seach engine such as Google:

“searchhi JavaScript library is a way of automatically highlighting words on a page when that page was reached by a search engine. In essence, if you search, for example, Google for some words, and then follow a link from the search results to a searchhi enabled page, the words you searched for will be highlighted on that page.”

October 29, 2003

Google eyes book search

In light of Amazon’s recent book search service, this report on CNet about Google in talks with publishers to provide a similar service seems a little strange.

“Google is in talks with several publishers to build a service that would allow Web surfers to search the full text of books online” (via CNet)

IMHO, the service does make sense for Amazon as a way to drive more consumers to book purchases and I suppose it could also turn another revenue source for Google — certainly as a research tool for business and academia, but is the market big enough to support the effort?

October 28, 2003

Movable Type Blog Migration

Over the last week, usually in the mid-to-late evenings — after Catherine falls asleep, I have been slowly migrating my B2-based blog to Movable Type.

I must say that for the most part the process has been fairly straight forward. The MT system installed smoothly and customizing the core MT templates, while time-consuming getting them to fit my old B2 template, were rather easy and extremely flexible.

However, during the migration process I had some interesting obstacles. In particular, I wanted to seamlessly maintain the entire URL-space of my old B2 blog with my new MT blog. My initial thinking was that with a little data-scrubbing and massaging I could export the MySQL table data from B2 and import the data into the MT table-space.

October 23, 2003

Amazon’s Full Text Search

Amazon has now extended its search to include the full text of over 120,000 books. It will even do hit-highlighting on the actual pages that match. Slick!

October 21, 2003

Office 2003 and the Google Web Service API

This article about integrating Google into the research pane of Office is from a few months ago, but I think relevant given that today is the official launch of Office 2003

October 17, 2003

Hybrid Application Manager

AppRocket seems to be a hybrid application manager with “intelligent search” that appears to be based on LaunchBar for Mac OS X. (link via Les Orchard)

“AppRocket uses a very special search algorithm to zip through thousands of items and only show you that which is most relevant.”

Just a note however, AppRocket requires .Net 1.1.

October 16, 2003

Is Comment Spam Cost Effective?

I’m getting my fair share of comment spam like many other bloggers, but I can’t imagine that the cost/time ratio is actually worth it.

I think Sam Ruby sums it up best:

“65 minutes to create. Carefully crafted to appear to be on topic. 10 seconds to wipe out.”

LOL! Dumb asses!

October 15, 2003

What is WinFS?

J. Wilcox over at Microsoft Monitor tries to determine if the new file system, dubbed WinFS, in Microsoft’s NG:OS Longhorn, will indeed be considered “new“:

“If Mr. LaMonica’s WinFS description is accurate, then WinFS really is Microsoft database technology running on top of the existing NTFS file system.”

October 15, 2003

Salesforce.com on Social Networking

Ross Mayfield posted an excerpt from an interview with the CSO of Salesforce.com in regard to Social Networking. The interview was conducted by IBDN, but I wasn’t able to find a direct link. However, here’s a quote from the M2M blog:

IBDN: We know that consumers will pay to find a date, but will they pay to find business contacts?

FULBRIGHT: Yes, one name for them is “leads,” and sales and marketing organizations pay thousands of dollars for leads today. Leads are the life-blood of every business. Another type of paid business contact is called “candidates,” and again companies have been paying recruiters or internal referrals thousands of dollars for great candidates for at least 50 years.