Browser Add-ons, Mahalo, Mahalo Follow, Mozilla Firefox

Mahalo Follow

picture-1.pngTonight at GnomeDex, Jason introduced Mahalo Follow, Mahalo’s first Firefox extension release, and a project in which I’ve invested a fair amount of effort.

Follow includes two components: (1) a Mahalo toolbar (with the requisite links and search box) that also sports a dropdown of the Mahalo directory and buttons that let you say whether you would, would not, or might recommend the page you’re reading to a friend.

The second component (2) is the “Follow” aspect. Pop open the Follow sidebar (Ctrl+Shift+F), and Follow will provide you with Mahalo pages that are relevant to your interests, based on the pages you’re viewing. Don’t worry – it’s not logging the URLs you visit or anything, simply parsing for keywords and finding SeRPs that match. It’s most interesting when you’re searching on Google or Yahoo (or the others): if Mahalo has a SeRP (Search Engine Results Page) that matches what you searched for (say, “ipod” or “Minneapolis Bridge Collapse”), it will pop the sidebar open and show you that SeRP so you can judge whether the Mahalo page (with human-selected links) or the search engine page (computer-generated) is more helpful.

You can download the extension here. There’s also a nifty contest going on where you can win prizes by referring people to download Mahalo Follow.

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Digg, Digg Statistical Data, Social Media

Top 1000 Diggers as of 2007/08/08

This CSV files contains the username, number of frontpage stories, number of submitted stories, number of stories dugg, and number of profile views for the top 1,000 users on Digg.

Top 1000 Diggers as of 2007/08/08

If you’d like to be notified whenever I release a new dataset, you can subscribe to the Digg Statisical Data RSS feed, which will include only the dataset posts, or my main RSS feed, which is updated with all of my blog posts.

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Browser Add-ons, GreatSummary, Mozilla Firefox

Two new Firefox extensions

I’ve been working on a few Firefox extensions for various third-parties, and two of them got upgrades this week:

  • GreatSummary: A handy webpage summarization tool. Long Wikipedia articles are no match for this bad boy.
  • An add-on for CouponCraze.com. I’d have to say that Christian at CouponCraze is the most efficient client I’ve ever worked with: the time from the initial inquiry about working together to uploading the first version of the extension to Mozilla Add-ons was less than 48 hours. Verily I say to you, it rocked.
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PHP, Programming, Project X, Python

What’s old is new again

A few weeks ago, I started a little side project, and I decided to write it in Python with the Django framework based on all of the good things I’ve heard about it. I may never go back to PHP.

It’s like this: imagine you’ve been driving the same 1987 Dodge Dynasty for the last 8 years. It gets you around, and you know exactly how to handle it. Most importantly, you’ve learned just what to do when it breaks down to get it going again. Then, one day, someone offers to trade you their brand-new Mustang for your Dynasty, straight-up. (They’re a collector of late ’80’s sedans, you see.) You are unsure, since you’ll have to learn how to handle this new car, but you accept, and your entire perspective on driving changes – the tired chore of going to the post office becomes your favorite pass-time; you’ve volunteering to take friends to the airport even when they have no flights to catch; and you can finally drive on the interstate since you know you won’t break down.

This is what it’s like to switch to Python after a lifetime of writing PHP. Programming is part problem-solving and part code-writing. With PHP, the fun of solving the problems overcomes the chore of writing the code; with Python, writing the code is enjoyable enough that I find myself wanting more problems to solve just so I can code the solutions. It’s a great feeling.

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Life, Minnesota

Bridge Collapse

This is just a note to anyone that knows me that neither I nor Christina was anywhere near the 35W bridge collapse today in Minneapolis. Watching it on the news is jarring though, as I routinely drove over that bridge when I lived in the Cities and was going to the U.

As I see the aftermath on TV, I have the same feeling of “these kind of things don’t happen here” as I did on September 11, 2001. My prayers go out to all who are or will be affected.

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Digg, Digg Statistical Data, Social Media

Top 1000 Diggers as of 2007/08/01

This CSV files contains the username, number of frontpage stories, number of submitted stories, number of stories dugg, and number of profile views for the top 1,000 users on Digg.

Top 1000 Diggers as of 2007/08/01

If you’d like to be notified whenever I release a new dataset, you can subscribe to the Digg Statisical Data RSS feed, which will include only the dataset posts, or my main RSS feed, which is updated with all of my blog posts.

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Life, Politics

Con is the opposite of pro

From this AP story about Congress holding Harriet Miers in contempt:

The House Judiciary Committee approved a contempt of Congress citation Wednesday against [one-time White House counsel] Harriet Miers. The Justice Department said it would block the citation from prosecution because information Congress is demanding is protected by executive privilege. Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House effort was important nonetheless.

Say what you will about the pointlessness of these kind of actions (as well as non-binding resolutions), but at least when Congress is wasting their time with this, they’re too distracted to be raising taxes.

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Digg, Digg Statistical Data, Social Media

Top 1,000 Diggers: 2007/07/18

This CSV files contains the username, number of frontpage stories, number of submitted stories, number of stories dugg, and number of profile views for the top 1,000 users on Digg.

Top 1000 Diggers as of 2007/07/18

If you’d like to be notified whenever I release a new dataset, you can subscribe to the Digg Statisical Data RSS feed, which will include only the dataset posts, or my main RSS feed, which is updated with all of my blog posts.

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AutoAuth, Browser Add-ons, Feed Sidebar, RSS Ticker

Translation Tuesday

There are a number of extension updates available today simply due to new translations:

AutoAuth 1.1.1

  • French (fr-FR)
  • Dutch (nl-NL)
  • Spanish (es-ES)
  • Japanese (ja-JP)
  • Portuguese (pt-PT)

Feed Sidebar 1.1.1

  • German (de-DE)
  • French (fr-FR)
  • Dutch (nl-NL)
  • Italian (it-IT)
  • Japanese (ja-JP)
  • Russian (ru-RU)

RSS Ticker 1.9.1

  • French (fr-FR)

The updates can be downloaded from each add-on’s respective homepage or via your browser’s auto-update feature for extensions. Thank you to the translators at BabelZilla for all their hard work.

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