anthonyjhicks.com » Internet

anthonyjhicks.com API

Anthony Hicks — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 07:20:15 +0000

The following public anthonyjhicks.com API calls are now supported via HTTP GET (no authentication required):

http://api.anthonyjhicks.com/geolocation/json
Last (town level) public location via Google Latitude in JSON
http://api.anthonyjhicks.com/geolocation/kml
Last (town level) public location via Google Latitude in KML
http://api.anthonyjhicks.com/twitter/lasttweet/json
Last Tweet in JSON

Charity Hack 09

Anthony Hicks — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:21:51 +0000

Excellent code event coming up in a couple of weeks:

Charity Hack Weekend brings together charities and developers to revolutionise the collection of donations. Join us 19-20 September 2009 and be part of this extraordinary event. We’re looking for developers to come up with new and innovative ways of helping charities promote their causes and garner support. The weekend will be hosted by PayPal at their Richmond, London, UK offices. It is a ticketed only event, available on a first come first serve basis.

Synchronising Outlook Exchange iPhone Tasks via BlackBerry

Anthony Hicks — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 09:11:23 +0000

A well known annoyance on the iPhone is the lack of Outlook Exchange Task synchronisation. A few iPhone apps and services have popped up offering server side Task synchronisation with your Exchange mailbox, however they require you to share your Outlook Web Access password with a third-party and/or run a desktop synchronisation application.

I’ve figured out a good work around. As my tasks already synchronise with Exchange over-the-air to the BlackBerry, I use the MilkSync application on the BlackBerry from Remember The Milk to synchronise Tasks between the BlackBerry and a Remember The Milk pro account. I then run the excellent Remember the Milk – iPhone application to access Tasks on the iPhone.

It takes as little as 5 minutes for Tasks to synchronise across all devices and servers, depending on the automated schedule set in the MilkSync application. And it works in any direction. Love that my BlackBerry is a wireless conduit to update my iPhone.

Joanne

Anthony Hicks — Tue, 26 May 2009 07:33:06 +0000

Favourited this video on YouTube.
Bye Joanne, you will be missed. Good luck!

Delicious

Anthony Hicks — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:22:07 +0000

Not sure when Delicious was redesigned, but I love it. New layout, combined with the awesome Firefox add-in, Facebook and Lifestream integration, and simple privacy control. Finally a solution that I can see myself using long term for managing, sharing and synchronising bookmarks – it’s only taken 15 years.

New Feed – Google Reader Shared Items

Anthony Hicks — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:04:47 +0000

I’m using Google Reader fairly regularly now, although 1000+ unread items per day from only 50 feeds still isn’t working out for me. Anyway, I do love the Share feature, with a single click the item goes into my blog Lifestream and into this RSS feed. So if you trust me to filter the web for you, subscribe.

FeedBurner – MyBrand

Anthony Hicks — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 13:39:27 +0000

I recently switched to FeedBurner to republish all my RSS feeds as they have really nice subscriber and click-thru statistics – which I assume will be integrated into Google Analytics now that they’ve been acquired by Google. One of the previously paid-for services offered by FeedBurner was MyBrand, where you can use your own domain for feed locations rather than feedburner.com. Now that it’s free, I’ve setup feeds.anthonyjhicks.com and added a CNAME record pointing at FeedBurner’s CNAME proxy. Works nicely all my feeds come off my feeds sub-domain, as do all links in feed items for click-thru tracking.

Yahoo! Pipes

Anthony Hicks — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 20:40:32 +0000

Loving Yahoo! Pipes. I’m using it to modify and republish a few RSS feeds which are then picked up by the AutoBlogged plug-in for WordPress. The first modifies my Favourites feed from YouTube parsing out the movie ID with a regex so I can automatically embed the movie, rather than link to it. Another cleans up a formatting problem in my Facebook Posted Items feed which caused AutoBlogged to choke. Pipes is very nice and has loads of potential. Along with Flickr, I hope Yahoo! pulls through its troubles so their few good assets are preserved.

Dangers of cloud computing

Anthony Hicks — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:59:58 +0000

Forgetting you’ve left an instance running in the cloud until you get the bill at the end of the month.

Adobe ConnectNow

Anthony Hicks — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:28:54 +0000

Really happy with Adobe ConnectNow at Acrobat.com. Free Flash based screen sharing and voice conferencing. I’ve also setup a short URL redirecting to my ConnectNow Meeting Room, that I can read out over the phone to get a screen sharing session running in seconds if needed. I hope this stays free after the Beta.

ajh.me and ajhpic.me URL shortening

Anthony Hicks — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 09:43:55 +0000

While services like tinyurl.com are good for shortening URLs, and TwitPic.com is great for posting pictures on Twitter – ultimately I hate using free services that could quite easily go away when their owners lose interest – taking all my links and pictures with them! So I’ve mashed together and significantly modified the PostMaster, TweetMe and Shorturl plugins for WordPress, along with creating my own personal URL shortening service: ajh.me (for blog posts) and ajhpic.me (for photos). Works nicely, no dependance on external services and all traffic comes to anthonyjhicks.com. Posting, shortening and tweeting is all automatic on receipt of an appropriately tagged email (e.g. iPhone) or web post.

Vimeo Plus now available to non-US customers

Anthony Hicks — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 08:19:39 +0000

Vimeo Plus – 5GB of uploads a week, 5000 embedded HD plays and ability to reconvert all my existing videos with the better codec. Excellent service! I use Vimeo as the primary host for most of my Videos. Great now that I have a HD camcorder too.

Vimeo

Anthony Hicks — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:27:04 +0000

I’ve uploaded most my old videos to Vimeo. I really like Vimeo over YouTube – clean UI, nice HD support, and no time or size limits (within your upload allowance). Wish they’d hurry up and launch Pro accounts for non-US users.

Upcoming Events Widget

Anthony Hicks — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 08:53:46 +0000

I’ve added an Sidebar widget to all pages on anthonyjhicks.com showing selected upcoming Events, complete with countdown. It’s similar to the Real-Time Activity tracker I used to have linked to Outlook on the old site.

Busy Bee

Anthony Hicks — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 09:20:58 +0000

I’ve switched anthonyjhicks.com over to the Busy Bee WordPress theme by WooThemes. Fairly happy with this theme over Fresh News which I had been using for the last several weeks. Some kinks to sort out with spacing in IE6/7, and still a bit messy in the Photos section for all browsers. Some unusual random browser crashes occurring too when viewing pages.

I’m a WordPress Convert

Anthony Hicks — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 08:13:54 +0000

I’m very pleased with WordPress – getting comfortable with tinkering with code, databases and creating plugins. I’m working on a plugin at the moment that integrates the InstaMapper API into a widget and also a full screen tracks viewer – I’ll release a beta soon. Loving the new Reverse Geocoding feature in the Google Maps API where you pass co-ordinates and return an address/locality name – which feeds nicely into my tracks viewer menus.

Absolutely love the Lifestream plugin which is now sucking in my public activity from Digg, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Last.fm, Twitter and Vimeo – creating a neat daily digest of what I’ve been up to, great for people not on Facebook where all this normally appears in the News Feed.

Also picked up a commercial plugin, AutoBlogged to pull in richer feeds of certain content, e.g. My Facebook Posted Items, and automatically blog it. The Akismet comment spam web service is genius, it’s already blocked hundreds of spam comments and trackbacks without me having to lift a finger. Lots of outbound RSS feed options too, for example tagging a post “fbpost” sends a blog post to Facebook.

WordPress for iPhone is a little buggy, but still does a fine job. All in all really happy with the level of integration between WordPress and the various sites, tools and gadgets I use each day.

Last GPS Location

Anthony Hicks — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 22:37:31 +0000

I’ve created a sidebar widget (see on the right below the Lifestream) showing the last GPS location as reported by my iPhone when running the InstaMapper application. The widget picks up the last co-ordinates via InstaMapper API and overlays a marker on Google Maps. If you click the info bubble on the marker, there’s a link to a full screen map as well. InstaMapper is neat!

New Website Progress

Anthony Hicks — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The switch to WordPress is going well. The multitude of a quality plug-ins and the ease with which you can hack at all the PHP to get it just right make WordPress an awesome choice – not yet regretting giving up on my old code. I’ve been writing XML export routines to transfer over 4,000 blog posts and comments going back 10 years, having some problems pulling in rich media posts the way I want them. Also haven’t quite figured out how I’m going to show my videos page yet, or how to handle redirects from old perma-links. Loving the Flickr Photo Album plug-in which makes excellent use of the Flickr API to suck all my albums, tags and pictures in from Flickr into my site. To have over 5,000 pictures completely externally managed yet so intricately threaded into my site is a credit to the Flickr API team – Flickr continues to be one of my favourite things on the web. Also very happy with the Media Temple Grid-Server hosting – it feels snappy and the control panels are the best I’ve seen ever from a hosting company.

Moving to WordPress and Media Temple

Anthony Hicks — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

After ten years of rolling my own blog software, I’ve decided to switch to WordPress, and host at Media Temple on their Grid-Service – I just don’t have the time to tinker with this stuff any more! Looks like a majority of stuff will export across nicely, although redirecting perma-links is going to be a tricky one. I’ll be using the Fresh News theme from WooThemes.

Facebook Developer Garage at Bavarian Beerhouse, London, UK

Anthony Hicks — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Good night.

http://www.bavarian-beerhouse.co.uk/

1Radio – Online Streaming Australian Radio

Anthony Hicks — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Checkout 1Radio.com.au created by one of my former colleagues. It gives you a nice clean fast interface to listen to streams from all the major city radio stations in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide. Very nicely done.

http://www.1radio.com.au/

MixDepot.net > Spread the Sound

Anthony Hicks — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Fantastic collection of mix sets uploaded by DJs in a variety of eletronica genres. Well worth a look. I recommend [Steve Marx] as a good starting point for downloading.

http://www.mixdepot.net/

24MB Broadband.. drool

Anthony Hicks — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

UK Online to offer 24MB ADSL2+ for under GBP30 per month! Where do I sign?

http://www.ukonline.net/press/release.php?id=23

BT Broadband Upgrades to 2Mbps

Anthony Hicks — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

At no extra charge. Good, because I was about to dump BT as their competitors were already offering 2Mbps for what I was paying for the 1Mbps service. The 8Mbps/500GB plan from UK Online is still looking very attractive though for GBP39.95 per month.

http://www.bt.com/broadband/news/

EU opens investigation into iTunes UK overcharging

Anthony Hicks — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

UK expensive? It’s all part of the fun of living here, I’ll be interested to see how this one pans out though, silly conspiracy theories aside. I don’t buy my DVD’s in the UK anymore, I import them from the Jersey Island’s tax free due to a loophole in UK import laws. Pretty much any gadget purchase now I look into offshore options first including buying in Australia and getting it shipped over. 17.5% VAT plus the most extraordinary markups in the world, particularly on the high street often show the UK as being *20-30% more expensive compared to foreign markets.. I guess if you do enough travelling it all works in the long run as taking that strong sterling overseas with you is great, you feel like a king!

* this stat has no real basis, just from a few observations on recent gadget purchases

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000890033406/#comments

BT Broadband connection now 1Mbps

Anthony Hicks — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Increased my BT net connection speed here in London to 1Mbps, it’s noticeably better, but still less than what I was running in Sydney before I left (1.5Mbps). I’m still toying with the idea of going to the 4Mbps plan from BulldogDSL or 8Mbps plan from UK Online. BT are currently running a 2Mbps trial as well.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/broadband/0,39020342,39174214,00.htm

Aussie Blogs .. revived

Anthony Hicks — Sun, 09 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

The update tracker is back, I’ve found someone to take over the entire technical side. It’ll run on my servers for the next few months until it can be moved. Thanks to everyone who sent thank you emails, sorry for the false alarm.

http://aussieblogs.org/

Aussie Blogs Closed

Anthony Hicks — Mon, 03 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

The Aussie Blogs update tracker and web ring are now closed permanently. Keeping the site running through solving technical issues, programming new updates to the detection routines and answering enquiry emails has been a time consuming process, and in 2005 I really feel my time could be better spent on other pursuits. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed running the site over the past 5 years, but since moving overseas my feeling of satisfaction from running the tracker has been steadily diminishing.

Thanks to the hundreds of sites that have linked to the tracker and web ring over the years, and the thousands of Australian blogs who’ve benefited from the more than half-million combined referrals. Thanks also to the volunteer editors in particular Victor and Wade. And to Benn for his design contributions.

The web ring is available to anyone who would like to take ownership, however you must have a track record of at least 3 years blogging to prove you’re going to keep it and running in the long term. You must also be over 21 years of age. This site (the update tracker) is not available.

The update tracker database is available in OPML format by request should you wish to build your own Australian Weblogs update tracker. The code behind the web site and detection bots is NOT available. The 15 Australian blogging specific domain names that point to this site are for sale.

http://aussieblogs.org

Aussie Blogs RSS Feeds

Anthony Hicks — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

I whipped up two quick beta RSS feeds from the Aussie Blogs Update Tracker this morning before work. I’ve been meaning to do it for ages, but well you know. There’s an updates and an aggregator feed. The updates feed contains a list of the last 6 hours of updated Australian weblogs, and the aggregator feed contains the last 100 posts appearing on Australian weblogs. The aggregator feed is particularly interesting as you can basically read all of Australia’s weblog posts in one aggregated feed. The aggregator probably needs a bit of work with full versus excerpt posts and support for Atom feeds, but it’s a start. Feedback? Anyone?

http://aussieblogs.org/

Aussie Blogs – approaching 5,000 monitored blogs!

Anthony Hicks — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Since pointing the automated Aussie Blogs FinderBots at several geographically specific blog directories including Blogger.com, Blogwise, Rice Bowl Journals and Brave Journal, the database is now at almost 4,600 sites. We should also easily hit 5,000 blogs and half-a-million click-thrus in next few months, currently at 361,073 clicks. Again, while my enthusiasm for Aussie Blogs has dropped significantly after all these years of the running the site, it has been fun improving the detection bots and programming new finder bots. The dozen or so bots that drive Aussie Blogs are getting quite clever now, particularly when it comes to geographic classification. Aussie Blogs has to be one the best and most accurate single-counrty listings of blogs available. Given unlimited spare time I’d like to open source the bots and convert the site from Lotus Domino to PHP/MySQL. But, alas, no one has stepped up to help out with coding after 5 years of asking, and I have no time. If you’re a proficient PHP developer and want to compile your own country specific weblog monitor, let me know, maybe we can work together on redeveloping the site.

This weekend will be the last lot of work on Aussie Blogs for quite a while. Plans:

Set up secondary bot servers and add failover wrappers to all bots. The bots will check-in with the web server every few minutes to see who should be running, if the primary bots haven’t checked in for a while, the secondary bot servers will take over. This should help ensure there are always results showing on the front page.
Upgrade Informa RSS library to support Atom 0.3 feed parsing on the Recent Posts page.
Various tweaks including: updating the CheckerBot excluded URL list and tweaking work file and database cleanup scripts.
Update site help page.

UPDATE: I deleted all the BraveJournal sites as this terrible service often returned error pages rather than the person’s journal when checking the site for updates. As a result the number of Aussie Blogs in the database has dropped by about 250 entries. I’m a little further off the 5,000 blog mark now than before, oh well.

http://aussieblogs.org/

More Domains!

Anthony Hicks — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Given the dropping USD, I thought it was good time to protect a few more Australian specific blogging domains from ad spammers. The following now point to the appropriate pages on Aussie Blogs: sydneyblogs.com, sydneyblogs.net, perthblogs.com, perthblogs.net, canberrablogs.com, australianblogs.net, australianblogs.org and brisbaneblogs.net. I now hold 22 domain names, 15 of which point to Aussie Blogs.

http://aussieblogs.org/

Aussie Blogs Codefest 2004

Anthony Hicks — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Spent the weekend coding on Aussie Blogs, except when I was getting my
ears raped on Saturday night at the Prodigy concert. I fixed lots of niggling bugs and also added
some cool features. Summary of the more interesting stuff:

Blogger.com Australia plus major cities directories are now searched by a new bot daily for new
aussie blogs and automatically added to the database.
The entire Blogwise Australia directory is now checked for aussie blogs weekly by finder bot,
not just the first page as before.
The blo.gs listener bot is out of testing and now running permanently watching for updated
aussie blogs that ping blo.gs. The bot is running on my London server.
Improved the alternate URL matching logic to improve the chances of matching a pinging blog
with the aussieblogs database.
Added source stats for the last 48 hours to the sidebar so we can monitor where updates are
coming from.
Re-enabled the CheckerBot for non-pinging blogs. I’m in the process of switching to threading
to handle where bad blogs can sometime block further execution.
Added a awaiting review statistic to the right sidebar to show how many blog edits or additions
to the aussieblogs database are waiting for human editors to check (currently 222 awaiting
review!).
The connection handling, polling frequency and efficiency of the weblogs.com and blogger.com
bots has been improved.
Migrated the aussieblogs site (and my personal site) to the new server at the MCI data centre
in Sydney (there was some downtime while data was migrated and dns entries changed).
Fixed a thread pooling bug on the new server stopping some features from working on the
site.

http://aussieblogs.org/

Aussie Blogs – belated renewed enthusiasm kicks in

Anthony Hicks — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Looks like things aren’t as grim as I had thought for aussieblogs. Weblogs.com seems to be alive again, and better still I discovered their shortChanges.xml file which shows the last 5 minutes of updates and is much nicer to poll for than there often-flakey-minimum-3-polls-per-hour-2000-entry changes.xml beast. Using shortChanges.xml also reduces the impact of losing a whole chunk of updates due to badly formed XML which has been a problem of late with weblogs.com So good old weblogs.com may have some life left in it yet.

It seems my worries about blo.gs stopping their changes.xml interface were a bit unfounded. I just implemented their alternative, and it is fantastic! Rather than downloading and parsing their changes.xml file every 30 mins, I set up a listener connected to ping.blo.gs:9999 and they stream new updates live down to me in zipped XML! I used their simple PHP 5.0 based stream_socket_listener example script and set it to kick off a special version of my Java checking bot (BloDotGsBot) each time a new update is detected by blo.gs. BloDotGsBot accepts the URL and RSS-URL as arguments and runs a fast comparison against the aussieblogs database, if it finds a match it runs off and does all the normal bot tasks that the other update tracker bots (visit site, parse meta-data, download last post, post update). It’s great to just sit there and watch the stream listener kick off all these little BloDotGsBots as bloggers all over the world ping blo.gs hoping that one of those blogs will match the aussieblogs database. This approach means blogs will appear within 10 minutes of making a post. Of course, if too many people blog at the same time around the world and ping blo.gs, my bot server might run out of memory .. DoS by blogging! More work required in this area obviously.

On to Technorati’s Attention API, I had to change my Attention experiment a little as no matter how hard I try I can’t get the Technorati API to recognise my username and MD5 hashed password! It just says bad username or password. I’ve emailed, but alas, no response .. I assume the API is just broken for me. My new bot (AttentionBot) posts a sites.opml file to Technorati which rewrites the outline elements with extra attributes including lastUpdate and sends it back to me. From there I parse this list and look for updated blogs within the last hour and process them accordingly (visit site, parse meta-data, download last post, post update). It seems to work well, although with my test data I found that Technorati was disappointingly lagging. For example it showed my weblog hadn’t been updated for 18 days! I don’t know how good this will be long term as a source for hourly updates, but it’s the best around with the most financial backing so hopefully it’ll turn out to be a good place for harvesting updates.

Anyway, as you can see, lots going on to improve update detection through a variety of methods despite my general lack of interest in keeping the tracker running. And still no Java programmers willing to kick in and help

http://anthonyjhicks.com/aussieblogs/

eBay Pulse

Anthony Hicks — Tue, 30 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Lists the most popular and expensive items appearing in the eBay marketplace. Interesting.

http://pulse.ebay.com/

1000 LOT INTEL P4 1U RAID RACKMOUNT SERVER 3.06 MENDAX

Anthony Hicks — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, I could really use 1,000 servers.

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=1484&item=5732386399

Bulldog Broadband

Anthony Hicks — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 00:00:00 +0000

4 Mbps unlimited ADSL, yummy. I think it’s time to dump BT Broadband, particularly as they’re introducing usage limits soon. Bulldog here I come.

UPDATE: Didn’t end up going for Bulldog and now get hit up by rude aggressive commission based salesmen on the street trying desperately to flog Bulldog services, which really has turned me completely off them. Bulldog, your rude poorly informed and trained sales monkey’s have lost me.

http://www.bulldogbroadband.com/general/landing.asp

This will be in the exam

Anthony Hicks — Sun, 11 Jul 2004 00:00:00 +0000

According to the referrers, presumably Aussie Blogs featured in the week 10 workshop notes for MDCM1000 New Media Technologies A at UNSW. Amusing.

http://www.student.unsw.edu.au/handbook/courses/MDCM1000.shtml

CAcert Inc: The Free Community Digital Certificate Authority

Anthony Hicks — Mon, 05 Jul 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Free email and server certificates. Australian too!

http://www.cacert.org/

BT Broadband 15GB Monthly Limit :(

Anthony Hicks — Mon, 05 Jul 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Ah well, it was a fantastic deal while it lasted. At 2 quid a gig it still completely beats Tel$tra BigPond’s ludicrous excess charge of AUD$150 per gig back home:

BT.com: “BT Broadband 512kbps has a usage allowance of 15Gb of data transferred per month. This is suitable for the vast majority of users. BT will not apply this usage allowance until early 2005. After this date, if your monthly usage allowance limit is exceeded, you will have choice of a restricted service for the remainder of the month, or the option to buy additional usage capacity. BT will confirm prices for additional usage nearer the time. Indicative prices are GBP2 per additional GB, although BT plans to develop options which could make this even less.”

http://www.bt.com/broadband/bb_info.jsp?targetSection=broadband&obsNoSee=Y&vStore=1322&obsPage=%2fbroadband%2fbb_info.jsp%3ftargetSection%3dbroadband_from_bt&obsType=LINK&obsOID=83032

ebay.com.au removing reserve function for auctions

Anthony Hicks — Mon, 05 Jul 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Interesting, good move I reckon:

eBay: “eBay.com.au will be removing the ability to use Reserves for all categories except Cars, Motorcycles, Boats and Other Vehicles.. Research has shown that sellers who don’t use a Reserve price on their listings experience a 34% higher sell-through rate than those sellers using Reserve, so here’s your chance to be more successful!”

Google Web Alerts

Anthony Hicks — Sun, 04 Jul 2004 00:00:00 +0000

http://www.google.com/webalerts

Google Personalized Search

Anthony Hicks — Sun, 04 Jul 2004 00:00:00 +0000

http://labs.google.com/personalized

Google Groups 2 Beta

Anthony Hicks — Sun, 04 Jul 2004 00:00:00 +0000

http://groups-beta.google.com/

Weblogs.com stops hosting blogs

Anthony Hicks — Wed, 16 Jun 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Isn’t it funny, I kept seeing people mentioning how upset they were about losing their weblogs.com sites thinking I was unaffected, and then I realised for years I’ve been using a redirect from australian.weblogs.com as one of the entry points for Aussie Blogs. Ah well. As with any free service, expect it to be pulled without notice, that’s why I pay for almost everything net related that matters to me (email, spam blocking, dns hosting, applications, subscriptions etc), not to mention automated quadriple backups of everything important both online and offline. I can understand why Winer is doing this, and people have little grounds to complain. The amount of stress keeping stuff like this going, especially when it comes to cutting code turns from a labour of love to a pain in the ass as the years pass. Aussie Blogs stresses me out enough and that’s tiny in comparison (NOTE: Aussie Blogs is still accessible through several other URLs).

http://australian.weblogs.com

Complete Ghostbuster Suit

Anthony Hicks — Wed, 12 May 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Impressive! [via gizmodo]

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3815314978

Google Blog

Anthony Hicks — Tue, 11 May 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Launched Monday. [via kottke]

http://www.google.com/googleblog/

Purchase Internet History

Anthony Hicks — Wed, 05 May 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Wilko’s auctioning a framed Netscape T-Shirt Signed by Marc Andreesen. Not to be missed!

http://www.wilko.com/weblog/archives/000095.html

New kids on the blog

Anthony Hicks — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Hah, yep and yep, so true:

“Those already bored with the phenomenon – particularly the techies who started blogging years ago as a way of sharing boring stuff about computer code – claim that the golden days of blogging are over, that what passes for blogging nowadays is the most banal wash-up of aimless lives, millions of pages slowing the internet and clogging Google. What they really don’t like is that publishing on the internet is not just for geeks any more.” The Observer

[via LinkMachineGo]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/weblogs/story/0,14024,1185116,00.html

Aussie Blogs Finder Bot

Anthony Hicks — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve finished the final major automation task for Aussie Blogs, a brand new bot called FinderBot. This bot monitors several other geographically specific weblog listings, collects the links and compares them against the Aussie Blogs database. If a new link is found it goes into a queue for review and approval by the Aussie Blogs Editors. FinderBot is quite adaptive, not only can it parse raw links appearing in a page such as Adelaide Blogs, Melbourne Blogs and Blizg, it can also handle sites that list URLs behind redirects, either by parsing it as a parameter on the URL like on eatonweb.com or completely masked under a coded redirect used at Blogwise and Peppy’s. FinderBot follows the redirect and gets the new location from the header, but doesn’t actually have to visit the redirected page. This results in a fairly inexpensive acquisition of the real URL hidden behind the redirect. FinderBot also attempts geographic classification through where the URL was found with my other bots subsequently checking for geo meta-tags and completing geographic classification where possible. After unleashing FinderBot a few days ago it has collected some 300 unique not previously listed Aussie Blogs. If only Technorati had geographic classification, then I’d really be able to keep up with new Aussie Blogs.

http://anthonyjhicks.com/aussieblogs/

Adelaide Blogs Forced to Shut Down

Anthony Hicks — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Wow. This is staggering. Just staggering. I hope this is just a great April Fools joke.

Update: James you bastard, nice one! I sweated over this for 2 hours waiting for a similar fate to befall my site. And it was still 31st March for me

http://jamesr.net/blog/index.php?id=38