A while back I created Trend Sweet Trend and added a search phrase tracker to it. It tracks the most popular search phrases people type into Yahoo! Search thanks to Yahoo! Buzz which updates each weekday. The search phrases are on the left and on the right is a grid showing what rank each term […]

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I’m writing my own search engine. I know it sounds crazy but it’s just the sort of project that fuels my fire. At this point, I’m keeping the scope of the search to urls that have appeared on my Trend Sweet Trend(retired in 2008) page currently numbering (>7000). I’ve written 3 perl scripts so far […]

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Trend Sweet Trend suffered a glitch over the past several days. To begin with my power went out over xmas so updates stopped occurring until I could get back and turn on my Fedora server. Then TST began to show only one link rather than the 25 or 35 it usually does. This was caused […]

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Using my patented(not really) trend technology, I’ve created another trends page(retired in 2008). This one is based on Yahoo! Buzz, their almost daily listing of the most popular search terms for the day. Whereas Trend Sweet Trend tends to show lots of developer and blog links, the search phrases page shows a lot more celebrities […]

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Over the past day we’ve seen some weirdness over at del.icio.us. Last night I saw this error: System error error: Can’t call method “prepare” on an undefined value at /www/del.icio.us/comp/user/get line 13. context: … 9: my $usedb = ‘master’; 10: my $ret; 11: 12: if (!$auth_user) { $usedb = ‘user’ } 13: if (!exists ($db->{$usedb})) […]

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I’ve taken Trend Sweet Trend(retired in 2008) further. Now, you can see screenshots of each link via css rollover. The page takes a little longer to load but I think it looks cool and is at least a little bit stickier. To do this, I created a script that submits urls to Browsershots and later […]

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I’ve just created my first RSS feed for trend sweet trend(retired in 2008). To do it, I scraped my own page and built the file. You’ve got options: add it to your feed reader, use a site like feedburner to add it to your page, or subscribe with Firefox so it’s always close at hand. […]

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Livemarks became slow yesterday for an hour or so. That meant I had to update my database by trying to connect and download links manually. I didn’t think of the possibility that my script might not connect but it’s important to plan ahead when you’re using a web service. You’ve got to think, what happens […]

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The del.icio.us crop that is. I’ve taken the data I’m gathering for trend sweet trend and made a best-of page. This page(retired in 2008) shows only the sites that have made it to #1 on livemarks for about an hour or more. I expect the list will grow by about a link a day so […]

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For a coder the pinnacle of frustration is testing…finding and fixing the bugs you want to squash. You can take one approach which is to find a bug, fix it, and pray that no other bugs appeared during the process. This unfortunately doesn’t work when you’re dealing with an application of any but the most […]

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