Category Archives: Software

Twitter search archiver

Leave a reply

With Teenormous, we started giving away free tees to people that tweet a link to us. Problem is, we couldn’t find an easy solution to archiving/looking back on tweets for the month. Twitter keeps the tweets seachable for a very short time. We found a few web apps/services that did some similar things but not exactly what we wanted. We even tried Google Reader by putting the search RSS feed into it. (That worked, but trying to scroll and count to #57 is a royal pain and that method just doesn’t scale.) So, some poking around led me to the excellent Ruby library for Twitter by John Nunemaker which uses the Twitter APIs.

It’s so easy to use it’s laughable. A few hours later and I have an app/script written that stores the results of any twitter query (like the one we care about) into a static HTML file with them in order from oldest to newest and each tweet numbered for easy random picking of winners. It also automatically creates a new file each month. I used the Twitter CSS so it looks nice and clean. Slap it in a cron job and we have auto-archiving twitter searches. Plus – it’s in HTML format in case we want to put them online for some reason.

It’s nice sometimes to do a little coding project that’s not exactly what you typically do. Oh – and Ruby rocks.

Xbox Media Center for only $25

1 Reply
xbmc

So, with our new arrangement of furniture and the incoming big-screen plasma/LCD, I decided I need another Xbox running XBMC – one will stay upstairs hardwired to the network, the other will be connected to the LCD/plasma and be hooked into the network wirelessly. My first one I used a modchip, but the art of softmodding has come a long way so I thought I’d try it. Since I already had a working Xbox, I went looking for a “broken” Xbox whose DVD drive didn’t work. I could just swap my working one in, do the softmod, and then just use it as a networked media center.

I posted on Craigslist looking for a “broken” but bootable XBox and found one for $25 which included all cables, 2 wired controllers, and one wireless controller. What a deal – though I did have to drive 18 miles both ways to pick it up. The softmod requires an original version of 007, MechAssault, or Splinter Cell so I asked a coworker (whom I know owns an Xbox) if he happened to have one of those games and he has two of them! I borrowed those and off I went.

I downloaded “Softmod Installer Deluxe” which contained the softmod installer and the hacked savegames. You’ll also need the Action Replay software for Xbox so that you can get the savegames on your Xbox. Along with that, you need a USB adapter that goes in your Xbox controller port. Luckily, my modchip came with one so I didn’t have to hack a controller and make one.

Continue reading →

How to remove Snap.com from sites you browse

1 Reply

If you have seen that annoying new service snap.com (it creates popup snapshots of the link destination) you have probably found it darn annoying. If you haven’t seen it yet, visit http://techcrunch.com and point at any link that goes offsite. If you find it really annoying, come back here and I’ll tell you how to get rid of it on all sites you visit.

It’s pretty simple to remove. If you’re using Firefox (and if not, you should be) and you are using the AdBlock plugin for Firefox, simply block
*.snap.com/*
and you won’t see the snap previews on any site you visit in the future.

[tags]geek, snap, snap.com, annoy, annoying, website, websites, spam[/tags]

WordPress blogging tip – how to survive a LOT of traffic (from BoingBoing or elsewhere)

3 Replies

I could have also called this “The first WordPress plugin you should install when starting a new WordPress blog”.

So, today, I posted a new feature article on Candy Addict called Top 10 Grossest Candies. I hoped it would get some traffic and submitted it to a bunch of popular sites. I got linked from BoingBoing and Fark.com which sent a ton of traffic and this caused my CPU usage on my shared server to go over the limits. So, my possibly-new-readers’ first impression of the site is an error page.

So, I scramble to figure out if I can get the CPU usage down, I call my host, but nothing I do drops it and I still get the error message (it comes and goes). So, my buddy Tom says I need a way to cache the pages and AHA! I search for a WordPress plugin that does caching and I found one. I didn’t know if it would work or not, but I figured it couldn’t hurt since my site was hosed anyway.

Almost as soon as I get it installed, my site is fine. Snappy, responsive, and no CPU quota error messages. Amazing. So, I owe the author of that plugin a few beers, but he is Hispanic and the site is almost all in Spanish (except the plugin page) and I can’t find any contact info. If nothing else, I just want to say thanks!

So, the moral of the story:
INSTALL WP-CACHE IN YOUR WORDPRESS BLOG NOW!
Go do it now – I’ll wait. Install it whether or not you expect to ever get a bunch of traffic. You never know when something you write will spread across the internet like wildfire and you will need/want some caching.

[tags]geek, wp, wordpress, tip, trick, tips, tricks, blog, blogs, blogtips, blogging, cache, caching, boingboing, traffic[/tags]