I finally launched https://overreader.com today. I had the idea for it in January of 2015 so it only took me 8 years to get off my @$$ and actually get it done. If you use Goodreads and either Overdrive/Libby or Kindle Unlimited, check it out. (or if you have friends that do, please share).
I launched a new site over the weekend – Customizer Corner. It’s a search engine for custom action figure and diorama parts. I needed something like this for myself and figured others could use it too. I launched it by posting it in ~6 of the action figure groups I’m a member of on Facebook. The response was overwhelmingly positive which is amazing.
My original plan was to write the “data gathering code” and put it in a WordPress site as a POC. Once I saw it worked, I was going to write a backend from scratch. But… the more I used WordPress the more I saw it can get me to about 90% of what I wanted. It has faceted searching and the ability to search in tags. So I changed my mind and figured I’d just use WordPress. Now I’m finding some shortcomings and I’m rethinking that… I’m still not 100% happy with the searching… searching for two words doesn’t work like I want and some of the ideas I have for the site just don’t fit well into WordPress, so I’m looking to see if there is a site framework I can easily use. If not, I guess I’ll write it from scratch.
I talked with Neil at Red Flare Models and he is an enthusiastic backer of the site and idea. I also talked to Brian at https://customsforthekid.blogspot.com/ and he is totally on board too. Cool stuff.
Looks like Swurl has closed shop. It was down for the past few days citing “performance issues” and now it says they have closed.
Hello Swurlers,
We built Swurl as two guys doing something we love in our spare time.
Unfortunately, due to the pressures of our day jobs and other
distractions, we can no longer support or maintain the service at the
level that we think our users deserve.Building Swurl has been a great experience for us. We want to thank
all of the folks that used Swurl as a way to document their lives
online and share with their friends and families. Thanks a bunch to
those users that gave us lots of valuable feedback and encouragement.Thanks,
Ryan & Jonathan
Such a shame. Would be nice to know what technology they use and where the problem was.
Anyone know of a site I can use as a replacement?
After many hours and months of work, and many late nights (yes, it’s 1:53 AM right now as I type this) Teenormous has launched. What you see right now is maybe 10% of the features and awesomeness that is planned for the site. We wanted to start with a solid foundation and a great search engine and build on that.
We’ll be adding more t-shirts all the time (there is almost 15,000 right now), and we’ll be doing lots of mini-releases to roll out new features. We have really big plans for the site. What you see now is just the start.
- Like T-shirts? Check out Teenormous – a t-shirt search engine
UPDATE: I found an even better way to download music from Seeqpod – use sadsteve.com – it has the ability to download built into the site. I use it all the time and never use Seeqpod any more. Give it a try.
So, there’s this site called SeeqPod that allows you to play just about any song you can think of but doesn’t allow you (easily) to download them. So, I fired up Firefox and used the LiveHTTPHeaders addon to see what was going on. Sure enough, the URL to the file is there, but it’s somewhat of a pain to get to and download the file. So, I saw another URL go by with /api/ in it. I poked around and figured out a pretty easy way to use it to download songs. Here’s how:
First, you’ll want to have the linkification plugin installed in Firefox. One of the things it does is make URLs in XML clickable. We need that functionality. Once you have it installed, do this:
Bookmark this link in Firefox (don’t click it, just bookmark it – there is nothing interesting there yet). Now edit the bookmark and change the CHANGETHIS to %s and put in something for the keyword. I used sp for seeqpod.
Now, suppose I want Weird Al’s White and Nerdy song…. I just type
sp white nerdy
in Firefox and I get an XML document with links to the song. With the linkification plugin, I can just double click on the URL and it will download the song for me.
This trick will work in IE, you just have to do some of this by hand (the initial search, copy paste the MP3 URL, etc). It’s just much easier with Firefox.
If this news gets out, I expect Seeqpod to change the way they do things pretty quick so enjoy it while you can – not sure why I’m even sharing this. if someone were really motivated, you could write a plugin that gives you a webpage full of links or download the first hit automatically or something – again though, they will probably close this loop soon now. If you liked this article, check out the original article I did that discussed most of these techniques:
How to find and download hidden music from websites.
[tags]mp3, mp3s, freemusic, seeqpod, download, downloads[/tags]