MyVogonPoetry

Well, we’ve been busy and have another site to launch to the world – Checks Please. it’s a great place to find and buy checks online. It aggregates checks from a bunch of other check sites and makes them easy to search in one place. Take a look!

• Checks Please

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.

• Teenormous, the t-shirt search engine

• 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]

A momentous day – Akismet has now caught over 100,000 spam comments on Candy Addict. Crazy.

[tags]geek, spam, akismet, wordpress, candy[/tags]