www.x-pose.org news blog

5 Reasons DiggBar Sucks

Diggbar sucks. The fact that Digg even had the balls to put this on their site with no way to disable it shows how arrogant they have become. Here is a quick rundown as to why the Diggbar sucks.

Digg Uses it to Inflate Their Stats.
Digg is quickly losing ground to sites such as Twitter and has recieved major competition from Yahoo Buzz. Their solution? Cheat. Every outgoing story link now uses their shortened URL service. This means that they never actually leave the Digg.com site. Rather they just use iframes to show the real page under their DiggBar. Guess what Digg includes in the DiggBar? Javascript stat trackers for Quantcast and Microsoft Analytics.

Digg.com for SEO is now pointless.
If you used to use Digg.com to submit your site for a quality incoming link, then that is gone. Not only does a link to your site no longer appear at digg.com, but your page isn't even looked at by Google. Look at the source code for a digg shortlink. It contains absolutely no information about the actual content. Instead it is just Digg.com content about comments and other various crap. Source site loses bigtime.

DiggBar Contains AdCode.
On every page that loads the diggbar, you will see: http://Ads1.msn.com/library/dap.js . Thanks Digg, clearly you have plans to show ads on other peoples pages.

DiggBar Controls Meta Tags
Again, look at the source code. Diggbar fills in the meta description and keywords with whatever it wants. The current default meta keywords are: "Digg, Digg.com, news, images, videos, vote, content" .

DiggBar Increases Pageload Size.
Thanks to the Diggbar's added Javascript the page size has increased for every single page.

Don't stand for Digg's bullshit. If they wanted to improve the time each user spent on their site they would actually do something useful like adding comment reply notifications. Instead they opted to create some spammy toolbar that in NO WAY helps the end user. This is how Digg uses their resources these days. Well, that and shitty Digg labs projects with a sponser to generate money. Hmmm! If you're not pissed off, then you should be. I say we opt for another HD DVD Key uprising. You in?

Bit.ly PHP Example code

As promised here is some Bit.ly PHP example code using their API to generate URLs. There is also some extra code that deals with advanced API usage towards the end of this post. It is important to note that these examples assume that you have cURL installed. I am also opting to use the JSON method of data delivery. Now let's get to the Bit.ly basics and look at a function to generate a shortened URL.

/* Example code */
$link = "http://www.x-pose.org";

print getSmallLink($link);

function getSmallLink($longurl){
// Bit.ly
$url = "http://api.bit.ly/shorten?version=2.0.1&longUrl=$longurl&login=YOURLOGIN&apiKey=YOURAPIKEY&format=json&history=1";

$s = curl_init();
curl_setopt($s,CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($s,CURLOPT_HEADER,false);
curl_setopt($s,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
$result = curl_exec($s);
curl_close( $s );

$obj = json_decode($result, true);
return $obj["results"]["$longurl"]["shortUrl"];
}

If you want to get fancy then you can add error checking. Also the variable &history=1 in the URL allows you to keep track of your generated urls via the API. Otherwise they are not saved in your history. Now lets get to some advanced Bit.ly usage. .

Let's say you are trying to grab some extra data from the following Bit.ly link: http://bit.ly/info/13SH5 . Of course the most important part of that link is the Hash at the end. Here is an example how to print the Title of the page and the meta description:

/* Example code */
$hash = '13SH5';
$url = "http://api.bit.ly/info?version=2.0.1&login=YOURNAME&apiKey=YOURAPIKEY&hash=$hash";

$s = curl_init();
curl_setopt($s,CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($s,CURLOPT_HEADER,false);
curl_setopt($s,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
$result = curl_exec($s);
curl_close( $s );

$obj = json_decode($result, true);
print $obj["results"]["$hash"]["htmlTitle"];
print $obj["results"]["$hash"]["htmlMetaDescription"];

Still with me? As you know there is much more data than just the title and description for some of the info pages. Some even include automatically generated categories of what the webpage is about. So lets save those categories into an array that were tagged for this page:

/* Example code */
foreach($obj["results"]["$hash"]["calais"] as $items){
			$cat[] = $items[0];
}

As you can see Bit.ly is very powerfull stuff. Hopefuly this example code was able to help you out. Stay tuned for my next batch of useful example code that allows you to automatically make blog posts via wordpress.

TinyURL Sucks

TinyURL sucks and its about time people find another alternative. They did invent a new way of shortening links, but they have done little to improve their service since its launch several years ago. Not to mention it has gone down multiple times over the past few years. Competitors such as bit.ly have already surpassed them in features.

In fact bit.ly is so good that they have 2million dollars in investment money. ReadWriteWeb loves it so much that they have writen about the service multiple times. You are probably thinking what I'm thinking. . . wtf does a company that shortens urls need 2 million dollars for?!?

In any case, Bit.ly is a quality service that shows stats about clickthroughs of shortened links that have never been done before. Here is one such example that is a shortened link about Digg's latest townhall. Neat right? Not to mention it is a shorter URL than TinyURL. So if its characters you are worried about when writting a twitter post, then use Bit.ly.

In my next blog post I will write about how to use bit.ly and provide some example code using its API. Stay tuned.

Now, take a look at some Bit.ly Example Code

Wikipedia RSS Feeds

Wikipedia is a huge site so one might assume that they offer their articles in easy to use RSS Feeds. Well, they don't and not only that but its overly complex. All I want is to grab the "Summary" of Wiki entries. I've spent hours on this one and here are my findings.

Let's start with the Wikipedia API. I thought that it would be simple, something like http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php&query=Microsoft&format=xml would be the extent of my troubles. Boy was I wrong. I'll give you a second to load their api and read some of the examples. Seem overwhelming? Did you really think this would be easy? How silly. When you finally do seem to return results of entries, they are in Wikipedia formating. DOH! Now we need another step.

I've searched the web for a website that allows you to query the article and parses the formating to readable html. Then I found just the site I needed to query the data, format it, and offer it in an easy to use rss feed. Turns out that site no longer exists today. Then I come across MediaWiki which makes no sense to me as how it can help me. So I chose a different route...

Let's look for ways to parse the data from Wikipedia. There are many options to do this, so many in fact that you want to rip your own eyeballs out because none of them are easy and straightforward with adequate documentation. PHP users may come across Wiki_text which is available in the Pear framework. Good luck using that with no documentation.

I was really hoping to end this post with the method in which I used to grab Wikipedia entries. Unfortunately I cannot help you. However, if one day I am so inclined to give it another shot and do find an answer then I will be sure to make a blog post about it.

Until then I ask you to chime in and post information on how to grab wikipedia content in readable format in an RSS feed.

Am I the idiot or what?

Obama is a Celebrity First, President Second

Have you noticed that Obama literally is all over the place? Remember the Super Bowl when Obama was interviewed prior to the game? ESPN does multiple reports about what he said in regards to the BCS and College Football. Heck, right now Obama is on the front page of ESPN.com about his NCAA brackets. Remember the fuss over his Blackberry?

The question is why. Why is the media so different with Obama than previous presidents? It seems to me he is famous for being Obama and just so happends to be President as well.

Please, give it a rest. He actually has work to do.