Delicious (the social bookmarking site formerly known as del.icio.us that calls itself “the tastiest bookmarks on the web” and was also the father of the strange domain name), launched its long awaited redesign yesterday to help move the site beyond its late ‘90s style.
Though the underlying functionality is still the same, the new look and feel is designed to make it faster, easier to learn, and hopefully more desirable.
Speed: We’ve moved to a new infrastructure that makes every page faster. This new platform will enable us to keep up with traffic growth while ensuring Delicious is responsive and reliable. You may not have noticed, but the old backend was getting creaky under the load of five million users.
Search: We’ve completely overhauled our search engine to make it faster and more powerful. Searches used to take ages to return results; now they’re very quick. The new search engine is also smarter, and more social: you can search within one of your tags, another public user’s bookmarks, or your social network. Now it’s easier to take advantage of the expertise and interests of your friends, not to mention the Delicious community at large.
Design: Finally, we’ve updated the user interface to improve usability and add a few often-requested features (such as selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks). Our goal has been to keep the new design similar in spirit to the old one, so all of you veterans should be able to jump in without any confusion. At the same time, we’re hoping that newcomers to Delicious will find it easier to learn.
I’m a big Delicious user (http://delicious.com/cory411), but since I use the Firefox plugin, I rarely if ever visit the site.
However, with looks like this, I just might have to give it a second chance.
Twubble “can help expand your Twitter bubble – it searches your friend graph and picks out people who you may like to follow”.
To use Twubble, simply click the “Find some friends!” button, and Twubble will search through your list of ‘friend of a friends’ to see who your Twitter friends are following that your not. Thus, the more friends that are following this new found friend, the high Twubble ranks them.
As long as you’ve already got a sizable group of friends, Twubble does a pretty good job of finding new folks for you to follow, so give it a shot and see what you come up with, because you never know what’s inside the Twubble.
Robots.txt is a file that webmasters use to tell Google’s spiders what they can and cannot crawl through to index for search results, but for the curious, it’s also a way to figure out what Google doesn’t want the world to know about yet.
That’s because Google maintains its own robots.txt file that prevents their new products from showing up in search results until they’re ready. However, they don’t prevent you or I from taking a look at their robots.txt file and seeing what’s in there, which is exactly how Google Mobile LCB was discovered.
Google Mobile LCB appears to be a searchless search, where you put in your location, and Google automatically gives you various categories for things that are around you.
Though it’s obviously not finished, the idea is an interesting one, and I think we’ll see more and more programs become location aware as more and more cell phones come standard with GPS.
Last night I took the plunge and upgraded to WordPress 2.5, and so far, everything has been working as expected.
The install took about 5 minutes (not accounting for the back-up time) and went without a hitch. All of my plug-ins seem to be chugging along fine, and I haven’t noticed any drastic changes to the front of the scenes look of the site.
Behind the scenes is where most of WP 2.5’s changes occurred though, so I guess that’s to be expected. The whole interface was revamped, and changes include:
Multi-file uploading
One-click plugin upgrades
Built-in galleries
Customizable dashboard
Salted passwords and cookie encryption
Media library
A WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code
Concurrent post editing protection
Full-screen writing
Search that covers posts and pages
Let me know if you see anything go wonky in the next few days, but if you’re looking to make the switch/upgrade to WordPress 2.5, I give it two thumbs up.
While I’m currently a fan of Twitterrific, I’ve started to use Twhirl on the Windows based work computer, and definitely like the feature set. It’s easy to use, unobtrusive, and gives you plenty of customization. Plus, Adobe is pushing hard to get developers to work with Air, so there’s a lot of support there for future developments as well.
Recently, I was alerted to a problem with DYH and Digg. Whenever a post was submitted to Digg, the user was greeted with the following message instead of the usual Digg verbage:
This link does not appear to be a working link. Please check the URL and try again.
A quick Google of [Digg + ”This link does not appear to be a working link. Please check the URL and try again.”] turned up this page, which indicated the fact that this issue was due to an incompatibility between Digg and the Bad Behavior plugin.
Since I’m a huge fan of the Bad Behavior plugin and what it’s done to eliminate the spam that this site was seeing, I was reluctant to just remove it.
Thankfully, there’s a workaround, though it gets into php code, so it’s a bit messy for Wordpress beginners. However, if you use the Bad Behavior plugin on your own site, and want Digg to Digg, then do the following:
Open up the Bad Behavior plugin folder
Open up the Bad Behavior subfolder
Open a file called “whitelist.inc.php” in a text editor
Find the following text:
// Includes four examples of whitelisting by IP address and netblock.
$bb2_whitelist_ip_ranges = array(
“10.0.0.0/8″,
“172.16.0.0/12″,
“192.168.0.0/16″,
// “127.0.0.1″,
);
Add Digg’s crawler address (64.191.203.34) as follows:
// Includes four examples of whitelisting by IP address and netblock.
$bb2_whitelist_ip_ranges = array(
“10.0.0.0/8″,
“172.16.0.0/12″,
“192.168.0.0/16″,
“64.191.203.34″,
// “127.0.0.1″,
);
Save, and re-upload the “whitelist.inc.php” file
Moral of the story: Almost any problem can be solved with a little bit of Google.
If you’ve searched for a good torrent site but have so far come up empty handed, then check out TorrentFreak’s list of the Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2007.
The list of “public” BitTorrent sites is based on Alexa traffic rank, and should get you a good start into the world of torrents if you’re not there already.
Etsy is “your place to buy & sell all things handmade”, but one of the coolest Etsy features is the ability to search for products by color. Simply move around the box, selecting colors as they pop up, and products that contain your selected color will be shown on little cards. You can then move the cards around in a fluid environment, mixing and matching as you see fit. If only all shopping was this cool.
