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…It’s Website Wednesday: Twubble?

Twubble

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.

[Twibble]

…Google’s Mobile LCM has been discovered?

Google Mobile LCM

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.

Are you ready to hack Google?

[Google Mobile LCB]

[Google – Robots.txt]

[Via: ZDNet]

…WordPress has been upgraded?

WordPress

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.

[Via: WordPress Blog]

…Twhirl might be the best Twitter client?

Twhirl

Twhirl is an Adobe Air based Twitter client that runs on both Windows and Macs, and features the following:

  • Connects to multiple Twitter accounts
  • Notifications on new tweets
  • Shorten long URLs (using snurl or is.gd)
  • Cross-post updates to Pownce and Jaiku
  • Post images to TwitPic
  • Search tweets (using TweetScan or terraminds)
  • Timeline filtering
  • Localized to English, German, Italian and Spanish
  • Color schemes
  • Automatically check for new versions

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.

Maybe it’s time to give Twhirl a whirl.

[Twhirl]

…Digg doesn’t like Bad Behavior?

Digg

Sometimes it just helps to search!

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:

  1. Open up the Bad Behavior plugin folder
  2. Open up the Bad Behavior subfolder
  3. Open a file called “whitelist.inc.php” in a text editor
  4. 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”,
    );
  5. 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”,
    );
  6. 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.