TheRealURL Firefox/Thunderbird Add On
TheRealURL Firefox add on (which also works in Thunderbird, Flock, and Seamonkey) lets users get URL information on links – once the extension is installed, right clicking a link will show a new option in the context menu, “Get TheRealURL”:
Clicking it retrieves the URL’s information from TheRealURL’s JSON service and displays the unshortened URL, the page title and the content type on the status bar:
You can change the information displayed via the add on preferences settings:
I find it useful for checking URLs in possibly-spam messages, which recently started using URL shorteners to mask their addresses, and generally checking short links in blogs/twitter/etc. I was happy to discover Softpedia now lists it, with a %100 clean guarantee.
TheRealURL extension’s code was contributed by Rod Whiteley, creator of Mail Tweak, following a message I posted at MozillaZine forums. It was pretty amazing to post an idea on the evening and have a working first version by morning. Rod did an incredible job, with a lot of attention to detail, which I’m very grateful for. Thanks Rod!
Crowds Machine, Day 1
I’ve been working on Crowds Machine for a while, starting this an idea long ago and running it for my personal use for about three years now, but only recently I took some time to make it publicly usable – the first users I don’t personally know showed up only in the last 24 hours, following its mention in Waxy.org Links.
Here’s what this first public day looks like in traffic:
Keeping in mind it’s Christmas, and the site was down for a while till I fixed up the server, I’m pretty happy with that. But the real surprise is here:
There were less than 10 crowds in the system, so this means 1 in every 4 new visitors created a crowd. That’s pretty incredible. Maybe the holiday timing helped here. Maybe allowing users to log in with their Google accounts. Having to process 12,274 feeds a day might prove a bit of a challenge though…
I always assumed there’s a high entry barrier for CM users since they have to load in quite a few feeds to make it useful. Visitors so far seem to have no issues with that, most just importing their feeds list via OPML. Obviously these are not the typical Web users, but that’s ok. Crowds Machine isn’t meant to be mainstream – that’s the whole point of it.
Welcome Waxy/CrowdsMachine Users
Didn’t expect you so soon, great to have you here :)
Had some server issues earlier, but adding some memory to Crowds’ slice seems to have fixed it now. If you get any problems, or have any feedback, please feel free to post a comment here or email me at niryariv@gmail.com. Hope you enjoy Crowds Machine!
HelloWorldChat In Stanford Peace Dot Directory
HelloWorld Chat is a project I’ve been working on with my friend and designer extraordinaire Aviva. Basically it’s a “chat online with a stranger” site like Omegle & co, but we try to match between users from different countries (based on their IP address). Once we reach a certain level of traffic, we could start adding more sophisticated matching rules and connect between users of specific nations, based on current world events and so on.
We haven’t done much in way of publicizing the site, so it was great to be accepted into Stanford’s Peace Dot directory. Peace Dot only adds one organization per day to the directory, and we’re excited to finally get in :) They even do a little welcome video for each site, here’s Standord’s BJ Fogg welcoming us:
Thanks, Peace Dot!
Technically, HelloWorld is a simple Google App Engine based chat, written in Python. The focus was less on the chat code and more on making the application easy to customize and adapt for various sites. The look can be completely changed by editing two HTML files, and being App Engine based makes deployment extremely simple and cheap.
Sites built on top of HelloWorld might be used to foster dialog between sides in a conflict, aid in reconciliation phases, or help people going through their own struggle with a disease or addiction talk with others in the same situation. The anonymity allows users to speak frankly where it may often be difficult or dangerous to do so, and hopefully some may later move on to talk via Skype or Email – our goal is to be the easily accessed and risk free gateway to a dialog.
While forums and multi-user chats have important roles, a one to one conversation has a unique value of its own. Talking one to one makes slogans and cliches a lot harder to hide behind. It is a lesson I learned myself in the summer of 2006, when I happened into an IM conversation with a Lebanese person while both our parents’ towns were under fire by the other side. That experience was the inspiration for HelloWorld, I hope this tool would allow many more such conversations to take place.
Fall in New York
Generally beautiful, New York City is even beautiful-er when autumn foliage comes around. So it was cool to discover this Flickr set of scanned leaves from Morningside Park – literally 3 blocks from where we live.
(Via what about the plastic animals, via Outside.in)
Google App Engine Quotas on > 430k Requests/Day
[UPDATE: Posted this yesterday for >140k requests/day, updating now with >430k requests..]
TheRealURL had a particularly busy Thanksgiving Day Black Friday for some reason. Just for curiosity’s sake, here’s the quota usage for a GAE application under a relatively high load. The quotas that aren’t pictured are all on %0. Billing is now turned on (for the Incoming Bandwidth) but limited to up to $1/day – and was never used yet.
Bear in mind this is a pretty minimal app, of course, but still – not too shabby.
UnShorten WordPress Plugin Uses TheRealURL
I recently found that Jon Rogers, a developer from the UK, released the UnShorten WordPress plugin, which uses TheRealURL to unshorten links displayed by the Twitter Tools plugin.
That’s pretty cool, TheRealURL was designed as a web service with exactly this type of use in mind.
Between this and other users TheRealURL now serves over 40,000 requests a day. It’s nice to see Google App Engine handling that with barely using any of the various daily quotas (except for incoming bandwidth… Need to check on that one):
TheRealURL Adds Page Titles
I needed this for a project I’m working on, so I added a new feature to TheRealURL unshortening service: JSON/P requests now return the page title (scraped from the HTML <title> tag) as well as its original URL.
For example, http://therealurl.appspot.com/?format=json&url=bit.ly/a returns:
{ "url" : "http://www.apple.com/", "title" : "Apple" }
The plain text format remains as is – nothing but the unshortened URL – so I don’t think there should be any issues for existing API users. Response times don’t appear to be affected much either. If you do get any issues, please let me know in the comments or at niryariv@gmail.com.
