Making websites that are iPhone-friendly is easy enough, but I recently wanted to make a site that felt like a real iPhone app.  I don’t own a Mac, so building a native iPhone app wasn’t an option.

I turned to iWebKit 5.0, a lightweight DHTML toolkit for making websites that look “native” on the iPhone. It is a collection of CSS and Javascript files, a few small images, and a tutorial PDF on how to use them.  If you’re reading this on an iPhone, try out http://demo.iwebkit.net to see how a site built with it feels.

The iWebKit developers had these goals for version 5.0:

• It needs to be very lightweight
• Use small or no images (use css3 gradient and shadows for example)
• Use limited amounts or no javascript, always try to find a css3 solution first!
• Be user friendly (the least amount of elements possible in the html code as iwebkit is structured right now)

It’s dead-simple to use, and I think even people with scant web experience could put a static  site easily enough.  Safari for the iPhone has solid Javascript support, so more advanced web developers could put together some pretty decent dynamic functionality as well.

My favorite feature of iWebKit is when you use the “Add To Home Screen” button in Safari to put a bookmark icon on your iPhone.  A site made with iWebKit can be made to provide its own icon for your Home Screen, show a splash image while it loads, and run full-screen (no browser bar).  At that point, you can build something that most people would never suspect was a web site.

Other benefits from this approach:  No need to get Apple’s approval to list it in the app store and you can update it as often as you want.  You don’t get the exposure that the App Store brings, of course.   There are always trade-offs.

If you decide to give it a try, I recommend using Safari on your PC (or Mac) as a test browser during development, since it will render the pages fairly close to how they’ll appear on your iPhone.  You won’t get great results on IE or Firefox, but the Chrome browser works fairly well.

Have fun!

Last year I led a software project that employed a SOA architecture and a Flex UI.  The features we were able to build with FlexBuilder (now FlashBuilder) were pretty sweet and remarkably easy…  I’ve become a huge fan of Flex as a result.

The new FlashBuilder 4 provides some powerful new tools for integrating with various back-end services. Connecting to SOAP services is now, frankly, dead-simple. I’ve written two articles on this topic, both of which are now live on DevX.com:

• Build a Simple Map Client with SOAP in Flash Builder 4, Part I
• Create a Map Client with Web Services, Part II

The articles come with a starter project and walk you through how to connect to a SOAP service and build a functional Map client in a relatively short amount of time.  Unfortunately there’s been some sort of a mix-up on DevX and the download links for the project aren’t working yet.  In the meantime, you can download them here:

• Initial Project (start with this) : terraclient_initial.fxp
• Project by the end of Part 1: terraclient_part1.fxp
• Project by the end of Part 2: terraclient_part2.fxp
  

  Flex + SOAP map client

I’ll keep these downloads available until DevX fixes the problem on their end.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

Ever wanted to defragment a certain file or collection of files on your Windows PC, without defragging the entire hard drive? Here’s why and how you can do it:

Don’t Bring Me Down

I recently noticed that one of my oft-used Windows applications was getting slower and slower. After checking the usual suspects in Task Manager (Windows Search, Norton AV, you know who you are), I also checked to see if my hard drive needed to be defragmented. At first glance, the answer was no: the defrag tool reported “You do not need to defragment this volume”. I looked at the volume report, however and saw that many of the worst-fragmented files were used by my oh-so-slow application.

Any time an application needs to read or write to heavily-fragmented files, it has to go on a treasure hunt all over the hard drive platter. Since disk I/O is an expensive operation, defragging those files can boost application performance considerably. It might also save you from some nasty crashes.

The problem is that there is no guarantee which files the Windows Defrag Tool will touch. You can defrag the whole disk only to find out it skipped your files anyway. Yeah, that happened to me. Twice more than I care to admit. Mr Gates, I’d like my 2 hours back.

So I did a treasure hunt of my own, and found a fast and free tool designed to solve this very problem…

Contig To The Rescue

Contig v1.54 is a free command-line tool that works on Windows NT, XP, 2000, and Vista. It will analyze and defragment a file or a set of files matching a wildcard. Contig is fast, tiny at 55KB, easy to use, and can even be killed in the middle of processing without corrupting your drive. Here’s how to start single-file defragging in 5 minutes, or your next pizza is free:

1. Download Contig.zip, and extract Contig.exe in a directory of your choice.
2. Open a command line, and type in the location of Contig.exe, followed by the -v switch, followed by the location of the file you want to defrag. If either location has a space in the path name, be sure to enclose both locations in quotes. Here’s how it looks in action:
   C:\>"C:\tools\Contig.exe" -v "C:\System Volume Information\catalog.wci\00010005.ci"
...
Found a free disk block at 14025352 of length 32740 for entire file.
Moving 32688 clusters at file offset cluster 0 to disk cluster 14025352
File size: 133890048 bytes
Fragments before: 1126
Fragments after : 1
3. If you want to defrag a set of files using a wildcard pattern, then just use the -s switch and a wild-carded path. Like so:
   "C:\tools\Contig.exe" -s "C:\music\*.mp3"

It’s really that easy. Contig also has a couple of other switches to either just analyze the files or run quietly. See the home page for documentation. Happy Defragging!

Photo (CC) by Justin Marty

I happened across Jonathan Feinberg’s Wordle (“Beautiful Word Clouds”) visualization recently.  Pretty fun, but I instantly wanted a way to create one from an RSS feed. I didn’t see a way to do it, so I checked the FAQ confirmed there wasn’t one available:

How about a field to enter a blog/web page/wikipedia article’s URL?

If you know of an interesting text source that exposes a JSON interface, then I’d be happy to add a field for it on the “create” page. Unfortunately, a web site that doesn’t expose its data via JSON is not useful to Wordle, because Wordle does all of its text processing on your computer, in the browser. A JSON URL can be dynamically retrieved without hitting the Wordle server.

Yahoo Pipes immediately came to mind. I noodled around with the Term Extractor module in Pipes, a handy way to pull significant words from the items in an RSS feed. Thanks to the permissive Creative Commons license used by Wordle, I copied the necessary resources to my server, added a new JavaScript function to Wordle’s code to call the new Pipe, get a JSONP callback, and push the resulting feed terms to the Wordle Applet.

Voila: http://labs.techbrew.net/wordle/

The CC license on the mod stands, so if Mr. Feinberg finds the mod useful, he’s free to grab it, clone the Pipe, and put it back into Wordle proper.

A video demonstration of software is often far better than static screenshots, and is often more convenient to distribute than arranging for a live demo. This tutorial will show you how easy it is to record a video “screencast” of most applications with the free (as in lunch) Windows Media Encoder software.

Caveats and Installation

• WME won’t work with applications which draw directly to the screen. If the application has to run full screen or requires a decent video card, it probably draws directly to the screen.
• Check the System Requirements  page to understand what your computer’s hardware will be capable of doing with the software.
• If you want to record audio (like a voice over), you’ll need a microphone. If you’re using a laptop with a built-in microphone, it probably sucks. Try to get something that you can get closer to your mouth and that has a windscreen.
• Download Windows Media Encoder and install it. Other than picking an directory, the installer is basically hands-free.

Setting Up a Screen Capture

Getting the screen capture going is really easy once you’re familiar with the settings to use. (You’ll find the hard part is “performing for the camera” once the capture has started.)

Feeling a bit recursive, I used WME to demo a copy of itself, showing a quick walkthrough of the setup. You can watch it on YouTube or download the original techbrew.net_wme_walkthrough.wmv generated by WME itself. YouTube’s transcoding is unfortunately pretty fuzzy, so I recommend taking a look at the original to see what was actually captured.

Here are the basics of setting up a screencast, with some advice about settings along the way:

1. Run the software via Start->Programs->Windows Media->Windows Media Encoder.

2. Select the “Capture Screen” option in the New Session dialog and press the “OK” button.

3. Choose your capture settings. The new session wizard will show you options for doing a screen capture:

• Specific Window – Select this if the software you want to screencast is in only one window with minimal dialogs or popups. Dialogs and popups will only show up if they are in front of and smaller than the main window. Anything which extends outside of the boundary of the main window will be cut off in your video. If you choose this, you’ll need to start up your application and have it running before you go to the next step. Also keep in mind that the size and aspect ratio (length vs. width) of the video display will be the same as your application window. If your screencast is destined to be played in a video player like YouTube, for example, the aspect ratio can matter a great deal. If you can’t resize the window to be what you need, you might want to pick one of the next two options.
• Region of the Screen – Select this if you want to section off a portion of your desktop for capture. Any window, cursor, menu, tooltip in that region will be recorded. This is an easy way to make sure that the aspect ration of your video is exactly right. Getting everything you want to show to happen inside that region can take some careful planning and thought, however.
• Entire Screen – If you want to simply record your entire screen and everything that happens, this is the option to choose. Keep in mind, however, that if you have a really high resolution monitor, you’re going to be capturing a ton of data. You probably don’t want to create a video file that has to be played back at the same resolution in order to make out the fine details. If possible, drop down to a lower resolution before you do the screencast. Something else to keep in mind: If you only have one display, the WME window will be on your taskbar while you are recording. If your computer is capable of using two displays, you can use your secondary display as the capture screen to avoid seeing the taskbar.

4. Check (or don’t check) the Capture Audio option. If you want to record a voice-over at the same time you’re running your application, then check it. Be forewarned: doing a smooth voice-over while running the software can be pretty tough and takes a ton of practice runs. If you have access to video editing software, you may want to re-do the voice-over when you don’t have to concentrate on operating the software.

5. Click the Next Button.

• If you chose “Specific Window” or “Region of the Screen”, the wizard will prompt you to choose the window or specify the region. Do so and click the Next button again.
• If you chose “Entire Screen”, go to Step 6.

6. Name an output file – The wizard will prompt you for an output file name and location. The video file it creates will be a .wmv video file.

7. Choose the capture quality – The wizard lets you choose a capture quality setting of Low/Medium/High. You have to weigh the trade-off between file size and video clarity. If you have access to video editing software or the means to convert the file format later on, choose High so that you have the best-possible source to start with.

8. Enter the Display Information – You can enter some video file metadata like title and author if you like. The metadata will only show up if the video file is played in Windows Media Encoder, however. If you’re going to edit or convert the file, you don’t need to bother with this metadata.

9. Press the Finish button.

The wizard will close. Now you’re actually in the Windows Media Encoder proper, set up and ready to go according to the wizard settings you chose. (The Properties button on the toolbar will show you the myriad of settings available for a whole slew of use cases. After you’ve used WME for awhile, you’ll may want to dig in here and start experimenting.)

If you’re in Europe or a region that displays video in the PAL format, you can change that setting via the Tools->Options menu. The General Options tab has a “Default Format” setting which lets you switch between PAL and NTSC.

10. Press the Start Encoding button.

WME will record your cursor movement and screen activity, whether in a window, region, or full screen. If you chose to capture audio, it will record that as well.

The default behavior of WME is to minimize to the taskbar when you are recording. Restoring the WME window will pause recording. If you don’t want the minimizing behavior, perhaps because you aren’t doing a full-screen capture, you can turn it off via the Tools->Options menu under General Options.

11. Press the Stop button.

WME will stop recording and show you a summary screen of the screencast content. You can close the dialog or use the “Play Output File” button to view your handiwork.

12. Save your session settings. Use File -> Save to save all your settings to a file that can be reused for another screen capture. As you use WME more, you’ll probably start fine-tuning the settings for your particular needs. Saving those settings for repeatable screencasts will become increasingly more important.

13. Experiment, lather, rinse, and repeat. There is a lot under the hood in WME, including the ability to push a live video stream to a Windows Media Server. Play around and see what it can do, and don’t forget [F1] – the help files for WME explain the various concepts and settings in the tool.

Happy screencasting!

Wondering if your New Years’ resolutions will make it past February? While there is no substitute for personal discipline and all that stuff, it is nice to have some help along the way. Here are some ways that technology can make that resolution just a little bit easer to keep:

Get Things Done

Do you just need help remembering all the stuff you didn’ get around to last year? Go no further than Remember The Milk. This free service has it all: To-do lists with calendering, email/SMS/RSS/instant message reminders, and integration with everything from the iPhone to Google homepages.

If you want to embrace hard-core efficiency, read Getting Things Done and then check out this list of GTD software tools. The list has both buyware and freeware for Palm, Pocket PC, Linux, and Windows.

Get Fit

The coolest exercise gadget this year has to be the Nike + iPod Sport Kit. If you own a pair of Nikes that can accomodate a special sensor, this kit turns your iPod into a performance monitor and coach. At $45, it beats buying a new treadmill.

Need help with a exercise program and fitness tracker? Here is a Online Fiteness Tracker that helps you manage both your diet and your exercise plan, monitoring nutrition, and creating weekly and monthly reports of your progress. There is a free version of this service as well.

Eat Right

Counting calories? If you have a personalized Google homepage, you can add this Calorie Calculator widget. “Use the calorie calculator to see each meal’s calorie details and sum up your daily total. Use the settings to see your recommended average daily intake.” If you want something more portable, try the Nutrition Assistant. Or if you own a Windows Mobile device here is a roundup of diet software for smartphones.

Need to completely overhaul your diet? I personally recommend The South Beach Diet website. You get lots of tools to help shed the pounds, including a diet profile to track your progress, forums and diaries to share successes and struggles with like-minded people. Best of all, it has a meal planner that lets you pick and print recipes, including a coalated shopping list. (If you pick four recipes that each call for a 1/4 cup of minced onion, for example, the shopping list will combine the amounts and let you know to buy a cup of mixed onion for that set.)

Get Going!

Good luck in 2008! If you use any high-tech tools not listed here, drop a comment and let us know what works for you. Happy New Year from TechBrew!

I’ve been a user of the excellent IntelliJ Java IDE for 4 years on Windows. Even though the official Linux support by JetBrains is only for RedHat, you can also install IntelliJ fairly easily on Ubuntu. I’ve tested this with Xubunto 7.10 (Gutsy), Java 6, and IntelliJ 7. Here’s how to do it in four basic steps:

1) Get Java

Install the Java 6 JDK, which IDEA itself needs to run. (You can have other JDKs for your projects, but you’ll need this one to run IntelliJ itself.) For example, type this in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

Follow the prompts for root password, download confirmation, and eventually the Sun EULA to install Java itself. If it installed successfully, you should be able to type this at a prompt:

java -version

… to get several lines telling you the version of Java you have installed. If this doesn’t work, refer to Sun’s documentation on troubleshooting installations.

2) Get IntelliJ IDEA

Download the latest version of IntelliJ IDEA for Linux:

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/index.html#linux

Once the download is finished, extract the archive using the correct filename according to your download. For example, to install IntelliJ in /usr/lib, do the following:

tar xfz idea-7.0.1.tar.gz ./usr/lib/

The IntelliJ installation will now be in a subdirectory indicating the build number, in the format “idea-xxxx”. In the case of IDEA 7.0.1, the app directory is “idea-7364“. (Once the extraction is done, you can delete the downloaded archive to conserve disk space if needed.)

3) Get Environmental

There are a couple of environment variables to be taken care of. First, you need to set a new environment variable that tells IntelliJ where your install of Java is. For example:

export JDK_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/"

Use the “env” command, or just “echo $JDK_HOME“, to verify the variable is set.

Next, you’ll need to edit /etc/environment with superuser rights in the editor of your choice, adding the idea-xxxx/bin directory to your PATH variable. For example, you can edit the environment with the GUI mousepad editor like so:

sudo mousepad /etc/environment

The various directories in the environment PATH variable are delineated by colons (:). Append the current value (inside the quotes) with a new colon and then add the idea-xxxx/bin location. It should look something like this:

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/lib/idea-7364/bin"

Save and close the environment file. You’ll need to “source” it for your system to pick up the new directory in the PATH. You can verify your changes by echoing the variable as well:

source /etc/environment

echo $PATH

If you see the path to IntelliJ returned in the output, you’re all set.

Lastly, you may want to change the VM settings of IntelliJ. This depends entirely on your project size and other factors, so you’ll need to base these settings on your own need. The settings are in idea-xxx/bin/idea.vmoptions.

4) Get Started!

That’s it. Now you can run “idea.sh” from a terminal in any directory, and IntelliJ should launch…

idea.sh

If you run into problems, be sure to double-check the readme files in the installation directory.

Give Back

If this article proved useful to you, please drop us a comment and let us know. Or, if you find problems/alternate solutions along the way, please share them for the benefit of others. Thanks and happy coding!

Joel Spolsky’s article on Inc.com is a must read. Here are five easy steps to kill your technology project:

Mistake No. 1: Start with a mediocre team of developers.
Mistake No. 2: Set weekly milestones.
Mistake No. 3: Negotiate the deadline.
Mistake No. 4: Divide tasks equitably.
Mistake No. 5: Work till midnight.

Read an explanation of each mistake in “How Hard Could It Be?: Five Easy Ways To Fail”. Thanks to Kenneth Bowen for prodding me to read it.

Marshall Kirkpatrick posted some good advice about how to keep up with all of the RSS feeds in your reader. Boiled down to the essence:

1) You need an efficient reading mechanism (I use and recommend Google Reader.)

2) You need to keep your feeds organized so they make sense to you

3) You need to keep your feeds visibility high.

On that last point, a couple of suggestions that I made to Marshall wound up in his post: Add the Google Reader Button to your Google Toolbar (if you use it), and get a view of your feeds into your browser homepage. I use iGoogle, so integrating the Reader widget is a snap. (The image to the right is how it looks.)

One section that I think Marshall is missing from his post is along these lines:

Be Brutal

Be brutal to your subscription list. If you find yourself skimming most of the items in a feed, either find a way to filter them out before you see them, or unsubscribe from the feed altogether. (Note to TechBrew readers: This does not apply to you. Step away from the Unsubscribe button and skim past this item.)

This goes back to an article I wrote called “The Top 5 Reasons Your Co-Workers Don’t Use RSS“. The second reason was that people get overwhelmed by information overload. My advice was, and remains:

It is pretty easy to over-subscribe to RSS feeds and feel like you’re drinking from a fire hose. The best suggestion I’ve found to help you keep from getting overloaded is: “Too many RSS feeds? Put ‘em on probation.“. Granted, it’s more a mental+organizational approach rather than a tech trick, but it works.

Defcon 2007 was a great demonstration that HTTPS logins give everybody a false sense of security. The hacker convention revealed that dozens of people unknowingly gave up their GMail account info through a cookie exploit. Many people also used Gmail in the clear (HTTP) rather than encrypted (HTTPS). The resulting privacy breaches were pretty brutal.

Lesson #1: Always use HTTPS for your entire Gmail session, not just the login. Update your bookmarks accordingly: https://mail.google.com/mail/

Lesson #2: If you use the Google Toolbar, as I do, be sure to edit the Gmail button so that it always uses HTTPS. Here’s how:

(Note: The image to the right (click to enlarge) is a screenshot of several dialogs as they appear in the Firefox Google Toolbar. There are some cosmetic differences from the IE Google Toolbar, but the steps are the same.)

1. Click the “Settings” button on your Google Toolbar and select “Options”. This will bring up a Google Toolbar Options dialog.
2. Select the “Buttons” tab at the top, then select the Gmail button in the Custom Buttons list.
3. Click the “Edit” button on the right, then click the “Use Advanced Editor” link in the window that pops up.
4. A new browser window will open, displaying the XML specification for the Gmail button. Scroll about half-way down until you see these elements:<search>http://mail.google.com/mail/ ... </search>
<site>http://mail.google.com/?source=navclient</site>
<feed refresh-onclick="true" ... >http://mail.google.com/mail? ...</feed>
5. Change each instance of “http” to “https” in those elements.
6. Click “Save to Google Toolbar” and close all of the open windows, choosing “OK” until everything is closed again.

Now any time you press the Gmail button, you’ll be using HTTPS for the entire session. Like Gandalf says, “Keep it secret, keep it safe.”

Getting on Digg is really quite easy for the common blogger. Here’s how in one easy step:

• Get a job writing for Engadget, Gizmodo, Arstechnica, Mashable, or TechCrunch.

What, did that sound cynical? Check the latest top stories on Digg and where they came from. That’s where you need to be to easily top Digg.

If a job change isn’t in your immediate future, you are stuck with other more complicated options, such as:

1. Get noticed by one of the above sites.
2. Get noticed by an A-lister.
3. Get noticed by a top Digger.
   (or)
4. Beg all your friends for a digg and hope that 1, 2, or 3 happens a bit belatedly.

So the questions is whether or not ‘Digg Begging’ is, as one of my friends put it, “tacky or just good marketing?” Is asking your friends for diggs in the same realm as editing your own Wikipedia entry, if you have one? (Of course, if you have one, you probably don’t have to ask. )

Because the Internet is just like Middle School, the best way to solve this dilemma is to enlist your friends to digg beg on your behalf. Like the loyal Christian who woos Roxanne on your behalf, they stand between you and the sting of rejection and accusations of vain self-promotion. Parry and riposte!

Proxy beggar or no, is asking for diggs just like passing out fliers to your garage band, hoping for the big time? Or is it uploading your picture to Hot or Not, hoping for lots of MySpace friends? What do you think?

PS: Would you mind digging this story for me? I mean, my friend wants to know if you’d digg this story for him, since his account is frozen. Yeah, that’s it.

There are a variety of temporary email services out there in internetland, perfect for signing up at websites where you need the goods but are distrustful of the privacy policy. The ironic problem with many of these services is that you have to create an account and use your real email address.

One nifty alternative is Spam.la, a service of DreamHost that allows you to use any email address ending with @spam.la. Just pick a username to use as a throw-away email address, and any messages sent to that address will appear right on the Spam.la homepage. (The spam is coming in fast-and-furious, so you can filter the results based on your username.)

The disadvantage of this setup, of course, is that literally anyone can read your messages if they’re trolling the homepage. For many situations, however, that doesn’t much matter. The other disadvantage is that you have to constantly visit the site to see if any email has arrived. They don’t offer an RSS feed, so I thought I’d do a little mashup with some RESTful services and make an RSS feed of my own.

If you don’t care about how it works, just read “The Short Story” below, copy and edit the link, and you’ve got an RSS feed ready to go.

The Short Story

If your temporary email address is “bobby@spam.la”, this link will provide an RSS feed of your Spam.la email messages:

http://www.w3.org/2000/06/webdata/xslt ?xslfile=http%3A%2F%2Ftechbrewfiles.googlepages.com%2Fspamla.xsl &xmlfile=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi.w3.org%2Fcgi-bin%2Ftidy%3FdocAddr%3D http%253A%252F%252Fspam.la%252F%253Ff%253Dbobby%26forceXML%3Don

Since you probably aren’t using ‘bobby@spam.la’, just replace ‘bobby‘ in the URL above with your email name, and you’re ready to subscribe to it with an RSS reader. (Be sure to right-click and copy the link location, rather than cut-n-paste the above text. The display text has spaces to allow for line breaks.)

If you want to know how this works, keep reading.

The Long Story

The Spam.la webpage is very basic HTML. When you filter based on an email address, the URL starts like this:

http://spam.la/?f=bobby

The HTML isn’t well-formed, so we can’t treat it like XML just yet. As is, there’s not much we can do with it without writing a bunch of string parsing code. But thanks to the availability of some handy RESTful services on the web, we can transform it into RSS in a couple of passes. Here’s how:

1) Tidy up the HTML into XHTML with the free W3C Tidy parser service, checking “enforce XML well-formedness” to make sure it is ready to use. Passed into the parser, the XHTML of the filtered spam page is now:

http://cgi.w3.org/cgi-bin/tidy? docAddr=http%3A%2F%2Fspam.la%2F%3Ff%3Dbobby &forceXML=on

2) Employ an XSL stylesheet to turn the email links in the XHTML into RSS items. I wrote one and put it here: http://techbrewfiles.googlepages.com/spamla.xsl .

It is free to use and modify under a LGPL Creative Commons license.

3) Use the W3C XSLT Servlet service to transform the XHTML with the above stylesheet. This is also a REST service, so the result is a long URL that contains the tidy Spam.la page and the XSL stylesheet. It is uglified with URL encoding, but it works:

http://www.w3.org/2000/06/webdata/xslt ?xslfile=http%3A%2F%2Ftechbrewfiles.googlepages.com%2Fspamla.xsl &xmlfile=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi.w3.org%2Fcgi-bin%2Ftidy%3FdocAddr%3D http%253A%252F%252Fspam.la%252F%253Ff%253Dbobby%26forceXML%3Don

Voila! You have throw-away anonymous email where your RSS reader is your inbox. Just edit ‘bobby’ with the username of your choice, and you’re done.

If you found this handy or have improvements, please leave a comment or contact us.

Popstats is a just-released open-source set of PHP 5 classes that allow you to easily query one of several popularity APIs with a given URL. This code originally lived in the Power 150 (now hosted at AdAge.)

These tools can help you programmatically grab ranking and popularity information for your (or anybody else’s) website.

The initial classes offered are as follows:

The intended audience for these tools are PHP programmers and integrators; these are not intended for use by an end-user or non-programmer.

You are highly encouraged to contribute to popstats by submitting improvements or bugfixes that have general benefit to the tools. The code will probably also need a wiki page per class to discuss usage and that sort of thing – we would be happy to see that kind of documentation spring up.

Ever wanted to do a podcast, but didn’t have a lot to say or the time/desire/skill to produce one? If you have a phone and a Twitter account, you can start a micropodcast right away in two easy steps:

1) Go to http://www.twittergram.com/phone and plug in your phone number and Twitter credentials. Note: This will only work if you trust Dave Winer with your Twitter password.

2) Anytime you have something to say, call 646-716-6000 and leave a short message, 30-seconds or less. Hence the term “micropodcast”. (You can call in once every 10 minutes if you have more to say.)

Here’s what you get:

• A linked MP3 of your message will appear in your Twitter feed (example)
• If you checked the “global account” box in the registry form, your message will also appear in a global Twitter account at http://twitter.com/twittergram
• The actual Mp3 file will be on the twittergram server (example)
• An RSS feed of your messages will be updated on the twittegram server in this format: http://mp3.twittergram.com/username/rss.xml . For example, mine is: http://mp3.twittergram.com/mwoodman/rss.xml

The audio quality isn’t very good, but the process couldn’t be easier.   Note that there is no mechanism for edits/deletes, so choose your words carefully.   Happy micropodcasting!

Creative Commons image courtesy of KeyExpert.

Google Maps has added a feature that lets you add information to a local map region. Points of interest, directions, annotations, whatever. These maps can be set to “public,” making them viewable and searchable for anybody looking in the area with Google Maps or Google Earth.

The great thing is that you can also put in arbitrary HTML in a placemark, thus allowing you to embed images, thus allowing you to use webcam image feeds.

A while back I created SpringsCam using the Google Maps API to plot out the various camera locations and image feeds for Colorado Springs traffic. Some people talked to me to do the same thing in their city, but they didn’t have the Javascript skills needed to put it together.

The new Google MyMaps makes it really easy for anyone to do the same thing, but without any JavaScript necessary.

To test it out, I recreated SpringsCam with a Google MyMap, resulting in a map of the Colorado Springs traffic cameras.

Here’s how simple it is, provided you have a Google account (For GMail, Calendar, etc.):

1. Go to the map location where you want to add a webcam image.
2. Click on the MyMaps tab on the upper left. Click the “Create New Map” and give it a name and description.
   
3. Select the placemark tool () in the top left toolbar and then click on the map where you want the placemark to appear.
   
4. An empty placemark bubble will open up with a field for title and description. Give your webcam a title.
5. Press the Insert Image button () above the description box, then enter the URL of your your webcam image.
6. Press OK to finish the placemark.
7. Save your work!

You can add more webcams, as I did with the traffic cams, or annotate the area with shapes and drawings as needed. Your map will now be viewable and searchable for anybody looking at your area with Google Maps or Google Earth. Here is the one I created in just a matter of minutes.