Yahoo search is improving

Earlier I wrote about Sometimes yahoo is better is better than google in providing search results when I was searching for Installing latex on hostmonster. And now with its open search platform SearchMonkey its trying to close in to Google. SearchMonkey allows you to create data services to built search apps that can enhance your search results.

Yahoo search gallery provides you many existing search enhancements that you can add after logging to yahoo. [Via labnol.org].Try various enhancement like LinkedIn Profile, IMDB results, StumbleUpon Reviews and other popular ones.

And you can also create your own search enhancement using step by step method using Presentation application (SearchMonkey Guide).

SearchMonkey API unables you to modify how particular links appears in search results. You can add images, related links and other html formatting but it does not unable you change position of a page in search result. I was unable to find feature which will enable us to filter sites which requires you to login or sites like ebay and amazon which may not be relevant to us by making their appearance farther in search results.

But still these enhancements provides you little summary of search results which is very useful like in case of movie reviews, people profile via linkedIn, stock information etc thus sometimes making opening the actual webpage unnecessary.

June 20, 2008 | Filed Under webdev | 2 Comments

Wordpress plugins you should install

Few months back I have shifted my blog to self hosted wordpress blog at this location. I have passed few months trying new things on this blog like themes, plugins and its been fun playing with it. During this time I have tried several plugins, so wanted to share some of the plugins that I liked the most:

Aksimet: filters spam comments and tracksbacks. You don’t want your post to be filled with useless comments.
Wordpress.com Stats: Its a light weight plugin but still provides detailed representation of important statistics
Google Sitemap Generator: Generates sitemap for your wordpress blog which is by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.
Get Recent Comments: Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar.
FeedBurner FeedSmith: It redirects your wordpress feeds to feedburner so that you can easily track your subscribers.
Plugin Central: Automatically installs and updates WordPress plugins.
Wordpress Data backup: Its a necessary plugin to backup your blog. I still haven’t restoring posts from backup though.

For some specific users plugins like wp-latex, are also useful. It generates PNG images from inline $\LaTeX$ code in your posts and comments. I have installed latex on my hosting service( hostmonster) and still working on making simliar plugins(LatexRender) to work.

You can find many more such list on web if you do a google search. But Lorelle has a nice compilation of list of favorite wordpress plugins.

May 22, 2008 | Filed Under blog, listing | 2 Comments

Web 3.0 ? Web scraping?

Interesting reading from readwriteweb.com : Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services

Important points :

The rise of the API culture
Web Scraping

what is WebScraping ??
Dapper, Teqlo, Yahoo! Pipes - the upcoming scraping technologies :

Yahoo! Pipes, a new app from Yahoo! focused on remixing RSS feeds. Another similar technology, Teqlo, has recently launched. It focuses on letting people create mashups and widgets from web services and rss. Before both of these, Dapper launched a generic scraping service for any web site. Dapper is an interesting technology that facilitates the scraping of the web pages, using a visual interface.

Related post :
Web2.0
Living with web-based software

March 21, 2007 | Filed Under web2.0 | Leave a Comment

GPRS on Mobile

Yesterday I activated GPRS on my mobile (nokia 6030) …its quite cheap( 10paise/10kb)
So I tried different pages which works for mobile

Yahoo Search
Flickr : http://m.flickr.com
W3schools.com: http://w3scholls.com/wap.wml
Google Mpas: http://www.google.com/gmm

Some more websites which works on mobile can be found here : Mobile Compatibe Wesites

So I thougth i should have a mobile webpage too.. so i searched for it and found this great tutorial on w3schools: WAP/WML tutorial. It has also got a demo page which works with explorer only but it contains simple and good examples explaining basic features of wml along with preview on how it looks on mobile.

The WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) protocol is the leading standard for information services on wireless terminals like digital mobile phones. WML stands for Wireless Markup Language. It is a mark-up language inherited from HTML, but WML is based on XML, so it is much stricter than HTML.

Tutorial was pretty easy..so i create my own pae which works on mobile. You can access it at:
http://www.aburad.com/m.wml, though it contain my pic, blog address and some content only(I will add some more content). WML supports wbmp(which is black & white) image format,( you can convert image to wbmp using http://www.online-utility.org/. It als o supports jpg format. One more thing while designing your pages for mobile, you can opera to see how it looks as it supports wml files. Or check it at online wap emulator: WapTiger
Some more links : Wap Tutorials(haven’t tried yet).

February 15, 2007 | Filed Under tech, tips | 2 Comments

Google OneBox Results

Google has quietly added a new OneBox feature that highlights articles from Wikipedia. read about it here : Micro Persuasion : Wikipedia Added to Google OneBox
So here is more about Google OneBox results. I found good info about it on Google Operating System : Google OneBox Results. There are several kinds of OneBox results, for example :