Matt's Blog

Archive for the ‘Sites’ Category

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Flickr Short URL Generator

Saturday, August 8th, 2009

Recently, Flickr introduced its short URL service for all photos (and videos) hosted on Flickr. All photos and videos have a corresponding flic.kr URL associated with them, in the format of flic.kr/p/xxxxxx (the last part is the base-58 encoding of the photo-id).

Last night I was looking for a quick site to generate these short URLs from the full Flickr URL. My searching came up with nothing. As such, I decided to quickly throw together a site to do just that. Short story even shorter: URLkr.com was created.

URLkr is a simple and quick way to generate a short flic.kr URL from a full flickr.com URL. I hope some people will find this useful (I know I do). Check it out and let me know what you think.

Posted in Sites | 3 Comments »

Google AdSense Data to Get Integrated with Analytics

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

Google announced today that Google AdSense users will soon be able to have their AdSense data integrated into their Google Analytics account. This is a feature that many people have been waiting for and expecting for quite some time now.

This integration will provide users with more data about user behavior, such as which pages advertisements are clicked on and referring sites. This looks to be very useful data that publishers will be able to use to optimize their earnings. They posted the following video:


Google is currently in the process of rolling out this integration, and you can look for you invitation on your AdSense overview page.

Posted in News, Sites | No Comments »

I’m Plurking – mattfreedman now on Plurk

Monday, July 7th, 2008

PlurkIf you’re a user of Twitter you know that uptime isn’t one of it’s features. Recently, I’ve become frustrated with this fact. Last month, I signed up for Twitter-competitor Plurk. Today, I started to actually use it, and I’ve grown to like it.

Plurk has quite a few advantages over Twitter. Such as almost always being up, a nicer timeline presentation and more features. Not to mention new features being added constantly, unlike the seemly stagnant Twitter feature-base. However, one thing Plurk currently lacks is a documented API, but I’m sure that’s in the works.

With more and more Twitter users starting to use Plurk, I think that Twitter should watch it’s back because Plurk’s going to be hot on it’s heels.

Join Plurk now and follow me | mattfreedman on Plurk

Posted in Blogging, Sites | No Comments »

Matt’s Blog Search, Now Powered By Google

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Google Custom SearchAs many people who use WordPress to power their blog know, WordPress’ built-in search isn’t exactly as useful as you’d expect it to be. Recently, I’ve become quite frustrated with this fact.

So, a couple of days ago, I decided to setup Google Custom Search and see how I like it. It was fairly painless to setup, and I had it up and running in less than 5 minutes. I decided to host it on my domain, instead of directly on Google, so that I would be able to style it to look the same as my blog.

I’ve found Google Custom Search to work much better than WordPress’ built-in search. It returns more relevant results, and doesn’t provide you with tons of pages that are hardly relevant to your search terms. I’ve decided to completely replace WordPress’ search with Google Custom Search, and you can now use it in the sidebar of this blog, or from right here.

I’ve also made the meta descriptions of post pages to be relevant to what the post is about, and also blocked Google from indexing some pages (such as yearly/monthly archives and category pages) that contain duplicate content. So, in the next coming weeks, as Google reindexes pages in my blog, the search results should become even more useful (and not contain links to yearly/monthly archives and category pages, which aren’t really that useful if you’re searching for something).

What do you think about Google Custom Search, and do you think it works better than WordPress’ search?

Posted in Blogging, Sites, Updates | No Comments »

SpotPlex Closed Down

Saturday, May 10th, 2008

SpotPlexSpotPlex, a Digg-like site based on page views instead of voting, has shutdown their site and their hyper bot.

TechCrunch reports that SpotPlex ultimately closed down due to insufficient funding.

I had an account at SpotPlex, and had their widget on this blog. According to my stats, over the time the widget was on my blog, they sent me a whole 2 visitors… Wow… Interestingly, I never received an email from them that they were closing down. I only found out because their widget was no longer displaying, and I went to their site to see if it was down, and I found that they had shutdown. I confirmed with Michael Kwan that he had not received an email from them either. The least they could do would have been to email their users to let them know that they would be closing down, and that they should remove the widget from their blog…

Posted in Blogging, News, Sites | No Comments »

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