Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

VIA CELLPHONE  <google.com/sms>: Send text message to GOOGL (46645) to receive Google results on your phone.

VIA E-MAIL: Send an e-mail to google@6url.com with a search term in the subject line - get top 10 Google results via e-mail. Useful from a Blackberry or similar device.

<calendar.google.com>: Google’s version of web calendaring offers drag-n-drop changes to events and the ability to synchornize with Gmail and to share with others; another good feature: ability to import public calendars. I recently switched after five years with Yahoo’s version.

<maps.google.com>: What’s different? You can click-n-drag across the maps; fast magnification of specific spots along the map; satellite and hybrid images - all using Web 2.0

See these Google Maps mashups (web application hybrids):

* HousingMaps.com: marriage of Google Maps and Craigslist real estate postings
* Gmaps Pedometer | MapMyRun.com: virtual pedometer
* NYsee.net: traffic webcams
* Traffic info
* ChicagoCrime.org | NewHavenCrimeLog: track local crimes
* CellReception.com: cell towers near you
* HotOrNot + Google Maps
* MapYourAncestors.com
* LifeHack.org’s Google Maps resources
* Google Earth (PC and Mac, recently updated)
* Google Moon | Google Mars
* Read my column on creating your own Google Maps

The web service for fetching contacts from MSN messenger / Windows Live Messenger has been hit by a series of problems over the past few days. First I hit the bandwidth limit for the account used to host the service. Next, the server used was hit by a DDoS attack. Finally after all that was sorted out the bandwidth limit again caused problems.

Hopefully everything should now be back to normal and the service will be stable.

As always, if you do have any problems, my contact details are available under the ‘About’ tab at the top of the page.

I’ve spoken previously about Windows Live Contacts but never really did much with it. I didn’t have an immediate use for it and I was growing increasingly apathetic about the entire area of contact grabbers / importers. It was a shame really as it was a really exciting project with Microsoft leading the way in the area. It’s been only recently that Google and Yahoo have caught up and released their own APIs for accessing their users data.

I’ve moaned about how great it would be if we could get a users contacts without having to ask for their password. With services like Windows Live Contacts this is finally possible

With the possibility of actually using the code myself creeping up on the horizon I decided to put the time in to write wrappers for PHP. It can be broken down into two components.

Windows Live Delegated Authentication The first thing we need to do is get permission from the user to access their data. There was already a PHP wrapper for this but it did far more than I needed so I’ve rewritten it and ignored the parts I don’t expect to need. This evening I submitted it to the PEAR proposal process.

Windows Live Contacts The second step is fetching the contacts for the user after you have their permission. I could only find a small test script for this so a more complete implementation was definitely needed. Again, I’ve just submitted the code for this to the PEAR proposal process.

Both of these packages will likely undergo changes as they go through the proposal process but if you can’t wait to get started the files are available to be installed now on the proposal pages. The easiest way is using the PEAR installer. If you haven’t used PEAR before please take a look at the manual. If you’re still unsure of anything post a comment below.

July 1, 2008

Yahoo has announced yet another Yahoo Search index update. Yahoo notified us that we “may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.” But as of this morning, no SEO has noticed any significant changes with their rankings.

In fact, there isn’t much discussion around the Yahoo Search engine at all, right now. We have a WebmasterWorld thread discussing the announcement, but all posts in that thread say no one noticed anything. We also have a Plurk thread where I asked if any one cares about the announcement, and the consensus is, no. No one cares.

The last Yahoo update was about a month ago.

1. Go to [Start] -> [Settings] -> [Control Panel] -> [Power Options]
2. Select the ‘Hibernate tab’
3. Check the ‘Enable hibernation’ box
4. Click Click OK

start regedit,
add/update value “NoLowDiskSpaceChecks” to DWORD = 1
path: HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Microsoft -> Windows -> CurrentVersion -> Policies -> Explorer
requires a logoff or reboot

Create a file called “tryangled.url” in notepad and paste this:
[DEFAULT]
BASEURL=http://blog.tryangled.com/
[InternetShortcut]
URL=http://blog.tryangled.com/

Make a short cut with target
%SystemRoot%explorer.exe /n, /e, D: