A few weeks ago I mentioned that I had joined Jackpot Rewards, the online lottery and cash-back shopping site with a weekly $1 million sweepstakes. It's still the best odds anywhere for winning a million dollars, and you get extra tickets when any of your friends have two matching numbers in the jackpot drawing that week (so if you're going to join, use a referral link — the larger network of friends you join, the better your odds). Now they're also paying a $10 bounty on referred friends and have grandfathered in past referrals — I just got paid $50, more than paying for my membership.

It looks like FeedBurner's API has moved in with Google at Google Code. Without an e-mail or a blog post, they made a few changes that broke W3Counter's slurping of feed stats. Notably, they are no longer reporting the "reach" metric for some feeds, and it's disappeared from the API reference... perhaps it was harder to track than they thought.

As of this week, I've been accepted to masters programs to study computer science at University of Pennsylvania, University of Delaware, Lehigh University and Drexel University. Now I have to decide where I want to go. Continued »

Quite tangential to everything else I've been doing recently, I wrote my first ray tracer in C++ today. It can render arbitrary triangle meshes defined in SMF format. Next weekend I'll teach myself shading.

First, I wrote a PHP class for passing content to Open Calais and getting back tags. Then, a WordPress plugin for tagging posts as you write them. Now, taking it one step further again, here's a plugin for automatic tagging of your post archives.

I tried tagging for a while last year, but wasn't consistent in my choice of tags or in tagging every post at all. That made the whole system not worth the work, so I removed the plugins I used to add tags in the first place. Now tags are as much a part of WordPress as categories, and I have almost 170 posts not tagged at all. I could edit every one and add them, manually or with the plugin, but that would take a lot of time. Instead, I wrote a plugin which goes through my entire archive of posts, sends the post title and content over to Calais and adds any tags it finds. If there were already tags on the post, only new ones found would be added. Continued »

I just completed the WP Calais Auto Tagger plugin, the obvious first use of my Open Calais Tags class. It adds a tag suggestion box to your WordPress post writing screen which suggests tags based on your post content using the Open Calais API. The suggestions can be added to the post's tag list with a single click, or manually added if you don't want to use them all.

If you've been meaning to use WordPress's new built-in tags, but are too lazy to come up with a good list every time you blog, give the plugin a try. Comments, suggestions and bug reports are appreciated.

In addition to a visual overhaul, WordPress 2.5 added several new plugin hooks, including a widgetized dashboard. The new Blog Stats Plugin for WordPress adds blog stats to the dashboard, and makes integrating the tracking code into a theme simple.

It's also the first use of W3Counter's "visitor labeling" I previewed in October (spooky visitor labeling). By using the plugin instead of inserting the tracking code manually, the names of any previous commentors on your blog is picked up from the cookie WordPress sets and passed on to W3Counter.

Creating a dashboard widget was surprisingly easy. Of course, most of the code isn't in the plugin — I just fill the widget's box with an iframe that pulls up the stats from a specially formatted w3counter.com page. Some JavaScript trickery passes in the width of the box on your screen — if it's narrow, you get two columns of stats, but if your window is approximately 800 pixels or wider, you get three.

If you're using W3Counter on your blog, and have upgraded to WordPress 2.5, download it now.

Calais is a free web service from Clearforest, a Reuters company, that can perform semantic analysis on any English text. It uses natural language processing to extract concepts and relationships from the text. It's been around for a few months, but there's been very little developer activity around it, and even fewer completed applications using the technology.

Not finding any other work to build on, I wrote my own PHP class for extracting tags from content with Open Calais' API. You can get the source and read more here. This class takes a block of text or HTML, sends it to Open Calais or parsing, and extracts all of the entities (things like peoples' names, companies, technologies, etc.). It returns a multidimensional array organized by entity type.

There's more Open Calais can do, but I hope this class contributes something to those PHP developers that'd like to start using it but had no place to start with the lightweight documentation and eerily quiet official forums. I plan on putting this class to work as an auto-tagging plugin for WordPress posts. I still need some time to figure out how to integrate that into the new authoring interface of WP 2.5, which this blog is now running on.

Some time this morning someone submitted W3Counter's Global Stats report to Digg with a headline about the increase in Linux market share. The story crossed the threshold for a front page listing but was auto-buried... perhaps because that page has already been on the front page at least 4 times this year.

A CNET blogger wrote it up soon after, essentially just linking to the Digg story and the report itself. Now the CNET story's reached the front page of Digg where the original URL couldn't — nothing stops Diggers, eh?

In the time between the first story and the second reaching Digg's front page, I was able to finish and test the new code for upgrading accounts with Authnet's CIM API. With that, I pushed out the new website and code (sans a few minor things I want to test over the weekend that I commented out links to).

Even with the layer of indirection, W3Counter's seen over 15,000 extra visitors so far today. I expect it'll probably see at least 3 times that before this is over as reddit, stumbleupon and other social sites are starting to send the secondary traffic directly to the report. Now I can see how the new website does at attracting signups and upgrades.

If you're reading this on my site, as opposed to a feed reader, hold Shift+W on your keyboard for 3 seconds.