My OpenCalais PHP class and WP Calais Auto Tagger WordPress plugin have been updated. The class now supports the latest API endpoint, all entity types and social tags. The WordPress plugin was completely rewritten to use that new class and to use jQuery for all its DOM manipulation.
Every 2-3 years I re-evaluate Awio’s infrastructure and usually end up making significant changes. This year, that resulted in moving every site and service I run to new hardware, taking advantage of lower costs for multi-core processors and RAM than in past years.
w3roi, the service I created to measure and optimize the performance of online advertising, has always been priced by the number of ad clicks each user needs to track each month. This ties pricing to the hardware costs involved in running the site, as tracking and analyzing more clicks requires more CPU, RAM and bandwidth.
Since costs have dropped, all of w3roi’s plans have been upgraded to offer more resources at the same price. Depending on the plan, the increase includes up to 4 times as many tracked clicks as before. Existing customers’ plans have been upgraded with these new limits effective immediately.
node-searchparser is a little node.js module for parsing HTTP referrer URLs for search engine names and search keywords. It’s just one of a few modules I had to write while putting together a node.js server for a new real-time dashboard I’m adding to W3Counter in the near future.
I use PHP’s get_browser function to identify web browsers from user agent strings on several sites. I wanted this ability in a node.js application I’m writing, so I wrote a JavaScript implementation to use.
You can get it here: http://github.com/dangrossman/node-browscap
It includes a parser for browscap.ini files from the Browser Capabilities Project site, converting the patterns from that file to regular expressions JavaScript can compile and match user agents against. The matched browser’s properties are returned as an associative array.
I have listed my WP Review Site product for sale on Flippa. The listing is here, bidding is open for one month, and the buyout is $125,000.
I’m tired of checking the profile of everyone that follows me on Twitter to decide whether to follow them back. At the same time, I don’t want to follow everyone, or I’ll add spammers, and I do want to know what most of the people that follow me have to say.
I created Follow Ham this morning to solve that problem. It looks up who’s following you that you’re not following back, computes a “spamminess” score for each of those people, then recommends which you should follow and which you should block. Check it out and let me know if you run into any problems — consider it in beta status with only me having used it so far.
If you’re interested in the machine learning techniques behind the spam classification, read the About Follow Ham page.
WP Calais Auto Tagger has been updated to version 1.3 and works on new versions of WordPress again. This is a complete rewrite of the tagging interface to hopefully make the plugin more resilient — it’s been breaking when WordPress releases new versions too often for my liking. Now it replaces the WordPress tag interface entirely with its own, which has the same functionality (add and remove tags) as well as the ability to suggest tags based on the post content.
Update: v1.3.1 fixes bugs with the visual editor and scheduled posts.
Leave a comment if you run into any bugs. I hope to fix up the archive tagger plugin soon as well.
WP Review Site’s gotten a major version number increase to reflect a large number of substantial feature boosts, making it much more flexible and much easier to use without touching any code. Version 3 lets you add Amazon-style star ratings and user reviews to any WordPress site on a per-post, per-page and per-category basis. It lets you create different sets of rating dimensions for different categories, automatically adds Google Maps to local business listings, and tracks affiliate links and images for each post.
I am writing up the announcement e-mails to send to my lists tonight announcing it: w3roi is open for business.
Even if you’re not looking for a new way to track your online advertising and get more sales out of your advertising spend, if you read my blog, you’re probably involved with online business in some way.
Check out the affiliate program for an opportunity to earn 25% recurring commissions — you get 25% of the monthly payment of any referral, every month, for as long as that person stays a customer.
I just updated the Calais Auto Tagger plugin for WordPress, which generates tag suggestions for your blog posts using the Calais semantic API. It now requests “social tags” (a new addition in their API) as well as the entity types it was picking up before, and should work with WordPress 2.8 once again.
google+