Auto-Tagging Content with Open Calais

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 [...]

Discover Semantic: Search semantic web topics

Inspired by this article at Read/Write Web, I decided to make a search engine out of one of my bookmark collections. Discover Semantic searches about 70 sites dealing with the semantic web (aka “web 3.0″). It covers W3 recommendations, specifications, tools, tutorials, and dozens of blogs about semweb.
If nothing else, it was interesting [...]

AJAX Live-Updating Google Map

A new report I’m considering adding to W3Counter is a “Live Map” — a Google map that shows visitors arriving to your website in real-time. It updates every 3 seconds with an AJAX call, instantly recenting the map on each new visitor and popping up their information. I’ve had fun staring at it for half [...]

Another W3Counter Widget Test

Recommended Designers or Holding a Contest?

I need a new website for W3Counter, and I can’t design it. I need to reorganize the site and there are going to be lots of new service plans and features to show off.
I’m thinking of holding a contest at SitePoint, but I don’t know if I’ll get good results from this. I’m not [...]

Multiple Applications, One Code Base

With room to grow once again, I’ve been working on the other features I planned for W3Counter back in the fall. The main task, which I hope will allow me to sell to bigger customers than my normal $5/month individual webmaster, is providing private instances of the entire service. The plan is to have three [...]

Growing W3Counter

Like every year since spinning off W3Counter from Website Goodies in 2004, it’s exceeded its hardware capacity once again in December. Initially the service shared a Celeron 2.4/512MB server with all of my websites. It then grew into its own Pentium 4 3.0GHz/1GB server, then into a 2-processor 4-core Opteron/4GB setup. This time it’s outgrown [...]

Zune Social Plugin

I sniffed around the Flash enough to realize where it’s grabbing its data and can now parse that directly for info like the last songs I’ve listened to or those I’ve marked as favorites. I wrapped that up into another WordPress plugin that includes the Zune Card widget from the last. So, this single Zune [...]

Zune Card WordPress Plugin and Embed Code Generator

Today the 2nd-generation Zunes are officially for sale. That means the awesome new client software is here, along with firmware updates for current Zunes. Even more exciting for a Zune owner like myself, the Zune Social site has also arrived. One feature of the site is the Zune Card, a shareable Flash widget that displays [...]

Design at a snail’s pace

It takes me so long to do so little with Photoshop. Still feels like it’s missing something too. Next thing I need to do, at least, is some CSS text replacement with images for those cruddy people still running IE6 with no anti-aliasing and without my favorite ‘Trebuchet MS’ font.
I won’t have much time [...]