Author: Hjalmar Gislason

About Hjalmar Gislason

Founder and CEO of GRID (https://grid.is/). Curious about data, technology, media, the universe and everything. Founder of 5 software companies.

Private spurls and various minor updates

english, features

I may have been quiet for the last few days, but busy none the less. You may notice a new checkbox in the “Advanced” spurling window, labeled “Private”.

This allows you to spurl pages that you don’t want to go through the public listings on Spurl.net. If a page is marked “Private”, the only place you can find it is through “My spurls” on the web, and of course when searching your spurls. These pages do not appear in any lists anywhere on the Spurl.net website and not in syndicated lists. So, now you can happily take advantage of Spurl.net without fearing that your competitors, friends or spouses will be aware of what you have marked 😉

To change the “Private” setting for a page click the “Change comment/category” icon next to the page on the “My spurls” page. I will be changing that later on to simply “Edit entry”.

Other changes are not as obvious, but still worth mentioning:

  • The search results, especially when searching the entire spurl library should now be much more relevant, and searching your own spurls should also have improved. The relevance algorithm is rather complex, but in short it puts a certain weight on the title, description, comments and categories people have used for the spurl. It then also takes into account how many people have spurled the page, as an indication of significance. When searching your own spurls, the text of indexed pages is obviously searched as well, and other people’s comments and likings play a far smaller role. I will play around some more with this code, so if you have comments on search results, please let me know.
  • The recommendations have also been tweaked a bit, so they should be more relevant now.

All for now – but more to come during Easter.

Successfully implemented CD purchase protection

english, General

My girlfriend bought me a CD yesterday. It was one I really wanted so it was a well appreciated gift.

Now, we have our entire 5-600 CD collection ripped and stored on a server in our home. There is no stereo in our living room, only iTunes. So obviously the first thing to do with a new CD is to rip it and store on the server.

But NO, there is this wonderful copy protection mechanism on the disc and I would probably need to go to some lengths if I wanted to surpass it. This means I will probably not listen to the disc a lot – our CD collection is stored away in boxes and I will probably not be keeping this one disc around to be able to play it – and by the way on a lousy custom built player that comes with the CD.

So, for me, this CD is flawed. After all, I’m pretty sure my girlfriend was buying me the music, not a piece of plastic – the bits, not the atoms as Nicholas Negroponte would say. And my bits are flawed. Usually when you buy something that is flawed, you can return it but the store will probably not be accepting my compaints in this case.

From now on we will be checking any disc we’re thinking about buying for signs of copy protection, and if it has one – we won’t buy it. It’s as simple as that.

All of a sudden the intended copy protection has become a successfully implemented purchase protection!

Nice one – music publishers. No wonder you’re going out of business. If we could only buy our bits without hassle, you would be doing great.

So, next time you’re in a CD store – check for a copy protection label. If its there, don’t buy the disc. You want to be buying the bits – not the atoms.

Workaround for problem with “Spurl this entry”

Bugs & quirks, english

Vanz at Maestrini per Caso pointed out to me that if a title of a blog entry holds certain special characters such as quotes, the “Spurl this entry”-javascript doesn’t work. This is correct and can not be fixed in a simple manner. I posted a non-optimal workaround as an update to the original entry.

I will continue to think about this and see if I’ll come up with a better solution. Suggestions welcomed.

My spurls update

english, features

Some of you may have noticed an upgrade of the My spurls page. The main addition is that you can now rename, move and delete categories. Just go to the category in question and you see these features in the category header.

It is no also possible to sort the spurls based on date, title and how often they’ve been clicked. This helps locate what your spurls. Note though that ordering by number of clicks acts a bit strange as it does not correctly sort spurls with 0 or 1 click. This is a bit weird and is due to a writers block in my SQL brain center. I hope to find a fix soon, but it does not seriously affect the usefulness of having this option.

Further updates to be announced in the next few days…

Spurl.net – Del.icio.us integration / Spurl.net API

english, Spurl.net

In response to requests for further interoperability, I’ve made a couple of minor upgrades to Spurl.net:

  • Del.icio.us integration: Current users of del.icio.us can now fill in their del.icio.us user information at Spurl’s My profile page (if you’re redirected to the homepage you need to log in) to be able to use both services through a single post. When the information has been registered, every “spurl” is also sent as a post to del.icio.us, allowing users to enjoy the benefits of both services through a single point of interaction.

    When registering the del.icio.us information, users can also – optionally – upload their current del.icio.us posts to Spurl.net. This allows them to enjoy some of Spurl’s specific features, such as searching their old del.icio.us posts, getting recommendations based on the current del.icio.us profile and makes it possible to keep the Spurl and del.icio.us profiles in sync from that point forward.

  • API: If there are any developers out there that would want to use Spurl.net as a part of their implementations, I’ve created a simple API that allows posting and retreiving information from the Spurl.net database. If you’re interested in using this API, please var bug = “bug”; var a = “@”; var spurl = “spurl”; var dotnet = “.net”; document.write (“contact me“); for further information.

Most visited spurls and export

english, Spurl.net

I’ve made two improvements on “My spurls”. Both improve the usefulness of the My spurls page quite a lot and are the first steps in a major upgrade I’m doing to that ppart of Spurl.net in general (including the search functionality).

  1. Most visited Spurls: Spurl now counts every time you click a link in “My spurls” (or search results from My spurls). This information can be used to allow users to sort their spurls by frequency of use. That sorting mechanism is not there yet (hopefully later today), but as a first application of this functionality, The default page for “My spurls” now shows your category structure and the 15 most visited pages through My Spurls. For me at least, this made the trick: My Spurls is now my default homepage from where I access my most frequently used sites.
  2. Export: As Allen mentioned in a comment to a previous post, the export functionality is here. It exports all your spurls as a bookmark file. The structure of the export file is the same as Explorer and Firefox use, and I believe almost any browser can import files of this format.

    This allows you to back up your Spurls locally, and more or less do whatever you want with them. They are – after all – yours.

The Spurl.net philosophy

english, I like!

Even though I’ve moved discussions about Spurl.net to another blog, I thought this belonged here as well…
– – –
“Tell me what you read and I shall tell you what you are.” is an anonymous proverb.

While I have no intentions to use Spurl.net to tell you who you are, the proverb highlights how important the information we consume is. Every day we take in a lot of information from a variety of sources. This information shapes our ideas, opinions and to some extent our personality. Given this fact, it is amazing that people don’t try to keep a better track of their information consumption.
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The Spurl.net philosophy

english, Spurl.net

“Tell me what you read and I shall tell you what you are.” is an anonymous proverb.

While I have no intentions to use Spurl.net to tell you who you are, the proverb highlights how important the information we consume is. Every day we take in a lot of information from a variety of sources. This information shapes our ideas, opinions and to some extent our personality. Given this fact, it is amazing that people don’t try to keep a better track of their information consumption.

I guess there are two reasons:

  1. Suitable tools have been missing.
  2. Because of the lack of tools, people haven’t really given its importance a thought.

Spurl.net is aimed at solving this problem. I’ve tried to implement it so that it becomes a seamless part of users’ browsing activity. See something you find interesting or want to store for later reference – a single click of a button marks it, indexes it for you to search later on and even stores a copy of the page so that it will always be available even though the original page changes or becomes unavailable (so called linkrot). If the user wants, he or she can add more metadata about the page such as a comment, a custom title and a suitable category in a personalized hierarchy of categories, all efforts to help the user locate the information again later.

The conscious effort to mark something is important, as only a part of the abundance of information we consume is worth being able to track later on. The marked information thereby becomes a record of the consumption that the user rates as important or somehow significant.

While I’m not totally convinced that “personalized search results” are the holy grail some people claim it to be, I’m sure that most users will find it hard to imagine how they managed without being able to search the interesting part their own browsing history, once they’ve become accustomed to it.

With this record in hand, Spurl.net can also offer the user a lot of interesting value adds on top of the core “store & search” functionality mentioned above. The recommendations, syndication possibilities and the “spurl beam” (see: Spurl.net page, all mentioned features require login) only scratch the surface of a wide range of functionality that can and will be offered utilizing users’ spurl history. Some of these are already being built into Spurl.net and will be introduced in the coming weeks.

While these are all nice frills, I will try to keep focused on the main vision as detailed above. As before, all comments and suggestions are welcomed.

– – –

As an end note, nicely portraying the importance of the information we consume, here are a few of the sources that inspired my Spurl.net implementation in the first place: