english

Server outage

english, Spurl.net

This looks bad. Second outage in 4 days.

This time it is my hosting company that is not doing their job. I just spoke with support and the problem is being taken care of, although they couldn’t say when it would be up and running again.

I am looking at different hosting options that will have more reliability and can run the service without hickups even with more increase in traffic and additional planned features. My current hosting plan should handle at least 10 times more than the current traffic, but they simply are not living up to their promises.

I’ll keep you posted on progress.

Update (March 9th): Hostway claims to have solved the problem with the server, and assures me that furhter problems of this sort should not occur. So happy spurling.

Scientific American Mind

Brain technologies, english

Scientific American’s latest special issue is Scientific American Mind. It is a collection of very informative and interesting articles on the latest in brain science, philosophy of mind and brain technologies.

There is a brilliant article on “idiot savants” – people that have autism or received serious brain damage so that they do not function in daily life, yet have acquired some incredible special talents. Among the individuals mentioned in the article is Kim Peek, the man who inspired Dustin Hoffman’s character in the Rain man. He knows the text of 7,500 books by heart! Another one is Ellen who can tell the current time to the second without a clock no matter what the season.

While the whole issue is most interesting, three other articles in the issue are worth special mentioning:

  1. Anguish and Ethics (p. 10) that talks about how brain science is being used to better understand how humans deal with moral and ethical issues.
  2. The quest to find consciousness (p. 32) on efforts to understand how consciousness works – or better yet, what it is. These questions have hitherto been left to philosophers, but are gradually becoming hard science.
  3. The science of persuasion (p. 70). Consumer marketing – the persuasion techniques used to get us to buy certain products, elect a stupid president and other ways to make us sit and stand at “their” will.

I think most of you that read this blog will find this issue of Scientific American most amusing – and, no, there is nothing in it for me 😉

Spurl innovation from Italy

english, Spurl.net

As you have probably noticed, there has been an upsurge of usage from Italy over the past 3-4 days. Welcome!

A lot of Italian bloggers have put the Click to Spurl button on their pages, and others are syndicating the lists either using the Javascript method or the RSS feed. Spurl lists of the Italian spurl enabled bloggers that I have come across can be found at the end of this post.

One of the coolest usage I’ve seen so far comes from Gat. As you can see on his blog, he’s put a “spurl it” link next to every blog entry header and even posted information to show how others can do the same.

This allows a blogger some flexibility, as it allows users e.g. to alter their blog templates so that clicking a “spurl it” link next to a entry header on the blog front page will spurl the ENTRY’s permalink, not the FRONT PAGE itself.

If you would like to do the sam, this is the code you would use:

Another idea might be to add a related spurls link to your blog, or entry – so that your readers can see the stuff that people that have spurled your blog have also spurled (i.e. related pages). Such a link might look something like this:

In both cases the text in the brackets (including the brackets) should be replaced with the appropriate content.

If you come up with, or see other clever Spurl innovations like this, please let me know and I will try to post them to share the joy. In some cases this also gives a hint to what users like to do with Spurl and thereby affects the line of features I’m planning to implement.

Update March 27th, 2004: Vanz at Maestrini per Caso pointed out to me that if the title of the blog entry holds certain special characters such as quotes, the javascript doesn’t work. This is correct and can not be fixed in a simple way. The workaround for those of us that like to use quotes in our titles (a lot I’d guess) now is to put a fixed title on the link, something like …link_title=’+escape(‘An entry from Mercury Labs blog’)+… in my case.

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

Italian bloggers using Click to spurl:

Italian bloggers syndicating Spurl lists:

Service out due to DNS upgrade

english, Spurl.net

Due to a neccessary DNS upgrade Spurl.net has been unreachable for more than an hour.

I’m sorry for any inconveniece this may have caused, but I did not know on beforehand that this upgrade would cause any downtime. In any case, the upgrade is a step in improving the service, so please bare with me.

The page is gradually becoming available again (depending on where you are sitting in the world) so please be patient. :-s

Your spurl beam

english, Spurl.net
I added a little pet feature this morning. I call it a “spurl beam”. It is basically a timeline showing the pages that you have spurled.

It may not have a lot of practical value, but it is kind of cool. It shows what is floating through one’s head at the time.

To make your own spurl beam, go to the syndication page (login required) and follow the step by step instructions.

Currently it is limited to a specific size (175 x 400 px) and there are very limited customization features, but I will add more of those later on. Among other things it will allow people to open your spurl beam to zoom and pan through it and it will allow you to limit the beam to certain category or categories.

The name “spurl beam” is taken from David Gelernter’s term “information beam” discussed among other things here on my Wetware blog.

Anyways, you can see my spurl beam to the side. As before, all comments and ideas are more than welcomed.

RSS feeds for related pages and search results

english, Spurl.net

I added two features today that are natural extensions of the “search” and “related pages” functionality, namely to syndicate these results as RSS feeds.

Simply go to the search or related pages, perform the search you want to do or click the related icon () next to any webpage in the spurl lists. The little XML logo at the top of either results page:

…will hold the magic URL.

You can use this for example if you want to create a list on your blog that says “people that spurled my blog, also spurled…” or if you want to watch fresh spurls containing the phrase “search engine”. Anyways, it is yours to find out – I think it is natural that any possible list from Spurl.net can be syndicated in this way.

Have fun.

Comments from blocked text and upload bookmarks

english, Spurl.net

Two notable upgrades in the last couple of days:

  1. If you block a part of the text on a webpage before clicking the spurl! button, that text will be automatically used as the text for the comment for that page (see the “Advanced” tab in the spurl! window). This improves the usability of the comments a lot, as there is usually some descriptive part of text on the page (e.g. the intro to an article) or you want to store the page because of a certain point made in the text and it makes sense to store that bit as the comment on the page.

    So, simply block a piece of text on the page and then click spurl!. Needless to say, careful comments make it a lot easier to search for pages later on as the search functionality searches the comment text as well as the title, url and description.

    Note! In order to use this feature you MUST HAVE THE LATEST VERSION OF THE spurl! BUTTON. Go to “My profile” on spurl.net (requires login), delete the old spurl! button and drag the new one to the links bar instead.

  2. Secondly, you can now upload your bookmarks to your spurl.net account. The upload feature supports exported bookmarks from any Netscape compatible file (that includes Internet Explorer and Mozilla) as well as exported bookmarks from the Opera browser. Go to the upload page for further information. The step-by-step instructions will guide you through the process.

Search functionality

english, features, Spurl.net

Just added a search function to search for entries in the entire Spurl.net database. This first version is very simple. It simply searches:

  • the spurl title
  • the url
  • all user comments
  • and the description

…for a search string match. The search is not limited to whole words, so searching e.g. for “interest” will return also return spurls where the words “interesting” or “interests” appear in the searched fields.

Users can limit search to their own spurls in order to search for something they’ve previously spurled themselves.

There will be more search features soon, but I decided to introduce this limited functionality now as it is already quite useful and interesting.

Nasty Google Rank Trick

english, General

I came across this site this morning:

Search Subjects on AllofIceland.com – The Best Icelander Directory.

The page is obviously designed to fool search engine robots to index links to “advertisers'” web sites. It’s quite easy to see that the page is automatically generated, but still some serious effort has been put into making look – at least to an index robot – as it is made by a human.

Wonder how well this works and what methods Googlebot uses to avoid junk like this.

Anyway, I found item 40 a bit funny: “Articles on Icelander car rentals found inside Surtsey.”

For those of you that don’t know, Surtsey is a small volcanic island that was formed in an eruption in 1963-1967 and is today an isolated geological research area that only two dozen people or so have ever set foot on.

I wonder if they rented a car 😉

(Thanks to Magga for the link)

Massively Multiplayer Robot Game (virtual reality without the “virtual”)

english, Ideas

Here’s an idea that has been cooking in my head for years: Making the most real computer game still to be seen anywhere. How? By actually making it happen in reality.

I’m not thinking about games that blur the boundaries to real life and make yourself a character in the plot (Alternate Reality Games, they’re called) like EA’s Majestic. What I’m talking about is making a fairly typical computer game that actually uses reality as a rendering engine. What better way to get realistic effects? And what better way to avoid predefined rules that limit what players can do to the imagination of the game designers?

I will use an example to explain the concept. Let’s call my imaginary game “The Robos 2004” or something. In “The Robos”, you control a robot in a similar way as you control a character in a first person shooter or a massively multiplayer game. Your “Robo” lives on an island together with a ton of other robots, all of whom are owned and controlled by other players in the game.
Continue reading →