blogtricksblog
New trick for 07: Geocaching
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
My family and I were recently introduced to geocaching and every since we’ve been doing our compulsive gene pool proud. It’s a great sport, especially for families. There is simply nothing quite so cool as finding hidden treasure, especially in some of the nutty places geocachers have come up with.
The geocaching trick just shows a list of the most recent finds for a username and shows it in a simple list. You can use the list as is, or apply CSS styles to pretty it up a bit. Give it a try!
New trick: EZLink!
Thursday, December 29, 2005
This trick has proven really useful for me — EZLinking lets you use simple, easy-to-remember tags to generate links to common destinations like Google, Amazon, Ebay and Wikipedia, as well as custom destinations of your own choosing. Rather that remembering the syntax for an Amazon search url, or having to interrupt my writing to go open a new browser and cut/paste items, you can now use an EZLink. For Google, that just means something like this: <a>php reference</a> (which looks like this when linkified: php reference). For Amazon, you just add a simple href: <a href="ez:a">the tipping point</a> (which turns out like this: the tipping point).
There’s a lot more, and I’m clearly not much of a documentation writer. But please try it out — no ads will appear on your site, as with all of our tricks it requires no server support at all, and it really is pretty cool! And as always, let us know what you think at supportATblogtricks.com. Thanks!
WhatAbout… ebay?
Sunday, December 18, 2005
Ebay has everything, and often for less than other online retailers. The “WhatAbout ebay?” bookmarklet helps you make sure you’re not paying too much by instantly comparing prices to current ebay auctions.
Just drag the bookmark onto your “Links” toolbar and then visit your favorite store. When you’re looking at a product you might want to buy, just select the name with your mouse and click “WhatAbout ebay?” … A small popup will appear showing current ebay prices for that search. Wicked!
If you don’t select any text, the bookmarklet will try to do a good job by looking for product names or search terms on the page. But in reality a selection will give you much better results.
Drag me onto your “Links” toolbar: WhatAbout ebay?
New scrolling ad
Friday, December 9, 2005
If you’re using a free blogtricks account, you’ll probably have noticed the new scrolling ad format that just went up. It took a lot of work to make that play well with other sites — and honestly I’m not 100% sure we did a perfect job. I’m trolling sites to make sure it does ok, but if the layout of your site is messed up, please drop us a note and I’ll get it taken care of. As always, feedback is appreciated — remember you can get rid of the ads completely by becoming a subscriber, which at $10 a year isn’t too onerous.
So far I’m loving my new home at Adhost— they provide solid service and I feel much more confident that they give a hoot about me than I did while at Savvis. Thanks guys!
Always happens on vacation
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Or maybe I’m just always on vacation — no, if only that were the case. Anyways. On Thanksgiving evening blogtricks completely died, just as we were packing to go downtown for our annual start-Christmas-with-the-Nutcracker extravaganza. Needless to say I did not have sufficient tools at my disposal on the trip to make things better.
We should be good to go now. I actually took advantage of the fact that things were completely broken to move the machine to its new home (remember back in March when I said that was “imminent"?) at AdHost Internet, a great bunch of people I thoroughly recommend for colocation. I will be watching closely as I’m not ready to totally declare victory yet.
As an aside, my family and I missed this wonderful monorail crash by one ride, it appears. Quite exciting stuff.
Taskable OPML and RSS Browser
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Been quiet for awhile — a good thing in some ways, because it means blogtricks has been trucking along with very few problems. Yay!
I’ve released a new freeware toy — Taskable is a tiny app that lives in the Windows taskbar and gives you always-on, instant access to your favorite RSS, Atom and OPML feeds. It’s not really meant to replace existing feed readers; it just gives you a different way to get at the information you use most frequently. So far people seem to really like it, which is pretty neat to see.
Anyways, please take a look, and let me know what you think! There’s a bunch more info and an installer on the homepage.
Dare I say it?
Friday, May 20, 2005
OK, things have been up and down here since March … lots of heavy load on the system (plus a nice little hack episode) and I’ve been trying to fix it with configuration tweaks to the database. Bottom line — didn’t work at all. So finally I sat down and rewrote the app to be a gentler database citizen, and was able to make things much, much better. In fact, I think we should be in good shape for some time. Now I can concentrate on moving the stupid box and maybe adding a couple of new tricks to the pile. Any ideas?
Anyways, thanks for your patience and for keeping me posted; the error reports were very helpful in getting me closer to the root cause of the issues. Woo-freaking-hoo if this is finally behind us!
Maintenance … done!
Friday, April 29, 2005
Doing a bit of analysis here so I’ve taken the server offline — don’t want to have it hang your sites. Things should be hunky dory soon. Thanks!
Update … done!
affiliate tricks
Wednesday, April 6, 2005
More and more affiliate programs are offering dynamic feeds of their products and promotions. I’ve created a new affiliate trick page as a home for tricks that take advantage of these feeds. Right now there’s one for Orbitz and one for products from Overstock.com Auctions; as I get the time I’ll add more. Not only is no code required to use the tricks, but the content is always up to date without any hassle on your part. The still-undocumented transform trick rides again!
AmazonSaver!
Friday, April 1, 2005
Move is still happening, but lots going on here and probably won’t happen until next week. In the meantime, I invite the Windows users among you to try out my new screen saver … “AmazonSaver” explores categories and Listmania lists at Amazon and shows the large images for what it finds. It was a lot of fun to make (refreshed my ancient GDI skills!) and is a surprisingly addictive way to find new titles.
