Darren Stuart's random stuff

Resolves.me small update

Cleaned up yesterdays post about my new site resolves.me. I used the tumblr iphone app to write it but it removed all the line breaks!

I have just added the compete api to resolves.me.

Now for each domain you get the following information from compete

• Trust level - this is competes version of googles safe browsing api and its pretty nice. It displays Green, Yellow or Red based on if it trusts the site.
• Ranking - the compete ranking for the site (like the alexa rank)
• Monthly Visitors  - this is the last months visitor figures

There are some issues with using compete but I think its a nice to have so thats why I have included it.

The issues are:

• The traffic figures appear to be US only but I could be wrong and its not clear from the docs
• The trust level does not help with small or new sites and you will get a yellow icon. However known bad sites will return red
• The daily limits for the compete api are pretty low. 1000 hits a day and 5 a second, this makes twitter limits look amazing ;)
• Due to the limits I had to build in more caching and also if my limits are used up then I don’t show compete info or links back to them

If you want to use the compete api then its here http://developer.compete.com/. It has some nice libraries ready to go, I used the .net one and was up and running in less than a minute.

I have also started creating a api for the site and will support json and jsonp by the end of the day. Due to the limits on the compete data I will not be sharing that information in the api responses. However it would be easy to implement your own.

Next up I am looking at the Alexa and Yahoo api’s.

UPDATE:

I have finished the JSON api

You can find it here

http://resolves.me/api.aspx

use it like this http://resolves.me/api.aspx?callback=test&url=http://bit.ly/4ZN7QD

important note: the callback parameter is needs to go first if you wish to use it otherwise it gets lost in the url parameter.

Give me a shout if you try out the api. Please note this is not ready for production and if you want to use it then let me know.

New site alert

Currently working on http://resolves.me.

Not ready for primetime and only shared it on Twitter so far…

Features coming will be

• Intergrating with google safe browsing api.
• create an api to allow apps to resolve urls and return a json or XML response.
• Intergrate with digg and other Api’s to show social data on the domain.
• Use my own URL image capturing service.

a look at 2008

well as 2009 is under way I wanted to post something about what I did in 2008.

Here it is.

Projects that I completed for fun:

http://justaddme.com - a social widget

http://crowdstatus.com - a place to group twitter people

songs and me - a twitter like application for posting what your current fav song is. I decided that once it was up that I was not in love with it so pulled it.

http://diystartupnews.com - converted a wordpress blog to a user generated news source for startup related news.

I also setup a couple of other blogs for friends and really enjoyed working in wordpress 2.7

Professional work in 2008:

Stuartmedia - my web development company

Nokia - 6 months working on Comes With Music

brayleino - contracting web dev work

Skills I learnt:

ActionScript 3 (flex)

Siverlight 2

.net MVC

Cocoa/Obj-C

jquery

So what for 2009:

hopefully a lot more releases than I managed this year. I have updated versions of most of my projects that need to be released.

Crowdstatus is changing a lot, the new version has more sources not just twitter, it has new widgets and also a ton of stuff I am not ready to discuss in public just yet.

Justaddme is also due a massive update, I have most of it done but I have decided to throw it all a way and take a day to code it from scratch. There are some really good new widgets in the new version and hopefully a way to earning money from it.

I have a couple of adobe AIR based apps in the works too so when I get some time I will apply some polish and release em.

As I spent 08 playing with mobiles and html on them I have decided that 09 I will spend more time doing applications. iphone games and andriod games are in the works with  other talented folks.

Along with all these things mentioned I am actually working on other stuff I hope to release shortly. I am addicted to twitter at the moment so they are twitter themed.

Damn!

I completely forgot that I turned on twitter in tumblr. What a pain, I wish I hadn’t as there is no easy way to delete them all.

Anyway I have a new design for darrenstuart.com and I think I am going to move back to a wordpress blog and have this tumblr as a place for stuff that does not belong on my blog.

The new blog will use a grid based design with some sprinkles of jquery to make it a little more interesting.

stay tuned.

working on justaddme.com new design and features.

testing 123…

I think this downturn could make it an ideal time for companies to convert us expensive contractors to the darkside :p

wow how did it become 7pm already! on the plus note I am almost there with the gnip intergration into crowdstatus.