Archive for August, 2006

Google Blog search bookmarklet updated

Sunday, August 27th, 2006

Google blog search stopped auto-prefixing urls with the “link:” operator when you enter them in the search box. A search for something starting with http:// or looking like a domain name, used to be converted automatically in a search for backlinks (for a specific post, or for links pointing urls within a domain).

That’s no longer the case, as you can see in the screenshot, whereas an explicit link:pascal.vanhecke.info still gives the expected result **: (more…)

Posted in Blogging, Google, Search | 1 Comment »

More Direct link versions of Digg Feeds

Saturday, August 26th, 2006

I’ve updated my list of direct link feeds for Digg.  Note: I used this WordPress plugin that inserts a “Digg this” button automatically as soon as your story gets dug (and you get an incoming referral click). 
If you’re a Digg fan, you might also want to check these 2 Digg tools collections and the Digg blog:

Posted in SocialSoftware, Syndication | 1 Comment »

Legal aspects of screen scraping

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006

Is it fair use to extract images and their captions from an online newspaper and republish it? Some considerations that come into play: (more…)

Posted in Syndication, WebWatch | 3 Comments »

Zaza Cartoons RSS feed (screenscraped from www.standaard.be)

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006

Cartoon RSS feeds help to keep up to date with current affairs – and let you smile at the same time.
I’m a fan of the Dutch Fokke and Sukke, a daily cartoon in NRC Handelsblad. They don’t have a feed but somebody called Jarno Peschier at caesar.nl scripted this unofficial feed. It has 290 Bloglines subscribers, I assume that the total number of subscribers (Bloglines having about 1/3d of the market) hovers around one thousand. So I decided to screenscrape De Standaard and script an RSS feed for their daily Zaza cartoon* (more…)

Posted in Syndication, WebWatch | 4 Comments »