Web Services | Technology Blog

Shrinkomatic URL Shortening With A Twist

November 26th, 2008

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Ghacks author Daniel Pataki is pretty busy these days with all the new Internet websites and services that he is creating. His latest service is called Shrinkomatic. It is an url shortening service with one interesting unique feature.

But first things first. To shorten an url one would simply head over to the Shrinkomatic website and paste the url in the form on the main page. The service creates a unique short url in the form shrinkomatic.com/xyz which will redirect to the original url. This is definitively not the shortest url for an url shortening service but any name that is easy to remember should be fine for most users because that’s what url shortening is all about.

If you sign up for an account you can manage all the urls that have been created with the service. The list does contain a very nice and maintainable overview of the created urls. It also provides access to statistics detailing how many times the link was accessed (url trackin).

Great Summary Summarizes Web Pages

November 20th, 2008

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Don’t have the time to read a long article on a web page? Then it might be worth to give the Great Summary service a try. The service extracts the most important sentences of a web page and provides them as a summary to the user.

It is pretty obvious that a computerized summary won’t be as good as one from a human. It might still be worth a try if you lack the time or will to read a longish article. A good test text was the CNN article “Five ways to keep Alzheimer’s away”. The expectation for that article was to be presented with a list of the five ways that can keep Alzheimer’s away.

It is up to the user to pick the amount of sentences that should be returned. It can range from 1 to 100. Trying to squeeze a long article in 1 or 2 sentences might fail more often that it would succeed. Selecting 5 or 10 sentences did not reveal the desired information of the Alzheimer article. It did list some of the recommendations but not all of them.

Social Network Status Generator

November 17th, 2008

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Have we come this far already? Desperate times require desperate measures it seems. To impress, one has to be witty. This is especially hard on social networks with millions of other users who want to impress as well.

According to the developers of Generatus their product is ideal for the imaginatively challenged. Generatus is a social network status generator which turns the overly repeated and boring statuses like “Martin is working”, “Drinking Coffee” or “Jim is visiting his grandparents” into something witty and original.

Simplicity was probably the main design idea behind Generatus. Males can simply hit the Generate button while females will have to click on the female to generate female statuses (not sure if there is truly that much difference to justify that, it is probably used to make use of the right grammatical person in the sentences). It is also possible to use tags to get a status that relates to the selected tags.

Flickr Tools Tag Galaxy

September 30th, 2008

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Tag Galaxy is one of the Flickr Tools that visualizes Flickr image browsing utilizing tags and planetary constellations to show their related tags. A search for night for instance displays the related tags light, sky, dark and city rotating around the central tag. The interesting aspect of this display is that a click on any other tag other than the main tag will combine the old tag with the new tag to include only pictures that have been tagged with all tags.

Clicking on the central “star” will close in on that star and fill it with exactly 235 picture thumbnails. The planet can be rotated with the left mouse button and zoomed with the mouse wheel. A click on a preview image will load that image in front, another click will load information about the picture like the name of the artist, a description and a link to the Flickr page.

The Flickr page of the selected photo are loaded in a new tab. The user can use the navigation on top of the screen to load another batch of thumbnail pictures from Flickr which replace the old photos shown on the planet.

Make Me Babies

September 3rd, 2008

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Have you ever wondered how your babies would look like if you would have one with your partner? Now you can find out at the Make Me Babies website. Just upload a photo of yourself and your partner, wait a moment and take a look at a picture that could show your future child. Think it would be pretty funny if the developers of Make Me Babies would get sued by a couple who expected their baby to look like the generated picture but did not.

Could also be a nice way to determine if you are truly the father of a baby.. Sorry, just kidding. The user simply uploads at least one picture and either uploads a second picture or picks the face of a celebrity from the celeb database.

If you ever wondered how your baby with Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Paris Hilton or Johnny Depp would like then here is your change to find it out.

Domain Finder

May 13th, 2008

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Domain Finder is not your usual domain search engine that performs a search on the word that you type in by appending different domain extensions to it. It is also not one of those domain services that append suffixes or prefixes to the domain name. It actually provides a pretty unique domain search.

It searches for domains that make use of both the domain name, subdomains, the extension and directories to create a del.icio.us domain name. In the case of del.icio.us del is the subdomain, icio the domain name and us the domain extension. The creating of those fun names is blazing fast and makes heavy use of Ajax to avoid page loading times.

One thing that’s missing however are actual lookups if the domain name can be registered. Domain finder presents all possible domain name combinations even if they have already been registered.