foomandoonian

I'm not likely to be blogging much this next week or so. It's pretty imperative I be finding a new job, so that's what'll have my full attention. I'll continue to microblog via txt at The Twitter, so I'll hardly be gone at all.

I'm not presenting Website Outlook to you as anything other than a curiosity, but a curiosity it most certainly is. Submit your website domain (or indeed, any other domain) and it returns a valuation. For example, Google.com:

Net Worth : $1.2 Billion
Daily Pageview : 550000000
Daily Ads Revenue : $1650003.16

It also supplies PageRank, backlink count, Dmoz listing and other basic info. I have serious doubts that this has any real bankable value, (the site is full of typos and sloppy writing, so one wonders about the attention to detail behind the calculations) but if you're wondering about the potential value of your web properties, this is an interesting place to start. I'm certainly curious enough to delve a little deeper.

Learn how to use Yahoo Pipes and TwitterFeed to keep your Twitter followers up to date on your latest blog posts and anything else you happen to be up to on the internet.

Step 1: Create a fresh Twitter account

This step is entirely optional. Consider how your followers will react to receiving automated tweets - many will feel like they're being spammed. In the final stage of this guide you will be able to control how many tweets-per-hour get fed to your Twitter account, but I chose to create a separate account. You will need a different email address for each new Twitter account you create, but you should have no other problems.

It's going to be handy to be able to post messages manually to this account. Twhirl makes it easy to manage multiple Twitter accounts. Alternatively TwitterBar lets you post directly from your Firefox address bar.

Step 2: Yahoo Pipes

'Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web' according to the blurb. It's also surprisingly simple to use, so don't be overwhelmed by all the options - we're not going to try anything complicated. If this is your first time watch the quick video 'Learn how to build a pipe'.

You'll need a Yahoo account if you don't have one. When you're all set, click 'Create a pipe' at the top. You should be presented with this:

The menus at the top lets you name your pipe and the left hand menu contains all the modules you can use to create and manipulate your feeds. Lets drag the 'Fetch Feed' module into the main window. Now we'll need an RSS feed. In this example, I've taken my del.icio.us feed. The easiest way to grab the RSS URL is to right click on the link and select 'Copy link location' (or similar, depending on browser). Paste that into our module.

Ta-da. If you select that box and look in the debug window you can see the feed output. Repeat this for all the feeds that you want to broadcast on Twitter.

Now we need to join all these feeds together, using the 'Union' module (under 'Operators'). Then wire the output of that up to the 'Sort' module. Sort should update itself so the dropdown menu has all of the relevant attributes. We are going to sort by item.pubDate in descending order. Wire that up to the 'Pipe Output' module, and we should have a working feed. Click on the screenshot below to take a closer look at what you should have:

Make sure your pipe is saved and click the 'Run pipe...' link at the top. This will take you to a page that displays the appearance of the RSS feed and gives you a multitude of ways to put it to use. We just need to grab the feed from the dropdown menu at the right and keep it handy for step 3...

Step 3: TwitterFeed

Finally, we need to get our RSS feed into Twitter, and this is exactly what TwitterFeed does.
You'll need an OpenID to sign into TwitterFeed. I like ClaimID, but it makes no odds which one you use. I don't think a step-by-step guide is necessary here as the process is so simple: Enter your Twitter login info; your RSS feed and how often you want TwitterFeed to tweet.

I chose to include only the RSS titles in my tweets, and I like my URLs to be shortened with TweetBurner. Consider if you want your automated tweets to have a special prefix so your followers can tell which updates are automated (A good idea, but since I'm using a special account for this, I didn't see the need). Finally, make sure the 'active' checkbox is checked and go ahead and click 'Create'.

Step 4: Wait...

That's it, we're done for now. You may have to wait a while for your first update, and there is no guarantee that every single item in your feed will be tweeted, but I think we're off to a good start.

Check back for part 2 later. In the meantime you're most welcome to subscribe to my RSS feed, or join me on Twitter.

Mixwit simply lets you produce a mixtape out of whatever music you can find via seeqpod, skreemer or just as plain mp3's on the interweb, and embed them as a snazzy widget on your webpage. Well, you can see how cool it looks below...

The process was really simple - just search for tunes and drag the ones you like from the results list to your playlist. I rather liked the default templates, but you can upload your own image to truly customise the look of your tape. I didn't need give out my email address or sign up to anything to produce the widget above, although doing so would let me go back and edit the tape in the future. If you write a music blog, this would make a great sidebar widget.


So, another little service that does something simple, incredibly well.

Just as I was calling it a night, I noticed on Summize that the term Jaiku is trending. From what I can gather, most of the posts are Brazilian and they seem to be dissatisfied with Twitter and leaving en masse for Jaiku. Here is a translation of the results page, updated in real time.

Orgoo describes itself as 'your personal communications cockpit'. In real terms this means that you can send and receive email through multiple accounts, through a single inbox (unless you use free Microsoft or Yahoo webmail). It similarly collates all your IM accounts and uses Joopz to let you send SMS messages (in the US and Canada). The interface is one of the cleanest I have used - It's as polished as Yahoo Mail but with more of the simplicity of Gmail.

TinyURL is the original URL shortener. The service is very simple - take a long URL like:

http://omnomnom.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/chihuahua.jpg

and make a much tinier URL, like: http://tinyurl.com/3qyjpe. TinyURL offers several additional features that are standard for most URL shortener services, including 'preview' links (eg: http://preview.tinyurl.com/3qyjpe) and bookmarklets, so you can streamline the process of creating short URLs.

So that's all pretty simple, right? Why would you want to use one of the many copycat services? Well, as with my other round-ups this one is not going to be comprehensive. Instead, here are a selection of URL shorteners that have some genuine value add. Still too much text? Skip to the end. Enjoy.

is.gd is one of my favourites. It produces some of the shortest URLs (eg. http://is.gd/mdt). Users can see a preview page by appending a hyphen to the URL (eg. http://is.gd/mdt-). You are also free to add any hints you like, after another "/", for example: http://is.gd/mdt/meow.

snipurl, snurl or snipr.com, by contrast with is.gd, makes a simple service seem complicated. They have tons of features, and I hate to do them a disservice, but I wasn't prepared to create an account for something that is so non-critical. If you need Excel integration, RSS feeds, support forums, 'multi snips', privacy keys and tons of other features, check them out. Example url: http://snipurl.com/2atwu.

memurl tries to generate mnemonic URLS, like http://memurl.com/kepumi.

doiop.com lets you pick a keyword (provided you can find a unique one) to produce more memorable URLs: http://doiop.com/flyingrat. It seems short of other features though.

icanhaz.com does the same as doiop, but with extra LOLcat, making for some amusing URLs: http://icanhaz.com/schrodinger. You have the option of entering your email address so you can edit your URLs later, but I could see no way of logging in. Just to be safe, I would advise against it.

moourl.com's unique selling point seems to be 'cuteness'. It also has the option to personalise your URL. http://moourl.com/hownow. And it is cute!

Metamark can also generate custom URLs. A typical URL is http://xrl.us/tortoisefail, but that link will fail unless the user knows to append the password (in this case, add: -fail)

notlong.com is the only one I found that actually uses a custom subdomain, allowing you to create URLs like http://kingarthur.notlong.com. It also, by default, gives you a password to access your stats and manage the URL. One of the neater shortening services!

TweetBurner caters to the Twitter market by giving you stats associated with your account, and making it easy to tweet your twurl (!). Again, the bookmarklet simplifies the process. Typical URL: http://twurl.nl/5wucdf.

HURL.WS is hosted on Google, so won't go down unless Google does. The URLs are not the shortest (eg. http://www.hurl.ws/7y) but it does let you check how many people have clicked through one of your links by appending /hits - for example: http://www.hurl.ws/7y/hits.

urlTea is open source and has some extra funkyness. Typical URL: http://urltea.com/38vd. You can also append descriptive info to the URL after a question mark, http://urltea.com/38vd?like_this.

Finally, LinkBunch does something a bit different and creates a short URL for multiple links: http://linkbun.ch/dw1. It does mean that users have to be routed through a special linkbun.ch page, but there are many useful applications that make this compromise worthwhile.

In conclusion...

Use is.gd to keep it simple and short. Use Tweetburner if you use Twitter. Use notlong if you want the URL to look semi-professional.

TechCrunch on Twitter. Nothing much to add, except the comments are great - in fact I think I'm now sold on the benefits of video commenting.

Muxtape quite simply lets you roll your own mp3 mixtape on the internet to share with others.

As you can see from the main menu on the left, things are kept very simple. Upload your files, rearrange the playlist and rename any tracks you need to, and settings lets you name and caption and associate a colour with your muxtape.

The social networking features are pretty basic too. You can add anyone else's Muxtape to your list of favourites and you can explore a random selection from the front page. Last.fm this is not. Take a look at my muxtape to see the player in action.

A nice alternative is altertone, which is very slick looking and open source, but lacks the minimalism of Muxtape.

One final note worth mentioning is the official Muxtape blog. There was a short service outage over the last few days and this kept the users very well informed - something that Twitter has only just figured out!

We Heart It is a simple image bookmarking site, without the elitism of Ffffound. The service stands out because it keeps things simple and does things well.

After signing up, be sure to add the bookmarklet to your browser. Then it is just a matter of clicking a button, and optionally tagging and writing a comment on the We Heart It site. The tagging makes it easy to find similar images. You can choose to filter out NSFW content and there are rudimentary social networking features, but that in itself is no weakness. There is also the usual RSS feed so you can export your discoveries to your tumblelog or wherever.

I'm going to be writing about several other sites that serve a small niche but do it very well this week, so stay tuned for some more high quality discoveries.