Yahoo! Site Explorer

Yahoo! has released Site Explorer which allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. View the most popular pages from any site, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page.

WolframTones

WolframTones generates computed music compositions by running a one-dimensional cellular automaton found by searching the computational universe. The pattern this program produces is converted to a musical score.

PHP, caching and the flickr api

PHP, caching and the Flickr api is a simple example using PHP to access and cache requests to the Flickr API. This is the method used to create the flickr world map.

How to survive when Bloglines is down

This morning Bloglines had a problem displaying my news, which made me realize how much I depend on that service. When they’re down I’m stuck, so it’s time to think of a backup plan. First thing I need is a list of all my subscriptions. Bloglines can export them in OPML format, an easy to use format that most aggregators support. Store this somewhere and remember to keep it up to date when you add or remove subscriptions.

Next thing to do is select an aggregator. I’m in favor for a server based aggregator because it’s accessible without installing software, and when I switch between computers it will keep track of the articles I’ve read. One of the services available is Rojo. Import the subscriptions and you’re ready to go.

There’s some inconvenience because this new aggregator doesn’t know which articles I’ve already read, so it may take a while longer to catch up. Remember, you can always mark everything as read and start from scratch. You might be suprised how little you really miss!

There’s one problem though: the e-mail subscriptions. I haven’t found a perfect solution for this. The main problem is that you can’t move these subscriptions because they’re tied to specific e-mail addresses. Perhaps the use of an address from a paid service, like your ISP, is better because there’s money involved. For me it’s not a big problem as I don’t have that much e-mail subscriptions. And maybe it’s time to complain harder when a site only offers their news through e-mail.

The bottom line: think about an exit strategy!

Nederlands Soortenregister

In het Nederlands Soortenregister kun je informatie vinden over de 35.000 soorten van de Nederlandse biodiversiteit.

Jip slaapt

Update: de poes heette eerst even Sproet, maar het is nu Jip.

Simpy

Simpy is a social bookmarking service to save, tag and search your own bookmarks and notes or browse and search other users’ links and tags.

Squares 2

Squares 2, an addictive game in which you have touch the black squares, but stay away from everything red.

Typetester

Typetester is an online application to compare the look of fonts onscreen. The page contains a grid of three columns with a form in each column to set font properties like size, color and alignment. When you somehting in the form text samples in that column are directly updated to show the new setting.

3D calendar

If you want to have a 3D calendar, there’s a webpage where you can create a PDF or PostScript file to print, fold and glue to form a 12 sided calendar.