Nafurai » Content Creation

Feedburner Top List

maurizio — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 14:24:14 +0000

New version of my stats page with the Feedburner Top 100 list.

595710 http://techcrunch.com
230887 http://www.elise.com/recipes
177958 http://FreeiTunesSongs.blogspot.com
137295 http://itotd.com/
128087 http://www.mashable.com

As you can see from the list, this time there isn’t any cheater..at least not in the top 10. I am surely missing some blog because I still use a dumb way to check if it’s a feedburner user. In the next weeks I’m planning to use another trick. Right now I have only 13000 Feedburner users out of more than 381000 blogs.

I notice JohnChow and Shoemoney on the list..I think I’ll track their effort since they are having a RSS competition.

Since JC is giving away prizes to have more subscribers, I have to post his feed here to be part of his competition. I’m adding Shoemoney RSS feed too (JC forgot to mention to not link it. :D )
John Chow RSS Feed
Shoemoney RSS Feed

Stay tuned for a chart of their efforts..

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Blog Goals

maurizio — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 11:14:45 +0000

Some days ago a friend of mine was asking me why I am working with those Cancer data. He probably feels sad to read stuff about illnesses and he doesn’t like me speaking about it. So here I am explaining why I write about it.
As I said before, I’ve read an article about Cancer and I wanted to read more statistics about it. I wasn’t thinking about the possible benefit of making people aware of the problem. I was thinking more about my blog goals. The same reason that made me subtitle the blog “build your own internet”. I want people to continuously think about creating content for their blog with self build applications.

If you see a list, you should wonder on how to put it on your website; if you are creative, you want to show the list in a different way and maybe be able to easily update it. No one really want to write a list every time some small data changed.

The solution is to create a small application that will help you doing it. You don’t need to know how to do that (in the beginning). You just need to be able to plan to do that.

Then you can ask me for help..

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Cancer Update

maurizio — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 12:34:12 +0000

I am now able to show some data on screen. Using data taken from CANCERMondial I can draw a world map with different colours depending on the cancer rate. I would have loved to have accesss to Google Analytics’map, which should be almost perfect for this kind of stuff. Unfortunately I haven’t found a map like that on the net. The perfect map should have even better separations like sub states or regions (ie. California is a sub state of USA).

I was thinking to publish it now but I still have to find out how to print all the acknowledgment. On the site they states:

The data extracted from this website are in the public domain. You may use it “as is” but must cite the corresponding reference. While there should be no restrictions on the use of information published in CANCERMondial , users are asked to acknowledge the original data providers, and the CANCERMondial web-page address: http://www-dep.iarc.fr/ .

Which means I have to publish their site AND acknowledge the original data providers, which in my case are all the data providers, because I represent the whole world.

Anyway if for some supernatural reason you know (or you are) a cancer researcher, please let me know because I need some help to understand the data.

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Beta Update

maurizio — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 12:20:10 +0000

Today I will add a couple of feature to my beta tag search, but first of all I have to correct some bugs. The most annoying is with numebers tags. There are some tags with slash inside and of course the slashes are seen as separators and not as part of the tag so I get blank pages (Google Webmaster tool found them for me :-) ).
A second issue is that the numbers page doesn’t have a template..ops :-)

The big issue is with chinese/japanese/whatever tags. I am using UTF8 to print every kind of character. I can see on my database arabic/indian characters as well, but I still see some problem with the representation on screen/html. I am not sure now if the problem is due to old datas on the db or what else. One thing is sure: I have to read some pages again because some of them are not using UTF8 and thus I don’t recognize/convert their characters.

The thing is I don’t want to read again 300.000 sites just for that..what happens if I discover some other issue? (Actually I already have one. A lot of people who’s using feedburner, forgot to convert the html tag for RSS feeds so basically they have two feeds: internal one and feedburner one. Do not feel upset if your RSS subscriber’s number isn’t that hight on feedburner then) Anyway that is a good reason to start to cache pages on my server so I can easily read them again if I have to.
I want to do that but I was thinking to rewrite the crawler part, this time using Python. I don’t know python very well, but I see that a lot of companies (see Google) is using it for their crawlers. This could be a good opportunity to improve my CV and (finally) get a job. :-)

I was even planning to save how many times links are clicked, just to add another parameter to the classification of sites. Let me know what do you think. (I will probably build some kind of widget to monitor site usage like MyBloglog/Technorati/whatever so people can use it to rank better here)

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