Night Dreaming (by Sudar)

I had some free time this weekend and I used it to create my second Google Gadget called called FeedBurner stats. (By the way my first gadget was Bloglines Notifier, which notifies the count of unread items in your Bloglines account). It uses FeedBurner Awareness API to fetch the subscriber count of your FeedBurner feed and displays it using Google Charts API.

The full source code of this gadget is available here and if you are interested you can add it to your Google personalised page by clicking this button.

After you add the gadget, you just need to enter your FeedBurner feed URL. The gadget will fetch the subscriber count for the past one week and will display it in a nice bar graph using Google Charts API.

API’s used

The following are the API’s used for creating this gadget

• Google Gadget API
• FeedBurner Awareness API
• Google Charts API

Tags: FeedBurner, Google Charts, Google Gadgets, stats

When I published my year end stats, little did I know that numbers alone doesn’t matter much, unless they are presented in an easily-to understand manner.

So here I am representing the same numbers but in a much more understandable manner, with some support from the excellent Google Chart API, which I learned during pipesCamp.

Number of posts

You could see that the number of posts has almost dropped by 40% in 2007. There were 64 posts in 2006 where as only 38 in 2007. One reason for this is that lot of unexpected things happened in my personal life which took me away from the computer and the other reason is that I got busy and free time became a rare commodity for me. So this is an area where I should improve.

Number of comments

Again, as with the number of posts, the number of comments was also less by around 40%. There were 394 comments in 2006 but only 220 in 2007. This also includes my own comments; maybe I should represent my comments separately.

Average number of characters in posts

This graph clearly shows that average number of characters in my posts. Even though I have written fewer posts in 2007, the average number of characters has increased, which is good (which also means that I have become very talkative ). This is very good and is also motivating. In 2008 I should keep up the length of the posts and at the same time should also try to increase their number.

Total number of characters in posts

This graph clearly shows that even though I have written fewer posts, I have almost written the same amount of characters in 2007 when compared with 2006, which is again motivating.

I have really become addicted to stats now and will try to dig more deep into my blog to unearth other valuable information when I get some time. This explains why everybody was soo fascinated by Yuvi’s cool graphs.

Meanwhile you can also publish your yearend stats by using my Year End Stats WordPress Plugin. So what does your yearend stats speak about your blogging habit? Please leave a link to your yearend stats in the comments so that I can have a look at it.

PS: I would really love to see how Yuvi has scaled up this year. May be Yuvi, do it when you find time in between your exams.

Tags: Google Charts, stats, WordPress

As planned, I attended pipesCamp yesterday and it was really worth the time spent. As planned, I took Yuvi with me and he started to click his camera on the way itself, and he got some 35 - 40 snaps before we could reach there. (Yuvi, I know that your computer has crashed, but I am waiting for your photos to appear in Flickr as soon as possible. )

I meet lot of cool people there and true to the unconference style we had a couple of presentations about Yahoo Pipes (and some slides from the official Yahoo pipes team itself) and then some open discussions about pipes and blogging in general.

Then towards the end of the day we had “hackday” kind of competition and we were given 60 minutes to design/code a pipe and then 3 minutes to demonstrate the demo. Myself, Yuvi and Harish got together and created a pipe called “Ego Search“. (Harish, thanks for the laptop )

Ego Search is a pipe for finding out how popular you are on the web, based on search results from popular search engines. The popularity chart is drawn based on the number of search results that point to your blog or domain name for your name. And if your name is say ‘xyz’, a 100 point popularity rating on the graph says that you are the most populous ‘xyz’ that the search engine knows. You can try out the pipe in this url http://pipes.yahoo.com/sudar/egosearch. We also had some great pipes like MTC Mashup created by other cool people.

On the whole the first ever pipesCamp went very well. I will post links to photos and videos once they are available.

By the way anyone planning for the first ever WordCamp in India?

Tags: Events/Camps, Pipes, Yahoo

I didn’t have much to do last weekend and so I thought of giving a try to Google Gadget and ended up developing my first Google Gadget - Bloglines Notifier. As the name implies it will notify you the count of unread items in your Bloglines account. (Nothing special just a trivial one )

You need to enter your Bloglines account email id and it will retrieve the unread count using the Bloglines API and display it in the Gadget screen. The count will be automatically refreshed according to the interval set in the Gadget settings. Since Bloglines doesn’t need you to be authenticated before retrieving the unread count you don’t need to enter your Bloglines account password.

The Google Gadget API is very simple to start with but at the same time very powerful if you need to do complex or advanced things. If you are interested grab the Google Gadget API Developers Guide and get started. It’s actually that simple.

The full source code of this Gadget is available here and if you are interested you can add it to your personalized page by clicking this button.

Now I can have one icon less in my system tray. BTW if you guys have a nice idea for a Gadget, let me know I shall give a try.

Resources Used

• Google Gadget API Developer Guide
• Bloglines Developer API

Tags: API's/Webservices, Bloglines, Gadgets, Google, Google Gadgets, Notifier

Thanks to Wes (Trafic Transit) King Ping now has a new logo now. The new logo looks cool and fits the design very much. Check out the logo at KPing.com.

Here is Fred’s comment about this.

Got a suggestion / Feedback / Comment / Feature Request, let us know we would be glad to hear that from you.

Tags: KingPing

Last week I asked you people to suggest some good AJAX libraries and I also gave you a hint, saying that I am currently working on a pet project. Ok now its time to reveal that pet project. It’s actually an AJAX version of a ping service hosted by Fred.

People at Diva Marketing helped us to get a good name for our service and it was christened as King Ping. Currently it is pinging around 18 ping services and has its own domain at KPing.com. More features to come. You could find more info about it, in the about page.

So guys have a look at the King Ping and do let me know your suggestions, comments, feedbacks or feature requests. You can either leave them here or at Fred’s Blog or drop me an email

Happing Pinging

PS: If you blog about King Ping then tag them with “KingPing“

Tags: AJAX, BlogTool, KingPing