HotLinks Blog

Between july and now : disabled the cache system, switched to full utf-8, upgraded to magpierss 0.71.1 and finally added Merlin Mann to the "all star list". Yeah, hotlinks not dead :)

Just updated the footer, checked and fixed broken RSS feeds, added a little cache system to improve performances, added Joshua Schachter and Ross Mayfield to the sources. Next step, clean utf-8 (yep Anne !) support and magpierss update.

Yes, it's official, we are behind the blogmarks.net service. One of our original motivation was to build an HotLinks for everyone, one other was to build an Atom enabled linkblog service. We've just released our API yesterday.

We're looking for some interactions between the two services. Here's the first : a "copy" button (in the bottom right corner of the HotLinks items) that let you add the link to your blogmarks.

What ? You still don't have a blogmarks.net account ? Create one now morron !

You're a del.icio.us addict ? You really don't want to use "yet another bookmarking service" ? We're fine people. Bertier created fo you hot.icio.us, a greasemonkey script that turn the "copy to blogmarks.net" feature into an "add to del.icio.us" one.

Now just enjoy :)

Bertier just released another extension Popup blogmarks.net posting for Hotlinks that turn the link (add to blogmarks.net) into a popup.

1. Go to Hotlinks firefox keyword result page
2. Click on the Live Bookmarks icon on the bottom of the window
3. Subscribe in your Bookmarks Toolbar Folder or elsewhere

You're now an Hot Firefox Links subscriber ... in Firefox.

For a little funny recursivity effect, let blogmark this post :-)

We're looking for a domain name. As u may think, it's a very difficult task.

So what must we do ?

• Change our name ?
• Go ahead with a weird extension ? .to .tk
• Reserve a domain ala ho.tlinks.net ?
• Wait for hotlinks.com at christmas ?

Ideas ? Thoughts ?

I don't know if you've already noticed but Hotlinks items now have true permalinks. Look for the anchor on the bottom right corner !

Since the last post on this blog, I added two friends in the contributor list :

• Clément Hardoüin, a french standard activist known for the CSS Zen Garden Horizental or for the french traduction of the Developing With Web Standards paper
• Michel Bertier aka Tristan Rivoallan, a free software and LAMP guru, web developer too, responsible of the former Snapbot screenshot engine

The new screenshot engine is powered by Benfle.com and is based on a Python/VNC/Firefox machinery. It rocks and it's only in beta stage. Thanx Benoît !

Snapbot (our screenshot engine) will be down for some days.

If you want the screenshots back, you can write an XML-RPC web service.

• method : web.html2png

with 1 parameter :

• url

or 4 parameters :

• url
• screen width
• screen height
• reduction ratio

The service must send directly in response a png image. The size is 146px x 109px in our case (1024x768 with 7 as reduction ratio).

Food for thoughts :

• http://www.hackdiary.com/archives/000055.html
• http://www.burtonini.com/blog/computers/mozilla-thumbnail-20040614.xhtml
• http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/all.html#6%2f14%2f2004%201%3a55%3a00%20PM
• http://www.paranoidfish.org/projects/webkit2png/
• http://www.livejournal.com/users/brad/2015327.html
• http://www.babysimon.co.uk/khtml2png/index.html

... since saturday or sunday.

Sorry for the nuisances. We're working on ...

update (18 june) : fast new server, now fixed :-)

We no longer normalise the "www" in URLs. This "feature" has break too many URLs ... So the last update is a little buggy, sorry ...

Added Kellan, number 45. Kellan is the creator of magpie, the RSS/Atom parser we use here. You can read his post Structuring of a Linkblog which is very interesting.

By the way, we now have 7 "advanced" Atom feeds with the alternate/via/related sheme ... Oh yeah :-)

Thanx to Magpie 0.61, Atom support in HotLinks is now official (but still in beta stage).

We assume Atom feeds respect some guidelines resumed on the LinksLog page from the AtomWiki.

This add some new cool features :

• we now store the "permalink URL" (<link rel="alternate> ) of the items
• and the "via URL" too (<link rel="via> )

Note that we don't handle multiple <link rel="related"> like in Mark's feed for the moment, our architecture actually doesn't permit this ...

If you're switching your links feed to Atom too, leave us a note !

Hotlinks feeds in an Atom fashion on the todo list ...

First, welcome to :

• Nicolas Tehu, number 40
• Charles Miller , number 41
• Matthew M. Boedicker , number 42
• Anne van Kesteren's href , number 43
• Isofarro , number 44

I think we will stop at 50 :-)

Last week, we switched this blog to the incredible Dotclear 1.2b. If you don't know it, take a look. The theme used is DaClear and was designed by Maurice Svay. Good work guys.

Hotlinks now store <dc:subject> from the sources so i hope we'll try to do something with that soon. A nice system with tags ? Maybe ...

Finally, we now entrust our ping to Ping-o-Matic through their XML-RPC interface. It's cool and it works fine. Thanx Matt and Dougal !

• Added some weeks ago François Nonnenmacher's Food for Thoughts, number 38
• Added today Douglas Bowman's (oh yeah!) Recent Links, number 39. Hat tip for Blogger redesign Doug !
• Upgraded to MagpieRSS 0.6(alpha) with experimental Atom support (for Mark Pilgrim feed)

I thinks this was a little to fat ...

Now displaying 12 last hours instead of 24. This could change in the next future.

Result :