The domains are coolpetvideos.com (great if you are in the pet sector) and mojoslam.com (currently a humor type site). Both domains are over a year old. If you are interested in either (or both) of these domains, email me: billfutreal AT gmail DOT com and we’ll talk. These domains will be available with or without the associated wordpress databases.

But if you are into the world of Tribute Artists, go ahead and visit and sign up now - get in early!

So here’s a cell phone pic my daughter took.  Inserted into this post using the "Insert Picture" action in Live Writer.

After publishing this new page, where does the image go?

RESULTS:  Windows Live Writer handles the image upload the same as the native WordPress posting interface.  Cool!

So I’m trying out Windows Live Writer from my laptop.  My first impression is pretty good.  Sometimes folks find it fashionable to slam Microsoft products, but Live Writer is going to get a good look from me.

But I read about Ruby - Ruby on Rails - I see the code snippets, I read blogs…it’s a beautiful language and seems to bring out a new fresh approach to solving problems.

So I’m going to start playing with Ruby. I have quite a few projects on tap and Ruby seems like an excellent choice. Now, the easiest way to learn a new language is to simply write code in it, look stuff up and basically just learn as you go. A piece of one of the projects I have in mind is to utilize Google Hottrends in a mashup sort of way.

The first step is to read the Hottrends page and store the data. I have SQLLITE on my laptop so that’s where the data will be stored.

So, my first actual Ruby program. I’m sure its quite rough and a real Ruby guru would do it so much better but this is for learning and it does work. Simply scraping Hottrends using an XPATH expression and then storing a few pieces of info into a SQLLITE table (avoiding storing duplicate terms).

Here’s the code - beautifully concise and readable!

# hottrend-scraper
# 1/31/2008
# Extract anchor text from Google hottrends
# Store all anchor text strings into sqlite db

require 'rubygems'
require 'open-uri'
require 'hpricot'
require 'sqlite3'

@url = "http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends"
@response = ''

begin
  # open-uri RDoc: http://stdlib.rubyonrails.org/libdoc/open-uri/rdoc/index.html
  open(@url, "User-Agent" => "Ruby/#{RUBY_VERSION}",
    "From" => "",
    "Referer" => "") { |f|

    puts "Fetched document: #{f.base_uri}"
    puts "\t Content Type: #{f.content_type}\n"
    puts "\t Charset: #{f.charset}\n"
    puts "\t Content-Encoding: #{f.content_encoding}\n"
    puts "\t Last Modified: #{f.last_modified}\n\n"

    # Save the response body
    @response = f.read
  }

  # open database
  db = SQLite3::Database.new( 'scrapedata.s3db' )

  # HPricot RDoc: http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/
  doc = Hpricot(@response)

  # Pull out hottrends anchor text - stuff into database but don't stuff in duplicates
  (doc/"//td[@class='hotColumn']//table[@class='Z2_list']//td//a”).each do |anchor|
     anchortext=anchor.inner_html
     count = db.get_first_value(”Select count(*) from gtrends where scrapetext=’#{anchortext}’”)
     if count.to_i==0
     	puts “INSERTING #{anchortext}”
     	db.execute(”INSERT INTO gtrends (scrapetext) VALUES(’#{anchortext}’)”)
     end
  end
 db.close
rescue Exception => e
  print e, “\n”
end

As an added bonus Mark has a video up on YouTube showing how easy it is to use this thing:

The power of the web and the power of mashups at work!

If you’re on Facebook, connect with me.

I’m starting to use Facebook more each day - it’s a nice networking tool.

We mainly set it up for internal use on twitter but decided to make it public.

So try it out and use it for yourself. You’ll find it pretty handy.

The site is called Go 2 URL (g2url for short). Permanent short URL redirects - free for you to use.

Any questions?