JoeBlogs – Typo in dummy URL fixed

I’ve recently had a few comments that the JoeBlogs wrapper wasn’t working – and they were getting an “invalid response” or more specifically “Response XML not valid XML-RPC – missing methodResponse element.”

It seems that I had a typo in my comments in JoeBlogs.TestHarness/Program.cs on line 15:

//typically http://www.yourdomain.com/xmlprc.php (if your wordpress blog is installed in root dir)

The problem, is the xmlprc.php – this should be xmlrpc.php.

Those of you that copy pasted / uncommented out that line, would be executing requests against a file that didn’t exist on your server!

I’ve changed this typo, and committed to Codeplex: revision #27138

Thanks to Felix for pointing this out!

Tags: c#, JoeBlogs

Web 2.0 Logo Collage!

I found this MASSIVE collage of Web 2.0 logos by AJ Batac

Certainly beats trawling through go2web20.net (as good a site as that is, it just takes too long!!)

He has made all the logos available on t-shirts and other apparel:
http://www.cafepress.co.uk/eggnyte

(click to view full image)

Tags: graphics, logo, Web 2.0

Web 2.0 Logo Generators

  As a bit of a follow on from my review of the AJAX web 2.0 style waiting image creator I reviewed some time ago, I found a couple of Web 2.0 logo generators:

http://www.simwebsol.com/ImageTool/

This is the more “basic” of the two generators I tried.
Can add a “badge” to your logo, but you have to choose from a list of icons.
Here’s the result:

Quite nice.

http://creatr.cc/creatr/

Straight away you can see this is a more “advanced” tool.

There are many more styles to choose from, and you can specify the text in the badge – although this is limited to just the text. It would be better if I could adjust the size / colour.

Here’s the result:

Obviously, this is only for someone who is either

1. really lazy
2. has no idea how to use Adobe Illustrator / Photoshop
3. can’t be bothered to create a decent logo at the moment

I currently fall into #3.
As such, I made my logo on this blog a variation of the logo created with the more basic tool. I guess i just like the font more! But not the crappy “beta” badge.

I’ll get round to re-doing this entire site at some point…..

Here’s the settings I used:

 

 

The result:

Tags: generators, grap, logo

Yahoo Term Extractor API Discontinued

A couple of days ago Yahoo announced two of its search services will be discontinued on August 31st 2009.

Annoyingly, one of those is the Term Extraction API
Which means my Windows Live Writer Auto Tag Generator plug-in will simply cease to work.

Important Announcement: The Term Extraction Web Search service will be discontinued on August 31, 2

So, what can you do.

Well, according to a few posts on twitter, Zemanta seems like a suitable replacement.

I’ll check this out, and write up a post on it soon, in the mean time, there’s an introduction here.

Tags: API, windows live writer, yahoo

Reverse GeoCoding with Google API and C#

I needed to write a function to get a set of co-ordinates from an address, supplied as a string.
Using the Google API, I came up with this:

First, I created a struct, to represent the lat and lon co-ordinates:

public struct Coordinate
{
	private double _latitude;
	private double _longitude;

	public Coordinate(double latitude, double longitude)
	{
		_latitude = latitude;
		_longitude = longitude;
	}

	public double Latitude { get { return _latitude; } set { _latitude = value; } }
	public double Longitude { get { return _longitude; } set { _longitude = value; } }
}

This is a simple representation of a set of latitude and longitude co-ordinates.

The main method, which returns the above Coordinate struct is:

public static Coordinate GetCoordinates(string address)
{
	using (var client = new WebClient())
	{
		Uri uri = YOUR_URI_HERE;

		/* The first number is the status code,
		* the second is the accuracy,
		* the third is the latitude,
		* the fourth one is the longitude.
		*/
		string[] geocodeInfo = client.DownloadString(uri)		.Split(',');

		return new Coordinate(
			Convert.ToDouble(geocodeInfo[2]),
			Convert.ToDouble(geocodeInfo[3]));
	}
}

On line 5, you need to specify your Google API URL, in the format of:

http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=ADDRESS GOES HERE&output=csv&key=YOUR KEY HERE

And that’s it!

Obviously, there are usage restrictions when using the Google API for this, as outlined on the documentation pages

Tags: API, c#, Google