Jan 29
2010

I apol­o­gize for the recent down­time, which also affected the Clip­pable bookmarklet’s abil­ity to work. Dreamhost has been pretty awful with down­time lately, and my attempt to switch to a dif­fer­ent phys­i­cal server resulted in a hor­ri­ble mess for myself and sev­eral clients. I have to say that Dreamhost sup­port was extremely help­ful in repair­ing the sit­u­a­tion… their sup­port is the main rea­son I’ve stuck with them through the 4 hours of down­time I’d had up to that point. I’m not sure I’ll be able to swal­low much more, but we’ll see if things run as smoothly as they’ve promised from here on out.

In other news, I have a new ver­sion of the Songza ser­vice–one that doesn’t require any addi­tional libraries–which I’ll post soon. A cou­ple of other lit­tle projects are in the works, includ­ing a ser­vice that inter­prets nat­ural lan­guage dates for var­i­ous pur­poses. I’m in Atlanta for a week, then I’ll be in San Fran­cisco cov­er­ing Mac­world for TUAW, so it may be a bit, but I’ll be back!

Nov 12
2009

This is a quick and dirty Snow Leop­ard Ser­vice that scrapes Songza.fm to find a song related to your selected text in most appli­ca­tions. It replaces the selected text with an is.gd short­ened link and the name of the first song it found (just to be sure you’re on the same page… lit­er­ally). The code is also avail­able as a Text­Mate com­mand for those inter­ested. Update: Text­Mate com­mand with link selec­tion popup.

The ser­vice (and Text­Mate com­mand) require the Hpri­cot gem for ruby. In most cases, this should be instal­lable from the com­mand line with sudo gem install hpricot. If you see errors, you may need to update some Ruby com­po­nents. Once that’s set, just install the work­flow in ~/Library/Services and it should imme­di­ately start show­ing up in your ser­vices menu. Add a short­cut for it in Pref­er­ences -> Key­board -> Short­cuts -> Ser­vices. Next time you’re tweet­ing or writ­ing an email about a song, why not send a Songza link to back up your point?

Con­tinue read­ing “Songza Lucky Link Service…”