Simpy Chichimichi

Here is a little insight into how fast Jason Calacanis works. He recently left a comment on a pretty old post of mine XXX, so I decided to check the logs and see how Jason got there. Here are the excerpts from the logs, plus some comments. I replaced the real IP with a fake one. Note the times of each request.

Jason uses Firefox 2.0 and Windows NT 5.1 (ouch, old!). His browser immediately fetches 2 flavours of Simpy feeds, Atom, and RSS 2.0. I didn't know Firefox did that! Nice, just hit my already smoking servers:

13 seconds later, he is already on the next post, Alexa Spike Anomaly:

About 60 words and exactly 16 seconds later, he moves on to the comments section of the post he just read:

63 seconds later, he posts his comment. This step is the longest step, even though his comment is pretty brief (and in fact what he described didn't explain the Alexa anomaly):

Total time: 1 minute and 32 seconds! Not bad for 4:30 AM (EST)!

Conclusions? Jason is on the cutting edge browser-wise, although he could use a new computer/OS. He reads articles that mention him, and he reads them thoroughly (remember, he got to this blog by following the last link in the "See Also" section at the end of the article about him). He stays up very late, probably to catch up on his reading (sounds sadly familiar). He reads pretty quickly, but he could work on commenting faster, although that 63 second delay might have as well been caused by this dog-slow blog server. Being Jason Calacanis is a LOT of work!

Enough of this, it's starting to sound like Valleyvag.

Firefox 2.0 is not the only web browser that can auto-discover how a site can be searched (see Firefox 2.0 Open Search Discovering Simpy). Have a look at the screenshot below:

That's right, the newly released Internet Explorer 7 knows how to make use of Open Search to discover how a site can be searched. Go ahead, add that Simpy Search to your IE7 toolbox!

 # get and store links in files matching a query
 client = SimpyClient('user', 'passwd')
 links = client.getLinks( {'limit':20, 'q':'+tags:"programming" +tags:"trails"'} )
 for i, link in enumerate(links):
     s = urllib2.urlopen(link.url)
     if s is not None: file(str(i)+".html", 'w+').write(s.read())
     else: print "URL "+link.url+" was not handled

Clients in Java, Ruby, PHP, and Perl are available at the SimpyTools project. Thanks, Benjamin!

Just as two new players (see Alexa Gets Competition) entered the market in which Alexa has been the only (free) player for years, the folks at Alexa gave its service a nice facelist. Instead of me describing it, go have a look. Looks nice, doesn't it? Does it remind you of another service? Similar looking charts? Alexaholic maybe? Here is the same data from Alexaholic, so you can compare. Ron Hornbaker, the man behind Alexaholic, should be flattered.

Amazingly enough, Alexa's own blog doesn't mention this yet. As a matter of fact, Alexa's home page is kaput at the moment.

If you are not using Firefox 2.0 yet, you should have a look at Firefox search plugin for Simpy, but if you are an early Firefox 2.0 user, keep reading.

The new Firefox 2.0 extension for Simpy is not the only new thing that came with the recent release of Firefox 2.0. Many, many moons ago Simpy's pages carried the little markup that could tell "intelligent" browsers how Simpy can be searched. Until recently, the main-stream browsers didn't do anything with this information. With Firefox 2.0 release, this finally changed! When a person visits any page Simpy with Firefox 2.0, the browser will automatically discover how Simpy searches are done (i.e. what the format of Simpy's search URL is) and will make it possible for the person to search all public bookmarks on Simpy!

But it doesn't end there! Once you are on Simpy.com, starting a new search is easy. This also lets you to search all Simpy's public bookmarks from within your browser, without having to go to Simpy.com first. With this you are searching people's pre-filtered, tagged, and annotated bookmarks!

How does this work? Via something called Open Search. The screenshot below (click to enlarge) show you how to add "Simpy Search" to your Firefox 2.0 browser.

This shows you how Firefox 2.0 automaticlaly discovered "Simpy Search" and offered you to add it to the list of search engines to search from your Firefox browser. By clicking on the little arrow next to the search box in the top-right of your browser, you will open a menu with "Add Simpy Search" being one of the options.

Once you add "Simpy Search" to your Firefox 2.0 browser, you can search Simpy directly from the browser. The screenshow below shows what the search box looks like when you set Firefox to use Simpy for searching. The little Simpy logo left of the search box shows that you are searching Simpy.

Apparently, that time has come! I just learned about two sites that offer data similar to that offered by Alexa: Compete and Quantcase. I've played with both of them, and they give some interesting data. For example, here is information about Simpy.com from Compete and from Quantcast. One major drawback that both of these services have is their focus on the U.S. I imagine this limitation will go away eventually, and data plus reports will start reflecting the picture of the whole world. In the mean time, I'm continuing with Simpy Internationalization. I hear German, Chinese, and Portuguese might be coming soon.

By the way, you can see Andu's name on Simpy contributors page. If your name should be there, but it is not, please let me know.