Author Archive

Do your talents lie in crafting crafty CSS? Do you want to have thousands of people see your work? Gada.be is breaking down the design door and letting the greater community in. We are now letting you… anybody design Gada.be with CSS. Submissions will be added to a site-wide, dynamic style-switcher that will let Gada.be users see Gada.be their way - literally! Here’s what to do:

1. Download the Gada.be design template and use your favorite CSS editor to whip up a spiffy new look for our site. We’d recommend TopStyle for Windows.
2. Send your changes to css@gada.be.
3. Wait for your (qualifying) submission to be added to the list. Once added, all visitors will have the option to see and use it immediately.
4. Get traffic - with full name recognition and a link back to your Web site.

Always wanted to change the way search results look on the page? Think you can do better? We’re looking forward to seeing what everybody does! The first five designs accepted will actually receive a full copy of TopStyle!

If you don’t want a white background with Gada.be results, you can change it! Check out the new drop-down menu in the top-right corner of any Gada.be page. Click the link, select a color, then click the link again to close the menu; a cookie will be set on your system, and you’ll be browsing in full technicolor. Kinda.

(1) Yes, we’ve supported RSS from day one (and Atom feeds as well). If you look now, we’ve added RSS icons next to every search feed on Gada.be. How’s that for instant discoverability?

(2) In our logs, we noticed that many people were bookmarking Gada.be searches in their del.icio.us accounts. Even though del.icio.us is still blocking us and not returning our requests for support, we’ve added an “Add to del.icio.us” link at the top of every results page for your convenience.

(3) We now support any kind of XML you care to throw at us. So, even if your service doesn’t output RSS, if you have some kind of API (likely XML-RPC), we can incorporate you into Gada.be in just a few short hours.

I’m generally not a fan of Google’s software (largely because it’s resource intensive on the Windows platform). However, they’ve just released a new beta of the Google toolbar (v4.0), adding one specific feature that you’re going to love. With the latest beta installed, you can now add gada.be to the Google Toolbar. Just click on that link and it’ll automatically be integrated!

Okay, we’ve been silent for a while - but for good reason. I can’t share that reason with you right now, but I hope to be able to do so soon enough. Last night, I stumbled into a site run by Douglas - specifically, a page about Dynamic News Feeds. I flipped out when I saw all the favicons; I love favicons. Immediately, I believed that Douglas had retrieved these icons automatically from the feeds - but that may not have been the case (as evidenced by his favicon tool entry). Moments later, he had pointed me to an offsite script - and then hours later, he had built another one for himself. I showed them to Shayne, and he did something that I have never seen in a search engine:

Favicons next to every headline! 

Go ahead, try a new search in Gada.be. If this is a first, I’m thrilled. If we weren’t the first to pull it off, then at least we’re thinking about taking the favicon script open source - and doing other things with favicons in the future. It’s too much fun (oh, and quite functional).

We’ve been doing a lot with Gada.be behind the scenes, and we’re doing more. Shayne’s been working on an ancillary service that will make Gada.be even better, too. He’s putting a lot of those loose pieces together right now, which is what’s taking us so long to roll anything out. We’d rather be “right enough” than “almost right” when it comes to this stuff. And we’re bold enough to remove the beta label from our site!

Been noticing the conversation around Gada.be’s OPML gaining a bit more traction lately. That’s quite nice to see, actually - and I wanted to encourage more of you to use Gada.be’s automatically-generated OPML in any one of your Web or Desktop applications. No funky APIs - no approval process. Just use our OPML, please. It’s there in every single category (including a hidden “a” category).

• The Lego brick of Web 2.0 - The Gada bug has bitten EirePreneur.

• From Istanbul To Sand Hill Road - Gada.be got a single star next to it, but I’m not sure what that means? Another potential investor? So many VCs, so little [insert something here].

• You Gada.Be Kiddin’ Me - Another VC who has seen the tip of our iceberg. Wait until you see what we’re planning on doing with user registration (trust me, it’ll give everything else a run for its money).

• Taking On Google On It’s Own Turf - One of the best, and most comprehensive reviews of Gada.be to date. Color me very impressed / thrilled. Note: we’re gonna address the Google results with our user accounts, and Yahoo! search works earlier in the day because they’re not allowing us access to their API (neither is del.icio.us). Can’t very well call it Web 2.0 if these other Web 2.0 companies don’t wanna play along?

• BlogBridge - Gada.be and OPML - This is a good start. I’ve asked for better integration, like hand-holding for new users who don’t know of OPML or Gada.be. I implore all aggregator developers to employ a dialog that puts a simple front-end on Gada.be’s OPML generation. It’d be easy to do, I know. Side-Kudos to Nick Bradbury for making Gada.be a default search option in the next FeedDemon.

• Why Do You Tag? My 5 Reasons - “My favourite tagging search tool so far, and perhaps one of these days I might weblog about it some more, is Gada.be. I have been able to search for content through using tags that other much more popular search engines have failed to provide. That, to me, makes tagging quite attractive on its own.”

• I Gada Be Damien Mulley - Another person who understands Gada.be’s desktop *AND* mobile simplicity. I don’t have Irish eyes, but if I did - they’d be smilin’.

• Gada.be is favorite tool for watching event coverage - Glad I don’t have to remind Robert about Gada.be. Of course, I’ve seen him open four browser windows at once to perform a single keyword search. Silly rabbit could’ve done it once and received the top results in a single Gada.be query.

So, play with Gada.be, write about Gada.be, tell us why you like Gada.be. You gada do it.

I’ve been steadily adding new RSS searches to Gada.be over the past few months (as you probably already noticed, we have over 250 unique resources for you to subscribe to easily through our service). I ran across a new OpenSearch option this afternoon - ArtWoo. When I dug a little deeper, I discovered they’re tagging all of their free articles with Gada.be keyword searches. A little love goes a long way, they say - and I want to thank ArtWoo for doing what they’re doing for us! They’re also in our Default and Research categories now, which would have happened (regardless of their support of our efforts here).

Thanks to a Gada.be fanatic (axel), we now have YouTube on our multimedia results page and Slashdot on our Geeky page!

From Rickie Dickie, a passionate OPMLer - pointing out that grazr makes TagJag OPML much more usable on-demand:

Here’s a TagJag / grazr mashup smart bookmarklet for Firefox (right-click and add this link to your Bookmarks). Written as a smartlet - but JUST in case you don’t know what that is, you name the bookmark keyword to something like “tags” and then in the address bar type “tags gnomedex” to browse TagJag’s OPML for that keyword in grazr. I posted HTML embedding script; check out grazr’s site for particulars.

The equiv favelet (bookmarklet) for either IE or Firefox would be something like this:

javascript:d=document;wgS=window.getSelection;dgS=d.getSelection();dS=d.Selection;q=(encodeURIComponent('%s')=='%2525s'?'':'%s')+(wgS?wgS():dgS?dgS():dS?dS.createRange().text:'');if (!q)q=prompt('Enter tag','');open('http://grazr.com/gzpanel?font=Tahoma,sans-serif&fontsize=8pt&file=http%3A//tagjag.com/all/' + q + '/opml');void('rickdog')

This favelet is written to work like this:

• If nothing is selected and there is no smartlet argument on the address line, you’re prompted for a keyword
• If text is selected and there is no smartlet argument, the selected text is the keyword
• If no text is selected but there is a smartlet argument, the argument is the keyword
• If both text is selected and there’s a smartlet argument, they are combined to make a single keyword (smartlet + selected text)

I must also note the new Maxthon TagJag sidebar plugin - which is still getting tweaked. Oh, and Rickie Dickie also grazjag’ed a YubNub!