I wanted this site ( single page) to load faster without any complications. I’ve just put the IP of the visitor and a small JS to copy the IP to your clipboard.

Snapshot of ItismyIP.com

I think,  I’m far better this time in choosing my domain name..I’ve seen around 100 hits already in a day without much doing from my side. So I added my adsense today to it.. Hope it gives me back the 10 USD within this year.

I know there are ‘n’ number of popular sites giving this service. But I’m thinking of something different that would help me have my share of traffic. Any suggestions welcome in this regard…!

Have a look here and do share your comments..

I added one more switch to my script ‘S’. It accepts the keywords and searches the YouTube for related videos. Now my scripts usage is like

This helps a lot for me now. Just I trigger something like

C:\Videos> Cscript yt_dl.vbs S 10 Sachin Warne

It downloads 10 videos related to Sachin & Warne from the YouTube.

Hope this improvement helps. The only limitation (atleast that I’ve noticed) is it can download the maximum number of 20 related videos. Please do share your comments.

The modified version can be downloaded here.

    You need to be online to watch a video from YouTube. It also supports buffering. That’s the video can be buffered when connected to the internet and watched offline. (This has helped me to watch so many videos when I’m not connected). But the pain part is if you close the browser, the buffered content is lost. You again have to connect to internet to watch the same video clip.

    Why not we download it and have it offline? I googled and found some websites that provide this service. You tell them the video you need, they give you the download link after sometime. You can download it. But you get this service at the cost of advertisements and annoying popups. There is a plug-in available for Firefox users. Still IE users don’t have any options. All I wanted was to download many video clips in a single shot. The only option was to code myself!

    I chose VBscript as I don’t need any more software installation necessary for this to run. Almost all the Windows comes with the scripting support. Hence I can run my VBscript anywhere even in the Cyber-cafes. It supports two switches currently. Either I can directly supply the list of URLs of videos I want when I’m calling it or I can provide a text file with list of URLs. Something like

When you call the script with ‘U’ switch you can provide the URLs directly. Something like

YT_DL.VBS U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMYw8SodMWQ, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRMyR8BJ74A

When you call the script with ‘F’ switch you can just provide a path to text file which contains the list of URLs

    YT_DL.VBS F url_list.txt

    The main advantage of the script is that you can just create a list of videos you want and put in a text file and pass it on to the script with ‘F’ switch. It downloads and saves them in the same folder with the title of the videos as the file names. You are done with a single command. No waiting, No popup and it can run on your background. You need not even bother about it.

    Please note, when you running this script for the first time, you will (most probably) get an error message stating, “msxml3.dll: Access is denied”. Don’t worry, it’s a security catch. You need to add http://youtube.com to your list of trusted sites. For this go to the ‘Internet options àSecurity tabà select Trusted and click the ‘Sites..’ button. There you add http://youtube.com. Now run your script. You won’t have any issues.

    Once downloaded, you can play those .FLV files using FLV players available over the web for free. You can download one from here. Hope you find this script useful. You can use it and modify it in the way you want. If you have any issues or suggestions, please let me know. Have fun and do share your comments here.

The script can be downloaded here.

    Here it depicts the total gross and net sales value of the organization for different category of product and services (ERP & SERVICE here) for different quarters of the year. Let’s say the ERP system of this organization exposes and API that gives this data in some XML format. For example check this XML. Something like below

    Now we’ve the charting APIs from Google (what they don’t provide man….. J ). It provides a powerful set of APIs with lots of options that can produce different type of charts. Please check the Google Charts for further details on the API. Now we have the different services available – viz Data provider and the Chart creator. It’s now time to Mashup them into a more useful UI. I’ve read the data from the xml using an xml parser and fed the same data to the chart API from Google. What we get is a beautiful graph plotted against our enterprise data.

    It’s quite simple with Mashup. Otherwise, we need to run our charting machine which is a overhead in many ways. The above chart depicts the sales in millions (y axis) and against the various quarters (x-axis). The same data can be plotted against a map to depict the geographical distribution of the sales as I showed in my last post. For creating a Mashup there is no limits. It completely depends on the creativity and the requirement of the situation.     There are N number of services and more number of service providers available over the web. Hence the theoretical limit of Mashups is infinite. Out of Infinite probabilities possible, lies the base and secret for the interactive and efficient UI which form the basics of Web 2.0.

The complete source code of the above example can be downloaded here. For using this, just unzip the archive into your webserver and set the parameters in the conf.mysql.php and use the qsales_table_def.sql file to create the table. To see this in action check this link. Hope this gives a better idea of what a Mashup can do. Share with me your views on this.

Writing any Mashup involves the following steps /actions

• Deciding what to write (choose a topic)
• Deciding the data stores (service providers like Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Hostinfo …etc)
• Look for necessary APIs exposed them

Once you are at this point, you can really ‘Mashup ‘ you data to provide your end user a creative user-interface. Now, I’ll take an example and go through the above steps and finally come up with a Mashup widget. I’d try to create a ‘Geo-IP-Map’. It’d show the end-user position (place) on the map. It can be embedded on any web page. I’ve just embedded it in my own sidebar.

For producing this I need the following data

• The Map’s base data
• The latitude and longitude of users’ present location
• The City / Country / Geographical location of the user
• The IP of the end-user

I’ve given the data in the top-down order. Now let’s decide the data store provider for each of the data required

Now you have the API and the data store ready. Both of the above data stores I’ve used require you to register with them for receiving the API key. This requirement varies with the data providers. Now you have this ready, you can just put things in place and provide a creative UI to your users. I used PHP to code my GEO-IP-Map. I’ve added this Mashup maplet to my own blog. You can see it in action in the sidebar itself. After all it is simple and cool…!

If you are interested in this code, you can download the sample from here. I’m not a PHP programmer, hence you may find this very crude. You can modify it to your taste and convenience. Do keep me posted.

I’ll write more on Mashups in my next post.