Reactions to MediaCreeper turns up every now and then, the latest I found were kind of speculative .. http://gertfrost.se/fa-kanner-till-mediacreeper (in Swedish) .. didn’t really take a stance for or against, just contemplating about the fact that it exists and thereabouts.
Silverback (also in Swedish) writes about MediaCreeper, commenting the fact that he can actually see that media circles his blog regularly.
The MediaCreeper API (http://api.mediacreeper.com/) has been online for a couple of weeks now and are considered stable. It has been linked on the Swedish OpenData-site, a sort of repository of links to open APIs and data collections.
The MediaCreeper API is licensed under CreativeCommons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike or CC BY-NC-SA for short.
There are a non-public part of the API that isn’t completed yet, the CreeperPing. It’s a WordPress plugin that will interact with MediaCreeper over a Server-to-Server protocol, capable of circumventing blocking and blacklisting of CreeperFramework (MediaCreeper and variants).
I just uploaded a PO file to crowdin.net and checked a few languages I consider “primary” as active for translation. Go to http://crowdin.net/project/mediacreeper-multilingual to help us make MediaCreeper truly multilingual. The base-language is English and if you know French, Spanish, Danish, German, Finnish or Dutch, please help us with the 72 text-fragments that need translations.
I’ll add the languages to MediaCreeper as they become completed.
Next round of translations may include .. (your language here). Suggestions welcome, just comment on this post.
Well, I’ve played around with Google Chart API ..
This screenshot of the organisation view, with a Google Chart underneath the cloud ..
This screenshot of the site view, with a Google Chart underneath the cloud ..
I don’t know just yet if this is what I want on MediaCreeper. Comments?
This last weekend I had some time to spend on finish up on the REST API for MediaCreeper, it is still vera beta-ish and needs somewhat more polishing. You’ll find it at http://api.mediacreeper.com/.
I’ve also whipped together a mobile (as in mobile-phone) version of the main MediaCreeper site, that one is sort of closed-beta .. and needs some more work on CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and jquery. More on this when it’s ready for release.
I started to code a javascript-widget a few months back, still on my todo-list. It’ll be done somewhere between march and when the cows come home .. any year now.
Just posted an update, fixing a… bug that was introduced the last time I had time to do some updates. The bug effectively stopped all IDN-domains lists on MediaCreeper from being listed, this due to a quirky UTF-8 encoding problem between PHP and MySQL.
I just rolled out a few updates, most dealing with IDN-domains. Noticed that it broke in a few places, encoding, encoding encoding… well, I’ll fix it tomorrow as it isn’t a show-stopper.
The sorting of the SiteCloud on the /latest page has been fixed, IDN-domains where always on the “bottom” as it was sorted on the domain name, the IDN prefix, “xn--”, made that happen — now the domains are unIDNed (a word?) .. so they appear normal.
A few cleaners applied, printfriendly.com and webcache.googleusercontent.com are stripped and original links are restored.
Last night (early today) I updated and added some 200 new ranges that had been building up in my buffers, with help from a fellow tweep, I got several new Norwegian ranges down.
A few Danish, Hungarian, Italian and French ranges made it in too.
Also had the Norwegian language definition for MediaCreeper out for a test-run with a genuine Norwegian .. “somewhat correct”.
Sometime during the next week the Norwegian language will be released. There’s a few corrections and a little longer translation needed.
It just happened, the 101 new Italian IP-ranges just went online on MediaCreeper. Most of them cover radio and television, in the coming days/weeks more efforts to dig up newspapers, publishers and record labels.
Italian bloggers: Si prega di codificare i tuoi blog con il banner MediaCreeper così il vostro blog compaiono nei risultati, i media italiani aventi tuoi blog in cerca di notizie, scoop e scandali.
(Please tag your blogs with the MediaCreeper-banner so your blogs show up in the results, Italian media trawls your blogs in search for news, scoops and scandals.)
I’ve seen signs that at least one media organization has actively blocked MediaCreeper, it’s the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet. They have almost disappeared from the toplist and latest pages, only a few hits per day.
I’ve foreseen this situation and have a solution, it’s a bit complicated, a WordPress-plugin (called “Creeper-Ping”) that acts like a proxy — it will forward each page-load to the MediaCreeper server to verify if it’s a hit/miss and serve back the banner accordingly. This plug in is still in early beta and I have it installed on my Swedish blog for testing and development purposes only, it seems like I have to spend a few hours this weekend to get it into production quality.
It’s prepared for several more sites just like MediaCreeper, as the underlying framework is going to be released as open source as soon as I bang it into shape.
I’ve been thinking about how to distribute the collection of traffic across several domains, with a little help from trusted friends and perhaps a few domains or subdomains, a simple PHP-proxy could be hosted on any server, in any directory .. as long as there is some coordination, this would make it possible to use Javascript to include the banner, which would get loaded from the proxy-script, which in turn would report it to MediaCreeper as a hit or miss.
MediaCreeper Blog is Stephen Fry proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache