Archive for the ‘Java’ Category
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
In the process of renaming our website from MyFriendSuggests.com to theSUGGESTR.com I found that most articles on this refer to using mod_rewrite to accomplish the redirect. However for most us Java guys this may not be the way to go. I used URLRewrite to accomplish this name change and have ...
Posted in Java, Lessons Learned, Web Development, theSUGGESTR | No Comments »
Saturday, June 16th, 2007
Tagging pages or items is a big part of the Web2.0 movement. After doing some mild searching I didn't find a prebuilt API for working with tags for Java (found some PHP stuff). So I created one to be used in the next release of our site (www.myfriendsuggests.com). As we've ...
Posted in Java, Web Development | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007
Taste is a great framework for collaborative filtering. We are going to be launching a new recommendation algorithm on our site (MyFriendSuggests.com) in the coming weeks (Stay Tuned!) based on the Taste framework. Taste provides a User-based and Item-based recommender. User based recommenders find users that have similiar tastes to ...
Posted in Java, MyFriendSuggests, Taste | No Comments »
Saturday, May 5th, 2007
As we've seen in my posts for scraping AOL, GMail and Yahoo, each site has its own "tricks" that make it challenging to scrape contact information from. The final site in this series of posts is for Hotmail. Hotmail is one of the trickier ones. As I did with the ...
Posted in Java, MyFriendSuggests, Scraping, Website Marketing | 3 Comments »
Thursday, May 3rd, 2007
In our previous posts we've looked at how to scrape both Yahoo! and AOL webmail for a list of contacts given a username and password. This technique can be critical in growing your user base by allowing your users to invite many friends in one quick and easy step. Our ...
Posted in Java, Scraping, Website Marketing | 2 Comments »
Monday, April 30th, 2007
This is the 3rd post in a short series discussing how I built an API to grab contact list information from Yahoo!, AOL, GMail and Hotmail. In our first post we reviewed the high level approach to scraping sites. In our second post we went over how to scrape Yahoo! ...
Posted in Java, Scraping, Website Marketing | 4 Comments »
Sunday, April 29th, 2007
This post builds on my previous post, in which we discuss how to scrape webmail sites for contacts. Yahoo! is by far the easiest of the sites to scrape (of the major sites). After you've sniffed the URLs used for the login you just need to replace the username and ...
Posted in Java, Scraping, Web Development | 2 Comments »
Sunday, April 29th, 2007
Many new websites, especially those that depend on social networks, are now offering ways to import contacts from various WebMail sites. I'm not going to go into the ethics of asking a user for their user name and password to a webmail site and scraping the site but I will ...
Posted in Java, Web Development, Website Marketing | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, April 25th, 2007
For the past few weeks I've been playing with Taste, a Java based framework for collaborative filtering (basically the recommendation feature found on sites like Amazon and Netflix). Hopefully in the near feature this tool will be incorporated in our site, MyFriendSuggests.com to improve our suggestion algorithms.
What I found was ...
Posted in Java, MyFriendSuggests, Taste, Web Development | No Comments »
Sunday, April 1st, 2007
A few pieces of software I've worked on have required me to scrape data from existing websites. In general the code to do this is ugly. The way I had been doing it was using the standard java connectivity classes to grab the data from the site and then parsing ...
Posted in Java, Web Development | 3 Comments »
