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I wrote a post about YouTube’s new API features. Here is an excerpt.

 

Yesterday my RSS reader lit up with posts about a “big announcement from YouTube tomorrow”. Many were hoping the announcement would be about live video streaming since Steve Chen made a comment about this at a YouTube party recently. But when the news broke today it was about a new API and many were disappointed, but I was thrilled.

Now with these new APIs you can literally make your own interface to YouTube and have access to all their data and even customize the YouTube player to match your site’s design. I already have a project in mind that I’d like to use some of this functionality for.

Read the entire article here

I’m looking for an SDK or API that I can use on a *nix box to convert XLS/DOC/PPT to PDF or SWF. Sites like Docstoc and Scribd are doing this and I am wondering how they are doing it. I’ve exhausted my google searching skills.

If anyone has any information on this please leave a comment. I would greatly appreciate it.

The biggest feature request for TwitPic has been the ability to post pictures from your phone to Twitter. Well as of yesterday, you now have that ability.

Just login to TwitPic, click on Settings and you are presented with your own unique TwitPic email address that you can post images to from your phone or from any capable email client.

Traffic and image posts have spiked and already this new feature has been a great success.

TwitPic is a service that allows you to share & comment on photos with the increasingly popular service, Twitter.

How it works
From TwitPic’s interface you can login to your Twitter account, upload an image, & post a status update to twitter with a link to the photo, along with a description.

Another feature is the ability to comment on photos uploaded to TwitPic. The comment is also automatically added as a status update to your twitter profile like the screen shot below shows:

TwitPic was born out of my need to be able to share & comment on photos easily with twitter. I developed it over a weekend, from concept to working site. As always I’m open to feature suggestions.

Screenshots

Smashing Magazine has released a huge list of 100 free WordPress themes.

“High-quality WordPress themes always come in handy. Whether you are looking for some design inspiration or professional coding solutions — in both cases you can learn a lot, you can apply them and you can build customized designs upon them without reinventing the wheel all the time.

In this article we present 100 free high-quality WordPress themes. Together with hundreds of other designs, these themes have been manually selected, installed and tested over the last weeks. They all can be downloaded, customized and used for free in both personal and commercial projects. Links to demo-versions provide a direct preview of a theme.”

Check it out

Software frameworks have become very popular in the last few years, mainly due to the explosive popularity of Ruby on Rails, making frameworks the new hip thing to use for development and a great buzzword to throw around like its candy.

Personally, I don’t use frameworks for my projects. I find them too constricting and I feel that I lose control over my development process, but thats just me. Some people swear and live by frameworks. Maybe one day I will find one that suits me.

Model-View-Controller (MVC) Architecture

MVC is a software approach that separates application logic from presentation. In practice, it permits your web pages to contain minimal scripting since the presentation is separate from the PHP scripting.

• The Model represents your data structures. Typically your model classes will contain functions that help you retrieve, insert, and update information in your your database.
• The View is the information that is being presented to a user.
• The Controller serves as an intermediary between the Model, the View, and any other resources needed to process the HTTP request and generate a web page.

PHP Frameworks

• CakePHP is a PHP framework that works on the MVC architecture and offers caching, application scaffolding, validation of model data and even a presentation API. One of the most popular PHP frameworks.
  
• CodeIgniter is a PHP framework that also uses the MVC platform, has classes for data access, e-mail, FTP, and XML-RPC. Also, CodeIgniter has an exciting community and thorough documentation to get you started.
  
• The Zend Framework is the self-proclaimed “leading open-source PHP framework.” Services included in the API include Ajax (JSON), search, syndication, web services, and a fully object oriented PHP class library.
  
• Symfony - A feature packed framework, but has a reputation for being server-intensive.
• Prado - A component framework for PHP5 that has similar event based web apps similar to ASP.NET.
• BareBones - a one-file, no-configuration, MVC framework for PHP5.

Source @ SmashingMagazine.com

I’ve posted some numbers about EchoPic on the site’s new blog. Below is an excerpt.

Today is EchoPic’s 2 month anniversary. I want to say thanks to everyone who has been using EchoPic and helping the service grow. When I launched EchoPic I didn’t expect it to grow like it has. It was just a fun side project. Well today, 2 months later EchoPic has become more than what it was intended to be.

Some Stats:

* Over 100,000 unique visitors a month
* Traffic spikes of up to 30,000 visitors per day
* Almost 10,000 views per day to hot linked images (these are not counted in monthly visitor stats

Link: http://blog.echopic.com/2007/11/echopic-two-months-later/

I started using Moola almost a year ago and I just recently picked it back up out or boredom. Basically Moola allows users to play flash based games against each other to make money. Users are forced to watch an ad before the game which is how moola makes its money. Every time you win a game your money is doubled.

LINK: Moola.com

is a new web based ad service with a new twist that allows viewers to say whether or not they liked the ad. The service looks very promising mainly because the ads that they show so far don’t suck.

AdPinion Ad

The dashboard that adpinion provides publishers is minimal, but I like the fact that it gets to the point. All I need to know is how many impressions/clicks/money have I earned. This is the only ad network I’ve seen so far that I would actually like to advertise with. I’ll be keeping my eyes on this one.

I’ve been quietly working on a new project the past few months that I will be releasing soon. I was a little side-tracked by EchoPic and its surprising popularity and growth rate, but now I am back onto ChartVote full time.

What is it?
ChartVote is a new music discovery service that allows users to listen and vote for music they like.

Vague huh? Well thats all I can say for now =).

We are looking for artists
Yes sir, we are. If you are an artist who wants to participate in joining ChartVote you can email me at info(at)chartvote.com

Go to ChartVote.com and submit your email address and I will notify you when it launches.