A short while ago I was researching an alternative to on-line backup because Mozy hasn’t been reliable for me. Just after signing up for an Amazon S3 account I clicked a link to return to the home page and was greeted with this fine error message:

Same result on another computer and my mobile phone. It’s not every day you get to witness a giant web site down and out.

One of my side projects is researching the relationships and work experience between film Directors, Editors, and their Assistants. Unfortunately, IMDb (and IMDb Pro) doesn’t have any reporting or data extraction functions to make this easy - everything is a time consuming and manual process.

After much digging on Google I discovered an accurate search phrase and found a few resources. IMDb doesn’t have its own API although developers have found a way around this using HTTP requests. Thanks to Martyr2 at Yahoo Answers.

http://www.trynt.com/trynt-movie-imdb-api/ - TRYNT web service which can be consumed by languages like PHP and .NET.

http://www.imdb.com/interfaces - imdb does provide interfaces for several platforms. These are often in the form of easily parsable text files. Not the ideal solution, but it can work.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/imdbphp/ - IMDB PHP project over at sourceforge could also be a solution.

No experience with any of them yet but it’s a start.

I was using Martin Fitzpatrick’s excellent plugin called AdSense Manager to handle Google ads on my blog. Version 2.x worked well but version 3.x stopped working properly with sidebar widgets and the admin interface failed to commit certain page changes.

My quest to find a solution was unsuccessful so I trashed the plugin and looked for an alternative. Other WordPress plugins looked weak in comparison so I went old-school and within 15 minutes I had a working replacement using a few lines of PHP and JavaScript code from Google. While it’s not as convenient as a plugin, it works fine with sidebar widgets.

Thanks to tamba2’s excellent (and brief) how-to guide.

Since January of this year I’ve been using Facebook to stay in touch with friends, colleagues, and other folks I don’t see often. There’s something to be said about seeing people’s faces every day which reminds you to stay in touch. Poke (and SuperPoke) is the greatest way to tell someone “hi” without getting into a dialog.

Since Facebook wants to make a few dollars in their effort to provide free services, they’ve initiated clandestine tactics to gather and distribute your surfing habits to others. Facebook’s Beacon software isn’t terribly popular for this reason but there are ways to keep it quiet.

wikiHow describes the proper way to disable Beacon in Facebook’s security settings as well as the BlockSite add-on for Firefox. Although the article doesn’t mention this you can use the BlockSite add-on in Flock (which, like Firefox, is based on Mozilla.

Manas Tungare describes how to filter out Beacon in the Mac version of Safari. I haven’t installed PithHelmet to test because it appears only in beta status for Safari 3 (which ships with Leopard).

I haven’t messed around with Nokia’s Lifeblog service because I don’t have an Nseries device and blogging from a mobile seems somewhat limited. In any event, Lifeblog supports TypePad as a blogging platform but WordPress support is strangely missing.

PhoneBoy developed a solution for WordPress versions 2.05 through 2.2 and today his hack supports 2.3. So grab a copy of his PHP code and go nuts.

[Via Weblog Tools Collection]