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Attention Coolchaser Alpha users! 2007-03-29 20:53:12 Please upgrade your MySpace profile background to our newly Coolchaser site. Your old backgrounds that you created at http://url.com:3000 will be going away this weekend. Of course, your existing accounts will continue to work at Coolchaser.com, and will remain free for six months, even if/when we start charging (yes, we’re still debating internally if charging for layouts is a good idea).
Thanks for your early support and constructive feedback!
Read more:users
, Alpha
Url.com server migration! 2007-03-28 23:49:20 We’ll be moving our Url.com server
s to Amazon EC2. This will take place tonight. The meta search engine should still be up and running but any votes will not be recorded for 3 hours from 10pm PDT.
Update: The migration went very smoothly. Everything is back to normal as of 10:56pm, but do let us know if you see anything weird. We apologize for the down time.
Free: Personalize your MySpace Profile with Beautiful Backgrounds! 2007-02-25 14:04:37
Can regular users personalize our own MySpace
profiles without tinkering with messy codes?
Can MySpace actually be beautiful?
Those were the questions we asked ourselves as we set out to create Coolchaser - the simple and powerful MySpace Profile Editor.
But don’t take my word for it, go try it out yourself at http://coolchaser.com
We’re not quite ready to call this a launch of the site, but we think it’s ready for folks to try out - but please bear with a few quirkiness as it’s our newborn baby! We’re also making the service free during this preview period!
So, enjoy and go give Coolchaser a whirl now! Do let us know how it’s working for you through our contact form or by commenting below.
Read more:Personalize
, Beautiful
, Backgrounds
Unplanned downtime 2007-02-18 14:46:01 Url.com was down for just under 2 hours today (0926-1111 hrs PST). We apologize for the inconvenience. We were already investigating into better fault tolerant architectures to try to prevent this from happening again, so this is a good wake up call to action.
We are seriously considering Amazon’s EC2. It definitely seems like a great long-term solution, although we are worried that it’s very new and still in beta. Anyone know of how other websites have fared with EC2? Ruby on Rails deployments would be especially pertinent.
Help test our MySpace Background Layout tool! 2007-02-05 18:45:45
Update: The test is now over. Anyone can out CoolChaser, our MySpace
profile editor that allows you to personalize backgrounds and layouts without any messy codes!
===========
As we hinted in our last post, we’re working on a MySpace Layout editor. We’ve only just started working on it, but like a proud parent, I think it’s already darn cool So, we are opening Coolchaser up to a few fearless users in our first public alpha test!
Coolchaser (as we are thinking of calling it, but tell us if you love/hate the name!) won’t quite get you a thousand friends yet but it handles the basics of creating a personalized, beautiful MySpace Layout pretty well and with a very dirt-simple user interface - as one alpha user observed, “So easy my grandma might be able to do it”!
As an alpha tester, in addition to being able to create beautiful layouts in a jiffy, for helping us improve and perfect the Layout Editor, you’d receive a free 6-month use of the edito
Myspace Backgrounds - part 2,875,321 2007-01-31 20:15:03 I have to admit when we first launched url.com back in Oct, we were quite surprised by the overwhelming demand from our users seeking for ways to customize MySpace.
Of course, it shouldn’t have been a surprise. According Hitwise, MySpace-related keywords top 5 of the 10 most popular search terms amongst the top search engines, with “myspace layouts” at number 9.
Our education has been a slow progression. At first, we noticed that almost at any point in time, our recent searches invariably had Myspace customization terms. For me, it really sank in after a series of well-received postings by Sachiko (over 100 comments!) sketching out the difficulties in customizing MySpace.
Clueless we may be, but we’re also opportunistic Rather than struggle to chase the latest trendy Web 2.0 idea, it seems like manna from heaven that all of you, our users, have been trying hard to tell us something: “Build a tool that lets me customize MySpace the way I want!”
We s Read more:Backgrounds
We’re case studied on PBwiki 2007-01-28 12:44:36 You may like the look of Clipclip.org. Well, one of the collaboration tools we use, PBWiki, shares the same look as our site, and caught the eye of the PBwiki folks. This past week, we were blogged on The Daily Peanut. PBwiki selected clipclip.pbwiki.com as a case study on how we made it look so good.
Check out PBwiki’s interview with Chao Lam. It features Sachiko Kwan who designed our wiki and both Clipclip.org and URL.com. Yeah!
Happy New Blog: The Merge 2007-01-28 12:33:51 We have crossed the holiday season divide and entered the new year, for quite some time now, you’ll say, and I’ll agree. The thing is we were so busy bringing new features and refining the ones we have that we lagged with our blog postings. Perhaps unbeknownst to you, the intrepid workerbees here have been keeping two sites live and running. In the past, blogging for one, meant not for the other, so we have a new plan…
We’ll close the blog divide between our two sister sites Clipclip.org and URL.com and have one blog post for both. With this cut of the virtual red ribbon, we invite the netizens of each site to freely visit and use the services of both domains, and be updated with this one blog.
May you prosper and grow in the new year, 2007!
Read more:Happy
You can now vote on Wikipedia! Go Nuts! 2006-12-13 18:46:23 Yes, you heard me right, Wikipedia
removed frame busting javascript!
For those who just visited our site, this is the story. When we thought of the concept of “voting on a search result,” we concluded that people will be able to see if the result was relevant or not only by actually visiting the site. The other method was to allow people to vote on the search result page itself - but is this going to be accurate data?
The use of frame was (and still is) controversial, and I was one of those who went “against” using frames in the beginning. The reason was because I didn’t have good experience with sites who tried to trap me inside their sites against my will. For example, I remember the old Hotmail would use frames when I click an external link and trapped me with their frames saying “click here to go back to hotmail” or something like that. (does anyone remember?) I think their intention was good… they thought people would want to hav
The semantic web vs the bionic web 2006-11-12 10:59:47 My dad just sent me a cool article from this week’s NYT that gave a layman’s intro to Semantic web as Web 3.
Some thoughts (as i hug my Sunday AM coffee and stare out over the pacific waves)
As semantic web / web3.0 progresses, will it further push people to one-box search as the core interface for the web?
What “relationships” will drive symantic web logic- i.e. what will be the “pagerank”-style innovation of web 3.0?
More specifically, as with url.com, can the relationships between keyword-result-USER (what i call search social-networking) be a leading innovation? Can we get there?
Coffee done…and i look forward to your thoughts!
Myspace background revisited. 2006-11-02 03:29:52 Update: Try out CoolChaser, our MySpace profile editor that allows you to personalize background
s and layouts without any messy codes!
===========
In the previous post, I blogged about why there are so many searches for “Myspace Backgrounds” on our search engine. Since then, it has received 46 comments as of today. To tell you the truth, I was expecting comments like “Hey, I stumbled upon your site (http://www.url.com) and found some cool backgrounds, thanks” - ok, I’m just joking but I didn’t expect to get comments mostly asking “Hey, I need help putting a background on Myspace!”
Well, I gotta confess - since I’m not a Myspace user I didn’t understand why this was happening and quite frankly I thought “Hmmm… they must not be very Internet savvy… I mean how difficult can it be to put THAT (controversial some people call crazy) background?”
So, I decided to put a background on MYspace (yes, Tom is m
Speed, Speed, and more speed 2006-10-28 18:28:35 Among the technically inclined, when I describe how our social search engine combines the best results of Google, Yahoo! and MSN, a common response can be summed simply:
Isn’t that SLOW?
As users of url.com know, our search responses are actually quite fast and usually just a tad slower than any of the top search engines. (ok, I’m biased here, do regular users think our search response times are acceptable? Please comment below)
One reason why metasearch engines are thought to be slow is because, for each search result, the engine has to grab results from the original search engine, process it and then route the results back to the client browser.
What is unique about url.com is that we employ a technology such that your browser actually grabs search results directly from the original search engines such as Google and Yahoo. We do this via ajax apis that Google and Yahoo provide.
This technical architecture also has the nice side benefit that it lightens our server load
Myspace Backgrounds! 2006-10-19 19:40:16 Update: Try out CoolChaser, our MySpace profile editor that allows you to personalize backgrounds and layouts without any messy codes!
===========
Myspace users, wonder why you got here (http://www.url.com)?
Non-Myspace users, wonder why so many searches for “myspace backgrounds” “backgrounds” “BACKGROUNDS”?
Well, this is the answer! TADA~!
(click to enlarge)
This is a form on Myspace to customize your Myspace blog. Hey, pretty neat you can put your own background!
Such as http://www.url.com/image.gif?
Actually, the way Myspace used “http://www.url.com” was not meant to say “go to url.com to grab your background” but rather as a generic site address - something like “http://www.some-website-name.com/” or “http://www.the_address_of_the_site_that_has_the_background.com.”
Why on earth did Myspace use url.com then??
According to Webopedia, the definition of URL is the following:
Abbreviation of Uniform R Read more:Backgrounds
When Many is Better - sharing examples of better search through many 2006-10-18 14:51:31 Psyched about what you found? Lets hear about it!
did you find a great result that you wouldn’t have found using your normal engine?
did the community-enhanced results help? (maybe a better result was voted up, a bad result was voted down, or you appreciated the comments..)
did you discover something cool, just by browsing recent searches or browsing through another user’s search history?
People love their Dogs! JDPower ranks Dogpile #1 in user satisfaction. 2006-10-13 17:37:49 Mulling over our recent challenges (and planning some general strategy stuff), I stumbled upon this post by Search Engine Watch- which shows DOGPILE (yes, DOGPILE) as having the highest customer satisfaction ratings of any search engine. Why?! Is it the metasearch functionality? An underdog loyalty? Intermingled Ads in the results? Regardless of the reason, I think this is as a hugely encouraging sign that a different search experience can win loyal hearts of a searching community. Congrats Dogpile and Ask!
“Here are the J.D. Power survey’s customer satisfaction findings. Little used Dogpile was ranked number one:
1. Dogpile
2. Ask.com
3. Google
4. Yahoo! Search
5. AOL Search
6. MSN Search
7. Internet Explorer (treated as a search engine in the survey)
I don’t have any insight into the survey methodology so we have to take the results at face value. But 10,000+ respondents is a very large sample. A disconnect is the difference between search engine market share an
Back to the secret shell for a bit… 2006-10-13 17:31:57 UGH…. Soon after we moved to the new home at url.com, we ran into numerous volume-related “incidents” - all tied to things a bit out of our control. This has unfortunately forced us crawl back into our secret shell for a few days while Chao finishes a really really cool AJAX workaround.
Stay tuned…
Introducing your search community and Introducing URL.com 2006-10-09 15:36:29 Say hello to URL - No more secrets! As of yesterday, we removed the “secret” from our domain… No, this is not a “launch” (Communities can’t just “launch”), but it does mean that we are looking forward to welcoming more public users into our pilot.
Say hello to some of your community
- To celebrate the change, this post will begin a new weekly routine of introducing & profiling our more active community searchers. The hope is that motivates us all, and we can all learn from how each other search!
Kschroer105
We found Ken because is an active expert on Yahoo! Answers, where he is on the leaderboard with over 4100 points...today he tole me “I use url.com frequently to get good answers to all questions in any discipline or area whatsoever….one search engine’s results are usually better than others… I like the ability to automatically take the weighted “cream of the crop.”
bodhisattva
Bodhisattva is a Reiki Read more:Introducing
Bull’s Eye! 2006-10-08 18:24:31 I’m still pretty amazed at how seldom the top 3 search engines concur with their respective top search result. Conversely, when they do agree, you can be pretty darn sure it’s the right answer!
On url.com, we take advantage of this by taking you directly to that result on the rare ocassion when this happens. It’s our version of Google’s well-loved, “I’m Feeling Lucky” feature, except you don’t have to choose which button to click, it’s automatic.
For all of us FireFox lovers, here’s a more subtle way to activate this feature right in the url address bar:
Type “about:config” in the url address bar
Type “keyword.url” in Filter textbox and you will see only the preference keyword.URL.
Double-click on keyword.URL and change the value to: http://url.com/search/meta?bullseye=true&query=
Now, whenever you type in keywords in the address bar, it’ll take you right to the site when there’s a B
Searching together.. the top keyword project 2006-10-07 20:47:49 Here’s an experiment/challenge for us all… let’s try to get comments and votes on results for to the top 500 most-searched keywords…
A quick and dirty experiment….
We’ll start by together
searching on keywords from two list: One list pulls the top 300 keyword queries from URL.com and the other has the top 200 keyword queries from an old but cool list of top searches from other meta search sites. I put the list on a wiki page that we can use to manage the process. I’ve randomized the list orders, but included a rough relative rank. Just visit the list and start searching and commenting wherever you feel you’ve got good insights to share!
I’ll refresh this blog post frequently with updates…definitely send us comments/suggestions on the best way to open-source this project! But, to start,
Get started here!
Why try? We can prove that we can build this community, and we will make URL better for the average keyword search.
A dose of insight from Seth Sternberg… 2006-09-24 16:02:01 This week I’ve enjoyed glowing encouragement from users and mentors… But a refreshingly critical conversation Seth Sternberg of Meebo stands out as one of the more constructive chats I’ve had in a while. Here’s some background, but more importantly, I hope this blog may lead to even more tough input like Seth’s.. comment away!!!
About eight months ago, Seth left Stanford GSB to pursue Meebo full time. He was just a few months and a handful of credits shy of graduating. Many classmates (and some renowned prof’s) thought he was crazy. He quickly proved folks wrong. Soon Seth and team won over Sequoia, and in just a few months they’ve fostered the fastest growing and most passionate IM communities I’ve seen since Skype.
Seth and i have exchanged a few email threads over the past year, but mostly along the personal context of entrepreneurship while at the GSB. This week, I finally had the opportunity to show Seth what we’ve be
CoolChaser Forum 2007-09-19 23:52:54 We just released a shiny new forum for CoolChaser! If you need layout help or just want to chat with the other members, go check it out
The link to the forum is http://forums.coolchaser.com
Read more:Forum
Featured Themes IV 2007-09-11 20:24:47 Hope people are enjoying all the great themes as we now have 16,162 themes! It feels like yesterday when we used to get feedbacks “you need more themes!” That’s when we had only 12 themes… We would like to thank all the great theme creators for their great design skills! As always, let me introduce some great themes I discovered.
Tiny Layout Nike Dunks theme by Heathaaa!
Look ma, a tiny layout! Isn’t this awesome? I combined it with a skateboard background and love the way I can see the dude’s nike mark on his shoe! This is one of the ONLY TWO tiny themes we have, the other is the ipod tiny theme that is pretty tight too! Go check it out! All created by Heathaaa! who is my idol~ xoxoxo!
Yellow theme by CHAMORITA
CHAMORITA has created so many cool themes (66 and counting!) ranging from mermaids, abstract, Louis Vuitton and much much more! This one is one of my favorite as it is so elegant and sophisticated. Here I combined it with a backgrou Read more:Featured
Are your contents being cut off? 2007-09-06 13:44:45 UPDATE: Heey, listen people~ we have been rescued! Heathaaa! has figured out how to solve this problem!
Just put:
<style> *html table table table { height: .01%; }</style>
AFTER the CoolChaser code. If you have it in your “about me” box, put it at the end of that, if it’s in your “who I’d like to meet” put it at the end of that box and that should fix the problem like a magic! How does it work? Let’s go ask Microsoft as it is an Internet Explorer only bug! LOL
This is going to be fixed for ALL LAYOUTS IN THE FUTURE once we update our code on the site so come back and create another layout again maybe tomorrow. But in the meantime, you can try to do this manually if you can’t wait
So, people, you can ignore whatever junk is written below here. But if you are curious, you can see how helplessly I was trying to figure out this bug ;P Thanks for helping me out Heathaaaaaaaaa…!!
—————— Read more:cut off
CoolChaser planned downtime 2007-09-05 20:45:01 Update: The deployment went smoothly and was over in 20 minutes. Do less us know if you see any glitches tho’. Thanks!
_______
CoolChaser will not be available at 11pm PDT Sep 5th 2007 for under an hour, as we do a server upgrade. We are working on providing attribution to flickr users on the Myspace profile itself. We also provide a link to where the original image was sourced on any of the search engines we provides interfaces for (google, yahoo and flickr), so that users can better determine if they have the right to use the image on the profiles.
More fixes to come, so stay tuned!
Happy 1 Million! 2007-10-02 17:06:14 Last week CoolChaser had the 1,000,000th person create a layout! Woo Hoo! One Million! That’s HUGE! How huge? Can you imagine that in dollars? That’s one million dollars! That’s a lot of money right? Now imagine that in people! Yeah, that’s how huge it is! Woo Hoo!
The honorable 1,000,000th person who created a layout was.. (drum rolls)
TWISTER!
But of course, Twister couldn’t have become the one millionth user without all the other 999,999 CoolChasers, and I’m sure he would like to thank all of you guys for making this come true! Right, Twister? wink wink … OK, I’m not sure if he wants to thank you all but we, the whole CoolChaser crew would definitely like to thank ALL OF YOU for using CoolChaser and being such a great fan! So here’s is for all of you guys!
We would especially like to thank those people who come back to the site every month every week or everyday! to create layouts and themes and spreading the word to their fr Read more:Happy
Featured Themes V - Halloween Edition 2007-10-11 19:48:47 It’s almost Halloween
and many people have been putting together sooo many great themes and layouts! Let me introduce some that I found and liked
Halloween Lg Prnt Generic01 by Lost John
Lost John has created so many great Halloween themes and layouts only in couple weeks or so! He is also very active on our forum so go check out his list on this thread! You won’t see it on this picture here but in the actual layout the skeleton is pretty creepy because it’s slowly swinging…. AAAAAA! I can almost hear that theme song from the “Halloween” movie! Ten ten ten ten ten ten…. You can check out all of his themes and layout on his profile page So many to choose from!
Witch by †åmm¥
As †åmm¥ is the queen of horror layouts, you can bet that her Halloween theme rocks too! Like many of her other themes, you don’t need to select any background as it is a complete layout without it, but of course you can add your favorite Jack o Lan Read more:Featured
, Edition
CoolChaser planned downtime 2007-10-09 00:32:49 UPDATE: CoolChaser is back up following a successful server upgrade. Thanks all for your patience.
*****
CoolChaser will not be available at 3.30am PDT Oct 9th 2007 for around 90 minutes, as we do a server upgrade to speed up our databases. Sorry for the short notice and check this blog for updates!
Cool Widgets, videos and what’s next? 2007-10-07 19:35:14 As some of you may have noticed, we are showing Nabbr videos
on our home page and other parts of the site. There are many reasons why we chose to work with Nabbr and why we are excited with this new development.
Nabbr offers us some hip, original content. I’ve never heard of the bands that Nabbr is representing, but I sure dig their music
Next, Nabbr helps CoolChaser stay free (yes, Nabbr actually pays us and offsets our rapidly exploding server hosting fees as we’ve become surprisingly popular (thank you!)
Finally, we’re still figuring out what next to work on at CoolChaser (besides fixing bugs and making the site more reliable!). From your feedback, we hear that you want to integrate more videos, slideshows and other widgets, and that you want to be able tweak everything. The Nabbr widget represents our first initial experiment into this brave new widget world.
Let us know what widgets you love, what you hate and what widget you wished someone would just get busy
Jumble’s Text? 2007-10-16 00:26:05 Have you created your CoolChaser layout couple of months ago? Then do you see all your text jumbled up on Firefox? Like this:
If so, we have updated all the code on our site for any newly created layouts, so please recreate the layout and reinsert it.
If you would like to just updated it manually, put this code after the <coolchaser> code in your about me box, or the who I’d like to meet box.
<style>table table tr td {line-height:1.4em;}</style>
And you should be fine!
Another thing you migh see is all your friend’s link on a seperate line like this:
View Gotham’s Friends:
All |
Online |
New
If so, try putting this code after the <coolchaser> code in your about me box or the who I’d like to meet box:
<style>
a.redlink:active, a.redlink:visited, a.redlink:link { display:inline; }
.friendSpace br { line-height:0; }
</style>
Just wanted to let you know of how to fix this if you created your layout a while ago
A Peep Under the Hood 2007-10-01 03:00:32 Ever wonder what powers the CoolChaser website?
From it’s humble origin as a one-server website, traffic on CoolChaser has surged to the extent that currently, a cluster of no fewer than 11 virtual servers are required to fulfill user requests at peak hours. On a typical day at present, CoolChaser embeds over 40,000 layouts! As a Web 2.0 site, CoolChaser serves out a very high proportion of user generated, individualized content, which in turn calls for a lot of processing power.
As you might have guessed, our site runs almost entirely on Amazon Web Services EC2 and S3 infrastructure. In our opinion, the EC2-S3 combination is the perfect companion to our growth strategy. The main benefits of EC2-S3, from our point of view, are unrivaled flexibility and scalability, while valued end users like yourselves will enjoy better website reliability and quick responses even during peak hours.
On the software side, the CoolChaser app is developed on Ruby-On-Rails. Ruby and Rails are one po
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