Movgrab Status

Current status output of movgrab ('movgrab -test-sites'). This shows which downloader sites are broken, and which I can't figure out, or which seem to have shut down. Long-term broken sites will eventually get removed from the list.

Checking youtube okay
Checking metacafe BROKEN
Checking dailymotion okay
Checking break okay
Checking ehow okay
Checking vimeo BROKEN
Checking almostkilled okay
Checking 5min okay
Checking vbox7 BROKEN
Checking blip.tv okay
Checking ted okay
Checking myvideo okay
Checking clipshack okay
Checking mytopclip okay
Checking redbalcony okay
Checking mobango okay
Checking berkeley okay
Checking yale okay
Checking sdnhm okay
Checking uchannel BROKEN
Checking princeton okay
Checking uctv.tv okay
Checking reuters okay
Checking clipfish.de okay
Checking liveleak okay
Checking academicearth okay
Checking photobucket okay
Checking videoemo okay
Checking videosfacebook okay
Checking aljazeera okay
Checking mefeedia okay
Checking myvido1 okay
Checking iviewtube okay
Checking washingtonpost okay
Checking cbsnews okay
Checking france24 okay
Checking euronews okay
Checking metatube okay
Checking motionfeeds okay
Checking izlese BROKEN

Movgrab at 300 popularity level on freshmeat

Hurrah!!

My video-downloader program 'movgrab' passes the meaningless but psychologically important level of 300 in its popularity score on freshmeat.

That makes it nearly as popular as Bitcoin

It's the most popular I've ever been!

Three URL Shorteners that don't need authentication, XML or JSON

Here's three URL shorteners that will allow you to get a shortened link without needing authentication, and with very simple APIs. These are useful if you're writing blogging or microblogging (twitter-style) applications.

All three take a simple HTTP GET request. As you have to include the URL you want shortened in the request, you have to HTTP encode it (you know, all that %20 stuff). All of them return one line of text, which is the shortened version of the URL.

You should be able to test them by simply using a webbrowser and going to the link. Don't forget to replace the line phrase <url goes here> with an http-encoded url.

Cli.gs http://cli.gs/api/v1/cligs/create?appid=autoblog-0.1&url=<url goes here>

Linkee http://api.linkee.com/1.0/shorten?format=text&input=<url goes here>

Is.gd http://is.gd/create.php?format=simple&url=<url goes here>

Howto Change Blogger Settings with the GData API

I've just discovered an undocumented (or I couldn't find any docs for it anyways) way to change the settings of your Blogger/Blogspot blog via the GoogleData API.

I discovered this as a result of the recent 'breakage' of my API client. I was using a blog-posting 'endpoint' URL that wasn't supposed to work, but had been working until recenty.

Geeky Groups near Birmingham UK

I've recently been getting more into meeting like-minded people, which is to say 'geeks'. After years of trying to pretend that I'm not one (in the same way that I tried to pretend my eyesight wasn't failing when I was a kid) I've finally decided to come out.

This new sociability probably started when I visited the c-base hackerspace in Berlin,



where I got horribly drunk and threw up in their loos. It wasn't all my fault though, I didn't pour all that Jager down my own throat. Well, okay, literally speaking I did, but someone kept filling the glass, so I feel there's shared responsiblity.

Anyways, since then I've been to the Nottinghack hackerspace in Nottingham. They did a frankly wonderful lockpicking workshop, and if they ever do another of these and you can go to it, I'd urge you to do so. You'll learn a lot (most of it alarming).

How to fix your broken Blogger client program

For about a month now I and other people have been unable to use the blogger api to update our blogs. This is one of a raft of problems caused by a recent update of the blogger system, and some other ones (including the fact my OpenID is broken) are still outstanding. However, the OpenID thing isn't a big deal, whereas the api blog posting is something I use a lot.

I can happily report that the Blogger/Google people have come through for us and found the problem. I had been losing hope, because as a linux user I'm used to having people break stuff, and then say the problem is that I'm running linux. But, though it's admittedly taken them a while, google's blogger team have dug to the bottom of the problem and found the cause. Maybe I should have more faith in future, we'll see.

If you've found that your blogger API client program has stopped working in the last month, then what follows is what you need to do to get it working again.