When the App You Love Dies, Build Your Own — Introducing LibrisLog
I was a happy Dante user. For those who don’t know it, Dante was a solid Android book tracker. Scan a barcode, look up metadata, track your reading progress. Simple, effective, and most importantly: it worked. Until it didn’t.
Adding books by title or barcode? The search API the app relied on had stopped responding, so neither ISBN lookups nor name searches worked anymore. Backups? Gone too. Dante had gone quiet: No updates in a long time, and the features that depended on external services had stopped working. I get it, though. Focus shifts. I’ve been there myself. I recently handed one of my own projects over to a new maintainer because I couldn’t keep up anymore. But understanding why doesn’t make it any less frustrating when it’s your bookshelf that’s stuck.
And that’s where the real pain started. Getting my own data out of Dante was a nightmare. There was no export function anymore. […]
Regular users of my blog should already be familiar with “Google Suggest”. Those can skip ahead to the section “Wildcard operator in Google Suggest”, for all others here is the quick start. Google Suggest is the name of the Google functionality that is responsible for suggesting possible search queries while you are typing your search query. For example, if you type “What are the most popular”, Google will suggest “What are the most popular sports in Australia”. The suggestions, in turn, are based on the one hand on the user’s own Google search profile and on the other hand on the most frequent search queries currently sent to Google by other users.
In the past, there were more and more – the websites on which a specific action was allowed to run only X times a day. Today, it’s more like geo-blocking – locking out certain users based on their country of origin. However, both variants are based on the same technique: the evaluation of the IP address. In the first case, accesses from an IP address are counted (in addition to cookies) – in the second case, a database is used to evaluate where in the world the user behind a specific IP address is staying. Both locks can often be bypassed by changing the IP address.
To develop my programs and web applications I mainly use two editors/IDEs. For the former I use the wonderful Visual Studio, and for the latter – Sublime Text, the editor that I cannot do without ever since I first discovered it. If you still don’t know what Sublime Text is, you should download the free unlimited demo version. I bet a few among you will switch to it from your editors!
Alright, the title might sound a bit sensational, but actually, “how do I get more visitors” is always an issue and the following article will hopefully highlight how to work towards this direction and what WDF*IDF has to do with it.