Cullect Now Accepting Pings
Sometime just past New Year’s Day, Cullect surpassed 10,000 feeds. Even at averaging 1 second / feed, it’ll take nearly 3 hours to get through all of them. Often times, much longer.
I’m excited to announce Cullect is now accepting pings. This means – you can let Cullect know when your feed has updated, rather than waiting for it to get around to you.
Cullect’s Ping URL
If you’re running Wordpress – like I am – simply paste Cullect’s Ping URL into your Update Services list in
Settings > Writing.
Similar settings exist in TypePad and other platforms.
If you need a hand figuring out how your platform can ping Cullect, just drop me a line.
Update – yes, pinging is also baked-in to the feed stats widget.
IWouldHaveBoughtYouThis.com Wraps Gift URLs with Cullect
Conceptually, short URLs are kind of like little, wrapped, gifts. You don’t really know what’s there until clicked…er, um….opened.
So, just in time for a your revised holiday shopping, IWouldHaveBoughtYouThis.com is the latest site to using Cullect’s URL shortening API.
Enter the link to Apple’s iPhone, a ride-on triceratops, or a new Audi A3 into the textfield, and IWouldHaveBoughtYouThis.com returns a ‘wrapped’ URL to share….cause it’s the thought that counts 
MinnPost.com’s Branded URL Shortener Powered by Cullect
I’m very pleased to announce MinnPo.st – the branded URL shortener for Minnesota’s nonprofit journalism enterprise – MinnPost.com. MinnPo.st is the first private-label URL shortener powered by Cullect.com’s API.
For the writers and reporters at MinnPost.com, MinnPo.st has the exact same features as Cullect’s own Culld.us URL shortener – like click counting and posting to Twitter – but with a brand their readers recognize.
For an example of how Karl Pearson-Cater, David Brauer, and the rest of the MinnPost.com team is using MinnPo.st: minnpo.st Twitter Search.
Culld.us: Now With Built-In Twitter Client – and Statistics
Culld.us now has a built-in Twitter client – based on the assumption that if you need a shortened URL, it’s likely you want to post it on Twitter.
Here’s a screencast of how it works:
Developer’s Note: Culld.us is built entirely on Cullect’s Item Stats widget. So, you can easily integrate Culld.us into your WordPress blog or other publishing system and see Cullect statistics on everything you publish.
Feed Stats Widget Update: Feed URL Option Added
Up until just a few minutes ago, the Cullect Feed Stats widget guessed the feed from the auto-discovery tag in the HTML. Sometimes it guessed wrong.
That can happen when a single site has (or historically had) lots of different feed URLs. For example, WordPress automatically generates a number of feeds: ?feed=rss2, /feed/rss, /feed/atom, etc not to mention Feedburner or Pheedo redirects. All of which may have a different set of subscribers.
Now, you by using http://cullect.com/feed.js?feed=[your-feed-url] you can specify exactly which feed you want stats for (and even compare the popularity of different feeds).
As an added benefit, specifying the feed will cut the widget’s load time – and therefore the load time of your page.
How To: Customize Your Feeds’ Cullect.com Feed Statistics Widget
Cullect has a simple javascript widget that displays all the information Cullect has about your feed, all in a single line of code, all ready for embedding on your own blog:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.cullect.com/feed.js"></script>
You can see the Feed Stats widget in action right here at blog.cullect.com and at GarrickVanBuren.com. For more the sites using it, check out the Widget archive of this blog.
By default, the Feed Stats widget shows;
- 10 Most Important items as ranked by Cullect.com’s Importance algorithm
- Amount of money donated and number of patrons to the feed
- The lists of reading lists the feed is in
- Link to create new Cullect reading list with the feed
- Link back to Cullect.com
If you’d rather show the 10 Most Important items, change the code to include “selected=recommended“:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.cullect.com/feed.js?selected=recommended"></script>
If you only want the 5 Most Recommended items, just say “count=5“:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.cullect.com/feed.js?count=5&selected=recommended"></script>
If you don’t want to show the donations (”show_patrons“) or the Reading Lists (show_lists), change the code to:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.cullect.com/feed.js?show_patrons=0&show_lists=0"></script>
And, just like that you’ve customized the which statistics Cullect displays on your blog.
The Feed Stats widget, like all Cullect.com widgets, adopts the CSS of the site they’re embedded on. If you’d like to change how it looks, here’s a breakdown of the HTML & CSS. Make it look cool.
<span class='cullect-widget' id='cullect-feed-stats'>
<h3>[Your Blog] at Cullect.com</h3>
<ul id='[recommended-items OR important-items]'>
<li></li>
</ul>
<p id='feed-patrons'></p>
<p id='feed-reading-lists'></p>
<p id='start-reading-list'><strong></strong></p>
<p><small></small></p>
</span>
How To: Change Reading List Item Count, Order, Pagination
In each view1, Cullect shows 50 items by default2, these items are then ordered most-to-least (’descending’) based on that view3.
You can change all this things by putting the following variable in your URL request (works for all supported formats4)
count=#(how many items do you want? maximum of 50)offset=#(this is how pagination is handled)order=a(ascending) ord(descending – the default)
Example:
This is equivalent to http://cullect.com/1 :
http://cullect.com/1.html?count=50&offset=0&order=d
This will give you the second 50 items:
http://cullect.com/1.html?count=50&offset=50&order=d
This will give you the second 50, least Important, items,
http://cullect.com/1.html?count=50&offset=50&order=a
1. Important, Latest, Recommended, Tagged, Hidden
2. The default count in Javascript widgets is 10.
3.
- Important = most Important, un-hid items, to least
- Recommended = most recently recommended to oldest recommended
- Tagged = most recently tagged to oldest
- Latest & Hidden = most recently published to oldest. Latest doesn’t include hidden items.
4. .Atom, .HTML, .JS (Javascript), .JSON, .M (’mobile’, i.e. text-only), .RSS, YML (yaml),
Cullect on Twitter- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
- Culld.us URLs Recently Shared at Twitter
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.