HOW TO: Build Your Own URL Shortener in 2 Steps
First, pick up a domain you’d like to use for your short urls – i.e. mine.url – and turn on a webserver.
To Receive a Shortened URL for your domain from Cullect:
Add the Cullect Item Stats javascript widget to an HTML page, passing it a long URL and your domain:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://cullect.com/item.js?only_link=1&link=[the-really-long-url]&domain=mine.url"></script>
To Redirect a Shortened URL from your domain
Add the Cullect redirect to your .htaccess file:
RewriteRule ^(l?[0-9]*)$ http://cullect.com/redirect/$1?domain=mine.url [L]
You now have your own custom domain URL shortener with all the bells and whistles Culld.us has. For extra credit – play around with the options in the Cullect Item Stats widget
How to: Send Blog Posts to Basecamp, Backpack, and Campfire
I use Basecamp with a couple of my clients, and there have been times I’ve wanted to share a relevant news item or blog post with my project team. So, I built it into Cullect.com – now when I find something interesting, I can send it to a Basecamp project without changing browser windows.
Here’s how:
How To: How Do I Unhide Stuff?
Hiding items in a reading list removes them from the /important and /latest views and adds them to /hidden.
If you want to return a hidden item to those /important and /latest, click – 'Hide... > Un-Hide'1.
Searches in /hidden works just as they do elsewhere, i.e /hidden/gustav, will show all hidden posts containing the keyword ‘gustav’ in their title, body, or author.
1. Sure, it feels like Windows’ bizarre Start > Shut Down menu construct, but it’s the simplest thing that works right now. 
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
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