MTG Finder 0.3

The new version of MTG Finder Chrome Extension has been released, the features are listed below:

• Added options page to switch between magiccards.info and wizards search. While the magiccards.info search does a full access to the website (here you can also see the rulings, prices and more), wizards search displays only the card image (screenshot 2).
• Wizards search works only for english card names.
• Fixed a problem with the queries of card names with apostrophes.
• Added Google analytics support

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Google url shortener

Google has recently opened a new service: Google url shortener. This url shrinker service works like Bit.ly (we described it at the Setting up the blog entry), you can type an url and Google will create a shortcut for you. For example, I typed http://themunsonsapps.blogspot.com and I get http://goo.gl/HtWzn, passing from 35 chars to 20.

The great feature isn't the shortener itself at all, is the analytics service. Google tracks all the traffic of the shrunk url and displays all the stats in a graphicly by hour, day or month with the corresponding referrers. It also gives you information about the visitors profile, like country, browser and platform. It also has the QR Code feature for mobile phones, you can check it by appending ".qr" to the short link, like this: http://goo.gl/HtWzn.qr.
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Best free online svn repositories

Maybe you want to develop in a custom team environment or you usualy work on different machines (that's my case) and don't want to do annoying thinks like constantly sending the files from one PC to the other. What you really need is a code hosting in SVN or CSV to save your work and manage your projects wherever you are.

I was looking for a free online svn repository, I found a lot of them so it was a difficult choice. I'll try to summarize my research by describing some of the repositories that I've seen and I consider that are the best.

• Source forge. Is the most noted open source software community and the most complete. So your project must be free, public and under an open source license. It hosts applications, website (including web traffic analytics) and source code on  SVN, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, or CVS servers. It provides issue tracking, wiki, blog, forums, statistics, support and more. If you are developing an open source project, you must be here, it's simply the best.
• Google Code. The Project Hosting on Google Code gives you 2 Gb of storage space for Subversion or Mercurial repositories, issue tracking and a project wiki for the documentation. You only need a Google account to sign up and create a new project to include it in the Google's code space sorted by kind.
  The only possible "downside" you can find in using google code as a source repository may be the license. Like sourceforge, Google hosts only open source code (Apache License, GPL, GNU and so on), so the source will be visible to everyone. If you're looking for a private repository to do some kind business, this one is not for you.
  Of course, if you decide to use it as your repository, you can be sure that you will have one of the greatests code communities, maintenance and support for you.
• Assembla. Although it's a payment development framework, it offers limited repository services for free and 30 days trial demos. I evaluate only the free features.
  Assembla private accounts are now free, so you can use it for your private projects like consulting. This type of account provides you 2Gb of Subversion or Git source space with SSL encryption. You can upgrade your account and pay a "small additional charge" to get a lot of professional features (one additional charge by feature) like monitor with Twitter, schedule milestones in an easy way, ticket issue management, support tool, mercurial, a project wiki, chat, skype, ftp, dashboard and many more.
  Like the previous mentioned repository, the Google account can be used to log into Assembla and manage your source projects.
  The main goal of Assembla is that it's a professional tool easy to setup that you can use for free in a limited version with a great storage size. I really recommend it over others if you are looking for a private one.
  
• Beanstalk. The free account includes 100 Mb of source storage, 1 user and 1 Git/SVN private repository, daily backups, RSS, but without SSL. There are personal and professional accounts from 15$ to 200$ montly with a storage of 60Gb.
  Beanstalk is a simple and user-friendly tool for small projects with one committer.
• Unfuddle. Provides a private SVN and Git free repository with 200 Mb storage. The free account limits the number of active projects to 1, archived projects to 0, maximum 2 people and 3 notebook pages. It includes the messaging, milestones, bug tracking and RSS services (no SSL encryption for free accounts).
• XP-Dev.com. It has a free plan with 200 Mb storage, limited to 2 private SVN projects (unlimited public projects) and unlimited users. Mercurial and Git are only available in payment plans. XP-Dev.com has free bug tracking, wiki, forum, blogs, file attachment and integration with multiple frameworks like twitter. There are a lot of payment features, like real-time backup for 2$/month.
• Project Locker.This site allows you to have 3 users and 500 mb of storage for up to 3 SVN/Git projects. Project Locker is private, SSL encryption, bug tracking, wiki and project management.
• Codeplex. Codeplex is an Open source community hosted by Microsoft (so you can use your Windows Live Id here) where you can host only open source project. It uses native Team Foundation Server as version control but SvnBridge is available to allow you to use SVN.
• Origo. This is a hosting platform that provides SVN repository, project wiki and issue tracker for open or closed source projects absolutely free. The difference with the others is that Origo is an API not a website, so it can be integrated in IDEs like Eclipse with Mylyn.
• Freepository. This is an old website (since 1999) that provides one SVN or Git private repository with no disk space limits, SSL encryption, back up every 4 hours, professional support for 1 committer user free. It's usage hasn't nice feedbacks.
• Bitbucket. Since Bitbucket has been acquired by Atlassian, it's growing up and offers unlimited disk space, issue tracking, wiki, downloads, custom domains, unlimited public collaborators, 5 private users and RSS. It's the last on the list because it only offers Mercurial services, not SVN, but there are ways to convert your SVN system to Mercurial.

Here is a summary table of the source hosting websites described before:

Website	Storage	Visibility	Issue tracking	Wiki	Version control	Users	Projects	SSL
Source forge	unlimited	public	yes	yes	SVN, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, CVS	unlimited	unlimited
Google Code	2 Gb	public	yes	yes	SVN, Mercurial	unlimited	unlimited
Assembla	2 Gb	private	no	no	SVN, Git	unlimited	unlimited	yes
Beanstalk	100 Mb	private	no	no	SVN, Git	1	1	no
Unfuddle	200 Mb	private	yes	no	SVN, Git	2	1	no
XP-Dev.com	200 Mb	private	yes	yes	SVN	unlimited	2	no
Project Locker	500 Mb	private	yes	yes	SVN	3	3	yes
Codeplex		public	yes	yes	SVN, TFS
Origo		private	yes	yes	SVN	unlimited	unlimited
Freepository	unlimited	private	no	no	SVN	1		yes
Bitbucket	unlimited	private	yes	yes	Mercurial	5	unlimited	no

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The Chrome Web Store

Google has recently opened the Chrome Web Store, an interesting and great web oriented space.

As you know, Chrome is not only a web browser, it has a lot of possibilities, and the Chrome Web Store is a great proof of it. Here you can find any chrome extension or theme published on the old extensions site, but also several web applications (like games, media players, chat, image editing and so on) to run under Chrome.

The new features of the Chrome Web Store are the chance of selling your product and the links inside the item view. If you are visiting an interesting extension in the category fun, the website will show you a list of another five items belonging to fun. You wil also find a list of other apps by the same author, for example, in the wikiquote english extension you will see a list named more from ivank containing wikiquote spanish and mtg finder.

Web Store brings to the Chrome's world a perspective that belonged to the mobile apps like Android Market or Apple App Store.
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Wikiquote Chrome Extension

Wikiquote is a wikipedia based webpage that contains a big amount of popular quotes in several languages.

I've developed a Chrome extension that brings you a quote everyday to your favourite browser, it's available in english: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/enfkoalpognfgchmlgbmnofgdcidndli and spanish: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mommeekinonbbbfnmjgjgimhjpplldkh.

Here you will find some quotes from people like Simón Bolívar, Bob Dylan (as shown in the gallery screenshot), John F. Kennedy, Buddha or Albert Einstein. Read a quote once a day and you will have more interesting conversations ;-).

Feel absolutely free to comment this post for any suggestion.
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Setting up the blog

The blog is actually on the "start up phase", it still needs a logo, a lot of contents, apps (some of them are developed and ready to be published) and the most important thing in every blog, visitors!

With this scope, I've researched in the webmaster's world and I've found some tips to get a more comfortable website for everyone. I've also found a general interest on the web about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techs. You should know that if your webpage is in the results of the search engines (such as google, yahoo or bing) queries, it will have more opportunities to get visitors. I describe below the methods and tools used at the moment here:

• The best way to introduce your website to everyone is to use the social networks. If you insert a link to your webpage into facebook or twitter, your website will be target of a larger amount of queries. You can also insert the link in the firm of your blog comments, forum posts or emails, but be careful, don't be spammer!
• Edit CSS. A great design is a great key to keep users. The CSS of the blog are now under construction, but you can see some android style details (remember, the droid is under license), they are hiddenly saying that this blog is about android without any word.
• I've registered the blog into Weblogs, a blog directory that shows feeds realtime. This is very useful to link you and to be target of related searches. Although every SEO has an own way to calculate the crawl your page, they often looks at the webpages that link you.
• The SEOs will find you if your rank is high (ok, I know, it's obvious, but keep it in mind). This is the really tough task to do. In the Pagerank site you'll find tips to get a better pagerank.
• There are some websites dedicated to get links, visitors and advertise you. I've used the spanish site tutop, that ranks the best registered websites.
• Bit.ly is an interesting website, it has analytics features, QR Code, short linking and URL customize if you register. You can enter your website URL and get a shorter link, like this: http://bit.ly/dOpjGU. This link gets you into the bit page, get stats and redirects you to the wanted website. You can see the Bit stats by adding a "+" to the short URL, like this: http://bit.ly/dOpjGU+ or see the QR Code by adding .qrcode to the URL, just like this:  http://bit.ly/dOpjGU.qrcode.
• Google feedburner allows you to analyze, optimize and manage your feeds. Feedburner also interacts perfectly with blogger. It also gives you an feeds buttons like RSS, google and more.
• Alexa is a website that gives you traffic metrics, search analytics, demographics, and more for websites. You should register your website to be tracked (and of course, get linked).
• Technorati is another big web directory that saves blogs by categories and ranks them. You should absolutely register here.
• I think that Google analytics needs no presentation, it's a very useful site to keep track of your visits, keywords, geographic zones. Here you can find some tips to add google analytics to your blogger page.
• To allow your visitors to bookmark and share your site in an easy and fast way, exists add this. You maybe think that there is no reason to add you, but it's useful. You can give customized buttons to share and bookmarks, such as facebook, buzz, email, twitter and more.

I hope that this tips can help you. If you know another tips to have a greater and comfortable site, please, share it here. I'll be some posts like this when I improve our blogging methods.

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