Vacation, Catch Up, and New Projects

First off, sorry for the lack of content lately. I have just returned from a 2 week vacation in Europe with the family. The good news, is that during the course of the vacation I have thought of a few new ideas to implement on this blog.



If you have taken a look at the recent posts/comments, you may have
noticed that my most recent project - the top 10 Digg application - has
come to a quick stop. The reason for this is that Digg released a
widget during the project. At first, I had a chance to continue the
project because the widget did not have the capability to display the
top 10 Digg submissions from the front page of Digg. Soon after I
mentioned this, a comment was left from Kurt W. of Digg saying that this
was a bug and would soon be fixed. Fine.. next project.



The next project actually consists of two parts. The first will be the
next coding project, and the second will be more of a blog project. The
coding project is going to involve the top 10 songs from the Billboards
top 100. I will most likely write up a little regex that will
parse the HTML of the Billboards website, and return the top 10 songs in
a usable format.



The second part of the project involves Google Trends. If you haven't seen the website before, Google Trends has a list of the top 100 searched terms on Google for each day. I am going to start explaining to the readers of this blog, why each of the search terms in the top 10 is so popular. Some of them may be obvious, but others may bring new light to a subject that could be useful. For you blog writers out there, this could be a great resource for finding hot topics to write about.