At the beginning of the week, I officially launched a little project named MicroBlogBuzz. The concept is simple: find URLs on micro-blogging platforms, and present the top blogged ones.

For those not familiar with micro-blogging, it’s pretty much like blogging, but smaller — hence the micro prefix. Micro-blogging posts are very short, 140-160 characters that is. The most popular platform is Twitter, but new platforms are appearing, such as Pownce, Jaiku and Identica. Also, this year’s TechCrunch50 winner is the project oriented micro-blogging platform Yammer (which I didn’t get to try yet).

Back to MicroBlogBuzz, I started this little project part time while testing various APIs, and when stumbled on TwitterBuzz, which presents the most popular links on Twitter. However, TwitterBuzz only present the domain name, which isn’t really meaningful since most micro-bloggers use TinyURL or similar services to shorten their URL. TinyURL was presented as the Top Twitter link. And I thought it was kind of stupid. So I decided to do the same thing, but to follow the HTTP redirections to get to the final URL.

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I got no IPod. I got no IPhone. But I’ve got an OpenID. I’m like a low class geek. But whatever. I’ve read a bit lately about OpenID and wanted to give it a try on one of my personal projects (CodeIgniter based, you bet).

I’ve stumbled upon Rémi Prévost — who’s blog a follow more or less consistently due to the lack of time — CIOpenID module. It’s basically a CI embed of Janrain’s PHP_OpenID.

His code is great and works well. But one thing I don’t like about it is that it requires a different bootstrap file (a modified version of index.php) and a somewhat hacked version of your typical .htaccess file. The reason is, CodeIgniter annihilates the $_GET variable during initialization, because GET queries aren’t secure (ok, this is overly simplified, but you get the idea).

Being who I am, and somewhat liking to reinvent the wheel during my free time, I used a different approach. Rather than using a different bootstrap file, I rather chose to use the pre_system hook.

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Long time no write, I have been really busy in the last two weeks. Big news coming professionally. I’ll keep you posted on this.

Schedule aside, there’s an idea that has been on my mind for quite some time. Actually, since I saw the What happens in the Facebook stays in the Facebook Flash presentation, and after my advertising teacher told us something like : “Advertising on the web is great, because you can track the viewers behavior, including pre and post viewing”.

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Am I crazy (my mom says I’m special) or this resembles a business-like Facebook? Pretty neat, nevertheless! Check out Linkedin Beta here.