Chipwrapper Blog

I'm pleased to be introducing a Mobile Edition of Chipwrapper at www.chipwrapper.co.uk/mobile

The site should work on modern smart phones with XHTML browsing capabilities, but also be backwards compatible with older WAP browsers.

The Chipwrapper Mobile Edition features the latest top headline from all of the major newspapers and news sources in the UK. On newer phones, you'll be able to click the headline and visit the original site and read the full story. On older WAP-only browsers the link will probably not work, but you will still be able to see at a glance the UK's current news agenda.

There is also a Chipwrapper search box on the Mobile Edition page, and newer phones and PDA browsers will be able to access the Chipwrapper Search Engine from there.

I've only been able to test the site on a couple of handsets so far, which makes it more of an 'alpha' than a 'beta' release in my book. Any feedback of problems, or hopefully, success, on your phone would be most welcome - chipwrapper@chipwrapper.co.uk

Posted by Chipwrapper at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've had to drop a couple of feeds from the Chipwrapper RSS aggregator for the time being.

The main ITN news RSS feed doesn't seem to have updated since their coverage of the funeral of Rhys and the death of Pavarotti last week.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail have been dropped from the Chipwrapper Rugby Edition homepage and RSS feed. They weren't, to my knowledge, one of the newspapers threatening to boycott coverage of the tournament, and they have even moved 'Rugby World Cup' into the main navigation on their site.

However, their RSS feed for Rugby Union stories is resolutely stuck on an item published on September 4th about Premiership new boys Leeds. I've removed their entries from the Chipwrapper rugby feed for now, but I'll keep an eye on it, with the hope of restoring it once they start publishing again.

Posted by Chipwrapper at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is a new page on Chipwrapper today - the Chipwrapper Headline Buzz page.

It features the same Chipwrapper search as ever, but instead of the latest online headlines from the UK's main print and TV media, it features a tag cloud based on their contents.

Every hour Chipwrapper analyses the top ten headlines from the BBC, Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian, Independent, ITN, Sky News, The Sun, The Telegraph and The Times.

Between thirty and fifty of the most popular words - minus the dull joining words - then appear in the new buzz tag cloud.

A huge amount of respect is due to Leon Brocard, for his excellent Perl module HTML::TagCloud. This made the job of producing the page using the existing Chipwrapper Headline Buzz RSS feed an absolute breeze.

Posted by Chipwrapper at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With Rugby's biggest event, the Rugby World Cup, starting tomorrow evening in France, what better time to introduce some Rugby into Chipwrapper.

There is a new Rugby Edition of Chipwrapper available at www.chipwrapper.co.uk/rugby

Instead of the usual mix of UK newspaper and broadcaster news headlines, you get an aggregation of the top two stories from a variety of sources, including the essential news from planet-rugby.com.

There is also a new Chipwrapper RSS feed available - the Chipwrapper UK Newspaper Rugby headlines feed, bringing the same headlines direct to your browser or RSS reader of choice.

Sadly, the UK broadcaster of the Rugby World Cup, ITV, has not made available any RSS feeds of the content they have at itv.com/rugby - which means I've not been able to include them in any of the Chipwrapper Rugby Edition headlines or feeds.

Posted by Chipwrapper at 03:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When Chipwrapper first started, underneath the search box on the homepage was a short list of links called "Topical Searches". It was made up of the kind of searches people would be making when looking for the big news stories of the day.

However, it needed maintaining and updating, and was basically editorialising.

Well, Chipwrapper isn't about editorial content, it is about helping people find the content that has been written elsewhere.

Last week, therefore, I replaced the topical searches links with a new list of links - "Headline Buzz".

Every hour Chipwrapper retrieves the top ten stories via their RSS feeds from the BBC, Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian, Independent, ITN, Sky News, The Sun, The Telegraph and The Times.

It then analyses these to see which are the most popular words being used in the headlines across all of these news stories.

The top seven words appear on the Chipwrapper homepage as the "Headline Buzz".

The "Headline Buzz" is also available as an RSS feed.

The feed gives you the word, the number of times it has appeared, and a link to a Chipwrapper search results page for that word.

  Chipwrappper Headline Buzz

Posted by Chipwrapper at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chipwrapper has already been briefly mentioned on Richard Sambrook's Sacred Facts blog, and on Friday it was the turn of Christopher Woods to write about the site on his Beta Test Blog.

His review also included a helpful little explanation of what the 'chipwrapper' means for those of you who didn't grow up with UK fish'n'chips culture.

Takeaway fish 'n chips have traditionally been wrapped in newspaper (it tends to be a good insulator and it's cheap, and it's one of those comforting familiarities) - a chip shop which doesn't wrap your stuff in yesterday's newspaper is either snobbishly upmarket or very popular because they've run out of sheets!

Christopher's review was generally positive (phew!), and in it he makes the first of what I expect will be many requests for some kind of myChipwrapper personalisation.

Posted by Chipwrapper at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over the weekend I added a new Useful Links page to the Chipwrapper site.

It gathers together links to all the newspaper and news sources included in the Chipwrapper search engine and headline feeds, so you can visit them directly.

It also has some links to news about the news. If you are interested in the UK's media industry then Media Guardian, the Press Gazette, Hold The Front Page and the Media Standards Trust site are worth a regular visit. As is the Media UK site, which has a fantastic aggregation page about newspapers.

Finally, the new Useful Links page has some links to the tools from Google and Yahoo! that I've been using to build the site.

Posted by Chipwrapper at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)