Hooked On Network

Videos From Top 24 on American Idol

2008-02-19T21:34:00.000-08:00

Watch all 24 of finalists from American Idol right on HookedOnReality.com.

Check them all out!

Fun Video Weekend on HookedOnCelebs

2008-02-19T15:33:00.000-08:00

Lots of new content out there. Make sure to check out some of the Will Ferrell stuff with his Old Spice, Bud Light and Heidi Klum commercials. Try out the Blinkx and Pixsy links for even more content!

Lots of sporty stuff with Daytona 500 bringing great videos, new top movie with star Hayden Christenson and Diane Lane. Plus much much more. Check out these favorites:

Also make sure to check out the new foxier sitemap page with lots of new additions:

Sitemap

Sugarfoot's Favorites

New music releases:

New Releases 2-19-08

Enjoy!

HookedOnCelebrities Search Gets Shined

2008-02-14T11:24:00.000-08:00

I prettied up the HookedonCelebrities search today. The 3 in 1 search let's you hit Truveo, Blinkx and Pixsy all at the same time. Amazing amount of content from all over the web for any search.

Check out the results for :

Daytona 500

Uno the Dog

Rock of Love

You'll see that you get results from Truveo and Blinkx by default. You can also add Pixsy results by checking the Pixsy box. Pixsy results also include images which make life easier if you are surfing at work.

The 3 in 1 is tight!

Gary, Abbie, Uno, Jose, Roger, Will, Marissa and Times New Viking

2008-02-13T10:16:00.000-08:00

HookedOnCelebrities gives you what you NEED. Don't be caught not knowing everything on these pages:

Plus videos from the top money winners on the PGA tour last year. HookedOnCelebrities once again delivering the one stop video exploration experience.

What do the 50th Daytona, this years Grammy Winners and the Sports Illustrated Cover Model Have in Common?

2008-02-12T15:46:00.000-08:00

They are all on HookedonCelebrities!

Check out the latest videos from the top 20 poll positions for this weeks NASCAR Daytona 5oo (the 50th!).

Check out the latest from these winners from this weeks' Grammy awards. HookedonCelebrities is a great source for all your favorite music videos. Use the triple threat search to find the latest from your favorite band.

Check out the latest videos from the hottie on the cover of the 2008 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue:

Marissa Miller

All this and so much more now up there for you on HookedOnCelebrities!

Amazing Support From Truveo

2008-02-08T15:23:00.000-08:00

I went over the 10k limit today on queries to Truveo's service. They sent me some emails immediately telling me what I needed to do to increase my limit. You will now notice "Powered By" logos throughout HookedOnReality and HookedOnCelebrities .

I think it looks great and I went ahead and did it with their competitors Blinkx and Pixsy as well. I even briefly toyed with making one of them the default provider.

The Truveo team had me up and running with an increased limit in under an hour. They both called me and emailed me. I was very impressed at the quality of support.

Hitting the Truveo Limit

2008-02-08T11:08:00.000-08:00

We hit the Truveo's 10k limit on HookedOnReality and HookedOnCelebrities already today and it took down the HookedOnReality site (my bad) and it made the Celebrity site look really weird.

Note that the Blinkx and Pixsy links are still working.

Blinkx

Pixsy

I sent in an email to Truveo to see what it will take to up my limit. I will report back here when I hear something from them.

HookedOnCelebrities Search Updated

2008-01-26T14:10:00.000-08:00

I have been using Google Coop to do my primary search on HookedonCelebrities.com for around six months now. There are some interesting features with it like helping out with misspellings and paying you. But the advanced search capabilities allowing you to explore Truveo, Blinkx and Pixsy content all ar once are just too good to hold back.

So I have made the "Advanced Search" the primary search on HookedOnCelebrities and moved Google to the side.

This give the advantage of brining back content for ANY search like:

http://hookedoncelebrities.com/advancedsearch.aspx?q=ronaldhino

http://hookedoncelebrities.com/advancedsearch.aspx?q=cienciano

Where Google Coop just crawls the content from my sitemap (and very slowly). I really like having the power of all three companies behind my search. Next will be moving it to AJAX to help performance.

The Blinkx updates made last week made the load times a little slower as the flash files are much larger. Mess around with it and let me know what search you like best!

Getting your hands on image and video APIs

2008-01-24T10:48:00.000-08:00

You can get your hands on the APIs used on http://HookedonReality.com and http://HookedOnCelebrities.com directly from

Truveo (http://truveo.com look in the developer center)

Blinkx (http://blinkx.com - they have a developer center thing but I couldn't find it while I was writing this)

Pixsy (info@pixsy.com - just ask nicely! I hear they have a dev center coming soon and I hear they are working on monetizing for API partners!)

If you need any help implementing these things contact http://Sideways8Tech.com.

New Blinkx and Pixsy updates

2008-01-24T10:13:00.000-08:00

Got a pretty cool Blinkx feature working today on http://hookedonreality.com and http://hookedoncelebrities.com. Blinkx gives you a swf url you can point to, to get flash based results.

Click anywhere you see the word Blinkx on either either site like :

Rock of Love: Blinkx!

or

Britney Spears : Blinkx!

This also works for all "Advanced Search" results.

I also updated my Pixsy results. You now get the latest content whenever you click the Pixsy logo throughout the site.

I may be doing something wrong but it seems you can't mix their NoRollUp parameter with their s=pubts:desc.

I'll see if I can't find out more.

Check it out!!

Using Truveo, Pixsy and Blinkx from C#

2008-01-23T20:48:00.000-08:00

The Sideways8 XML View control is used throughout the HookedOn network. I often mention performance in my posts from my three providers (Truveo -the default, Blinkx and Pixsy) and I wanted to show everyone the guts of how I am doing this.

This is not necessarily the fastest way to do this, but for what I am doing in .NET with a user control, it is a very easy way to add new providers and configure new feeds.

The goal of this control was to create a way to view search results from the Truveo, Blinkx and Pixsy APIs. I wanted to be able to make changes via properties that could be done by editing text files or database entries to be able to show new content in the system. If you look at the home pages of HookedOnReality and HookedOnCelebrities you will see some of the configurable properties of the control from the number of images shown, to the length of the title and descriptions, to width, to query etc.

All three controls use the exact same method for making the call to their respective APIs. Many of the specific features of the API's will be added to the controls in future versions. Currently the only control I really do anything special with is the Pixsy control where I use a couple of performance enhancing parameters because of the way I call the API. (pixsy has a NoRollup parameter you can pass in if you do not need any of the provider, calculated info - Truveos API for instance requires a second round trip to their server if you want this info).

The guts of the search occur in the Search function which looks like the following in our Truveo control:

double dblPeriod = 0.0;
DateTime dteTimer = DateTime.Now;
// Create a new XmlDocument
XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();

// Load data
string url = baseQuery + "&query=" + Query;
doc.Load(url);

XmlNamespaceManager nsm = new XmlNamespaceManager(doc.NameTable);
nsm.AddNamespace("default", ControlXMLNameSpace);
XmlNodeList xnl = doc.DocumentElement.SelectNodes(ControlXMLSearch, nsm);
rpMyRepeater.DataSource = xnl;
rpMyRepeater.DataBind();
dblPeriod = TimeSpan.FromTicks(DateTime.Now.Ticks - dteTimer.Ticks).TotalSeconds;

From here I make edits to my aspx page to choose which fields I want to display and how I want to display them.

You can get to the data as simply as :

DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "nodeName")

For me this was a quick way to get three providers up, with decent performance and maximum reconfigurability.

These three APIs are all great resources for adding interesting content to your web site. Give all three a test ride from the Advanced Search pages:

Advanced Search

Check out the relevance and speed for any query you like against all three at the same time:

Super Bowl latest from Brady to Petty

2008-01-23T15:53:00.000-08:00

The mayhem has begun for the two week circus up to Super Bowl XVII.

Get the latest off the wire for :

Super Bowl XLII

Super Bowl Preview

Super Bowl Commercials
and of course..
Tom Petty

Advanced Search Feedback

2008-01-23T10:06:00.000-08:00

The Advanced Search pages on
HookedOnReality.com

Advanced Search

and HookedOnCelebrities.com

Advanced Search

combine the abilities of the Truveo.com, Blinkx.com and Pixsy.com sites all into one search. I will be further expanding this page to include more of the features provided by each of these API's and examples of calling these API's in .NET.

The page is pretty interesting for comparing and contrasting the search engines for speed and relevance. I am personally using this page more and more for news/info searches.

The Pixsy choice is interesting to me often because they provide images as well as videos. The video providers don't often provide text on their video pages making it annoying to have to wait through the commercials etc to get to the news you may or may not want to hear.

With Pixsy's image search you can get right to the news story, scan for what you want and move on.

Hopefully they will improve their performance.

Heath Ledger news on the wire.

2008-01-22T15:36:00.000-08:00

Lots of Heath Ledger news on the wire today. Already have tons of stories from Truveo and a few from Blinkx. I am amazed how fast the content gets pushed out and updated accross HookedOn.

Truveo:
Heath Ledger

Blinkx
Heath Ledger

I'll double check why my Pixsy content is not updating.

Pixsy
Heath Ledger

Oscar Nominations on HookedOnCelebrities

2008-01-22T13:44:00.001-08:00

See all the latest videos and gossip on all the Oscar nominations:

Pixsy Advantage

2008-01-21T16:19:00.000-08:00

I made a lot of UI updates to the HookedonNetwork this weekend and noticed some interesting holes in the Truveo and Blinkx catelogs.

I created a page with the top 50 scorers in the NCAA right now : here

You'll notice that for many of the these players there is nothing that comes back from Blinkx or Truveo, but Pixsy has the content. Click the Pixsy/Blinks link in the results to fire off the same search against Pixsy/Blinkx.

Even though these guys are 20-ish games into the season and they are leading the nation in scoring, you get no videos. I was not expecting that. Pixsy's catalog seems to have significantly better coverage since they also provide the image links.

Advanced Search Complete on HookedOnReality

2008-01-16T21:58:00.002-08:00

Updated the Advanced Search page on HookedOnReality. This page lets you send any search to Truveo, Blinks and Pixsy at the same time.

This page allows you to do comparisons between Pixsy, Truveo and Blinkx for performance and relevance. You'll see interesting results between the three for different searches.
They all have their strengths and weaknesses. Check it out and decide which one you like best!

I will be adding other search engines to this page soon.

Advanced Search Added to HookedOnReality

2008-01-14T16:41:00.000-08:00

Added new advanced search page to HookedOnReality letting you do searches vs Pixsy/Blinkx and/or Truveo. It's an ugly implementation but it is kind of cool for comparing performance and relevance of the three search engines.

Check out the number of seconds for the searches from each provider and take a look at the results to see whose relevance you like.

I have noticed some interesting differences with different queries and regarding performance and relevance.

Upcoming Features

2008-01-10T16:29:00.000-08:00

1. Advanced Search that will allow you to search all of Truveo, Pixsy and Blinkx on one page as well as compare response times and relevance directly.

2. Play videos on site.

3. Add Digg, Delicios, Stumble and Technorati links for show and celeb pages.

HookedOnReality Performance Updates Complete

2008-01-10T16:24:00.001-08:00

Same issue as hookedoncelebrities is resolved. Also added new content to sitemap page:

Performance updates

2008-01-10T12:29:00.000-08:00

Noticed I was accidentally calling the Pixsy, Blinkx and Truveo API's when displaying aspx pages like:

Truveo Search

http://www.hookedoncelebrities.com/t7630/~Jamie_Lynn_Spears.aspx

Pixsy Search

http://www.hookedoncelebrities.com/p7630/~Jamie_Lynn_Spears.aspx

Blinkx Search

http://www.hookedoncelebrities.com/b7630/~Jamie_Lynn_Spears.aspx

This made the load time occasionally painful as I was calling all three search engines server side whether I showed their results or not.

Many other speed improvements making it way faster now.

Will make same updates on hookedonreality as well.

You can't make this up...

2008-01-08T11:36:00.000-08:00

With all the new amazing TV shows coming out this winter, one rises above the others like a rising thing above things that aren't rising:

Rock of Love 2.

Check out some of the other gems:

Survivor Fans vs. Favs
American Gladiators
Celebrity Apprentice

Where were you when ....

2008-01-08T11:32:00.000-08:00

First there was

"Where were you when John Lennon died?"

then

"Where were you when OJ was being chased?"

now

"Where were you when you found out Jamie Lynn was pregnant?"

Check out the latest on Jamie Lynn.

About The HookedOn Network

2008-01-03T12:36:00.000-08:00

HookedOnNetwork Mission

The mission of the Hooked-On Network is to give users the ability to use search as entertainment. The Hooked-On Network aggregates the aggregators to give users the most comprehensive and entertaining celebrity image and video search tool available.

HookedOn Technologies

The heart of HookedOnReality and HookedOnCelebrities is the publishing process. Sideways8Tech’s PubDango is a suite of tools used to quickly create content, generate sitemaps and “publish”. PubDango lets you add new content as easily as adding the name of a new show or star of a new show to the system. As these new pages are created new sitemap entries are created and that is the key to the rest of the site.

Once these pages are created and the sitemap generated the other tools come into play. Google Webmaster tools is used to submit the sitemap. This basically lets Google know that new pages are available to be spidered.

Google COOP is used as the search mechanism. All pages submitted through your sitemap are spider-ed and made searchable through Google COOP. The reason this product was chosen was because of how easy it was to implement a site search, the quality of the results and the direct integration with Adsense. All results point to pages on HookedOnReality.com.

Google Adsense is used to monetize site traffic. This was chosen because of the ease of setting up accounts and the capabilities of the reporting tools. Google Adsense gives you the ability to create all sorts of channels for monitoring where clicks are coming from.

Google Analytics is used to measure traffic, SEO benefit, user trends, GEO targeting, page views, etc. This tool was chosen because of the granularity and comprehensiveness f it’s reporting and it’s integration with Adsense.

Pixsy, Truveo and Blinkx are the first providers integrated into HookedOnReality. These services index hundreds of providers each. They each have their plusses and minuses.

We are partial to Pixsy’s celebrity index which seems the most comprehensive and entertaining (they also index images with their videos). But we love the consistent performance we get from bigger companies like Truveo and Blinkx.

Each provider has custom .NET user controls to query and display data. Sideways8Tech created these controls to map directly to the individual APIs of the providers. These controls are used throughout the site to display data. You can find out more about these controls here: Sideways8Tech Pixsy control, Sideways8Tech Blinkx control, Sideways8Tech Truveo control.

SEOMOZ.org provided guidance to maximize SEO benefit by following certain rules for page and content layout..

and....begin

2007-10-26T14:59:00.000-07:00

this is how it all begins.