Posted Yet? Finding cross posted articles

[nirmal]

Inspired by my previous work with Hacker News split view, I decided to explore other ways to change my news browsing experience. This is also my first time using Google App Engine.

http://postedyet.com

Posted Yet helps you find out if a site you are visiting from one news site has been posted to others. I'm currently indexing the popular stories on Digg, Reddit, BoingBoing and Hacker News. Just enter the site's URL into the form or use the Greasemonkey / GreaseKit / bookmarklet scripts below. Clicking on the results will take you to the comments/discussion area for the posting.

Examples of cross posts from recent HN posts.

Video Lectures: http://postedyet.com/?u=http://linkmingle.com/list/30-plus-List-of-Computer-Science-Video-Lectures-Over-200-Videos-video-lectures

M.I.T. students make huge parabolic mirror: http://postedyet.com/?u=http://www.dailytech.com/MIT+Students+Develop+Revolutionary+Solar+Dish+That+is+Hot+Enough+to+Melt+Steel/article12153.htm

George Carlin's passing: http://postedyet.com/?u=http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25322638/

Using the bookmarklets or Greasemonkey scripts would allow you to bypass coming back to the homepage.

The site has been tested in Safari 3.1.1 and Firefox 2. If you experience any issues please let us know which browser/OS combination you are using and we will fix it.

[bootload]

Tried on this article "http://gigaom.com/2008/06/22/fr-interview-futurist-paul-saff... has not been posted." but it was posted ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=224492 Still like the idea though. Could I suggest some simple visual indicators:

- add favicon (red) for failure, green for success. The w3 validator does this. the favicon loads before the page so you know quickly if it fails ~ http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fpostedyet.com

- on the result page add a "Tick for pass" and a "Cross for failure". If you miss the favicon colour you can read the result much faster.

I like this service. Is there going to be an api so I can check via code?

[nirmal → bootload]

Do you know if the article ever hit the front page. Currently, I am only looking at the articles that make it to the front page section.

I will look into those validator errors as well as suggestions :).

UPDATE: It is also possible that the article made it to the front page but then left before I reindexed. I am using HN's rss feed to get new content but I don't want to slam the server.

[bootload → nirmal]

"... It is also possible that the article made it to the front page ..."

Possible. I tend to read & mark the "new" page before the main page. Could you also take a second bite by indexing a couple of pages of the /new page?

[nirmal]

UPDATE: Posted Yet is now using the Digg api to find stories that it hasn't encountered using it's crawler. It caches to limit hits to the digg api.

[nirmal]

I am now indexing the new articles on both HN and Reddit.