Year: 2014

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My Twitter Digest for 02/19/2014

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My Twitter Digest for 02/18/2014

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Finally Breaking Down And Installing Jetpack

What better way to kick off a couple of vacations than to give the old blog a shot in the arm. I’ve danced around installing the Jetpack plugin for quite some time, but now seems like as good a time as any to give it a whirl. This post is written as an email and is being sent in. It is the first test: does it get there?

I’ve configured the Publicize features so this post should get out to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn in short order. We’ll see how that works.

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A Text Analysis API To Take For A Spin

AYLIEN Text API is a package consisting of eight different Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval and Machine Learning APIs that will help developers extract meaning and insight from documents.

There are currently 8 endpoints available:

  • Article Extraction: Extracts the main body of article, including embedded media such as images & videos from an URL and removes all the surrounding clutter.
  • Article Summarization: Summarizes an article into a few key sentences.
  • Classification: Classifies a piece of text according to IPTC NewsCode standard into more than 500 categories.
  • Entity Extraction: Extracts named entities (people, organizations, products and locations) and values (URLs, emails, telephone numbers, currency amounts and percentages) mentioned in a body of text.
  • Concept Extraction: Extracts named entities mentioned in a document, disambiguates and cross-links them to DBPedia and Linked Data entities, along with their semantic types (including DBPedia and schema.org types).
  • Language Detection: Detects the main language a document is written in and returns it in ISO 639-1 format, from among 76 different languages.
  • Sentiment Analysis: Detects sentiment of a document in terms of polarity (positive or negative) and subjectivity (subjective or objective).
  • Hashtag Suggestion: Automatically suggests hashtags for better discoverability of content on Social Media.

via Text Analysis API Documentation | AYLIEN.

This might be interesting here when used in conjunction with something like the Free Law Reporter though my initial testing seems to bring uneven results. The API did good work with a copyright case, spotting key phrases and generating a good summary. It didn’t handle Brown v. Board of Education as well, missing key concepts and generating a useless summary. It seems to work better at extracting short newsy articles from cluttered web pages than analyzing lengthy text articles.

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My Twitter Digest for 02/17/2014

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Paperless Office Is Closer As DocuSign Apps Come To Microsoft Office 365

“Today, Microsoft and DocuSign announced a long-term strategic partnership to make DocuSign’s industry-leading eSignature apps widely available from within Microsoft Office 365. DocuSign’s new solutions, which are built on the Office 365 platform, will include integration within Outlook, Word, SharePoint Online and SharePoint Server 2013”, says the Office team.

via Betanews: Paper is passé — DocuSign eSignature comes to Microsoft Office 365.

DocuSign’s eSignature apps have been available to Google Docs users for some time and the addition of Office 365 just increases the market penetration. As acceptance of digital signatures through trusted apps like DocuSign increases fulfilling the longtime dream of a paperless office becomes more likely.

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Use Google App Engine For Quick Static Web Page Hosting

Sometimes I’m looking for a quick way to take a look at some new static design pages or prototype and I don’t want to go through the hassle of setting something up on regular hosting. I’ve typically done that sort of thing locally, but that doesn’t help if I want to share or get feed back on something. Free Static Page Hosting on Google App Engine in 5 minutes shows how to get a static site up and running on Google App Engine.

I had thought of Google App Engine as a platform to deploy sophisticated Python, Java, or Go apps, but it can handle static HTML just fine. The article describes the steps needed and uses the Python SDK but I tested the same steps using the PHP SDK and it worked fine.

You should visit the Google App Engine site to get all the details for using the platform. For hosting a few static pages it’s free.

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My Twitter Digest for 02/15/2014

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My Twitter Digest for 02/14/2014