If you haven’t heard yet, Muxtape is an awesome site where you can create your own public mixtape on the web with up to 12 different songs. My colleagues and I really dug it, but we found that the good hip-hop mixtapes were too few and far in between, and wanted a better way of collecting them all. That’s where the idea of HipHopMuxtape.com came from. Using Rails, JQuery, and quickly learning a Ruby web scraping tool - Scrubyt - I was able to build the site and bring it up in a few hours. Here are the results:

I keep a database of muxtapes that are designated as “hip-hop”, and allow for anyone to submit muxtapes that they feel are hip-hop. I also allow for people to browse through all of the muxtapes and designate what is and what isn’t hip-hop:

I hope to eventually be able to index the whole site.

So check it out, bump some new music (btw my muxtape is food.muxtape.com), and enjoy!

I try to stay on top of the web; making sure that the relevant news and information comes to my attention, while being able to swiftly sift through the rest. For this, web feeds and Google Reader have been great.

But often a page will not have a feed to subscribe to, yet I still want to be notified of changes. This is where Follow That Page really comes in handy. Enter any URL, and Follow That Page will track textual changes from that page, and send an email when there is a change.

In the case of a page that has a lot of dynamic content that you are uninterested in, you can specify a block filter to section off just the part of the text that you are interested in.

There are a few more options but ultimately it’s kept very simple and does exactly the job I want of it. What’s more, there doesn’t ever appear to be any ads on the site or a “premium” (i.e. pay) account upgrade option. I’d imagine that the creator of this site needed exactly something like this, which hadn’t existed, and so just went about building one herself, and then opened it up to the public for free. So kudos to the creator for making a super-useful, super simple product!