Old News and UpdatesJanuary 23, 2006 The Custom Mangle feature is fixed! I finally sat down to have a thorough look at the program, and after much frustration and cursing, I found the bug that broke it. I can now sleep easy at night. See the forum post for more details. January 12, 2006 Mangle Toolbar version 0.9 released, which is a major overhaul from the previous version. 7 search engines were added to the toolbar, in addition to already present Google. A license key is only required for the Google web API (Google search engine does not require a license), the others are not restricted. The toolbar is now compatible with the new Firefox 1.5 release. Download the toolbar here. See the forum post for more details. November 9/2005 You may have noticed Mangle hasn't been updated in awhile, well I've been busy getting married! I'll be leaving for vacation shortly, so I won't have much time to work on the site until the Christmas holidays. I've had time to add a message board, and hopefully I'll update the Mangle Toolbar to work with the new Firefox 1.5 version. The message board is now open for public use! I'll use the forum to post announcements and things I'm working on, but it's also open for user comments! Feel free to post any comments or suggestions you have about the site, the toolbar or anything you like. The message board is at http://www.mangle.ca/forum/. I've updated the links page! I fixed some broken links and addded some sites, such as www.futureme.org/public.php?index=random (thanks Christopher!) and www.startpagerandomizer.com (thanks Dan!). August 31/2005 The custom Mangle seems to be broken, but the region Mangle works fine. Odd since they use the same code, really. It's seems to have been broken since mid-August or so, I'll look into fixing it. If you really want the custom word Mangle feature, try the Firefox toolbar for now. August 18/2005 Mangle Toolbar version 0.5 released. The scope of the toolbar has changed somewhat, before it was ideal to have a Google License key to pop random sites into the browser, the only thing it did. Now the toolbar can explore various areas of the internet, such as the world wide web, Usenet, pictures, news reports and others via the Google search engine. The next release will have support for multiple search engines (such as Yahoo, MSN, etc). Hopefully the update will be released later this month. June 29, 2005 First release: Mangle Toolbar version 0.2 for the Firefox internet browser. Bug reports, comments and suggestions welcome!February 12/2005 I finally caught up the rest of the stats pages. The months of October, November, December and January are finished. Enjoy. January 25/2005 After a very long time, I've updated this site! I've updated the statistics page for the months of May, June, July, August, and September. October's data was corrupt, so I will fix that and do the October - January stats in the next month. I also have another project closely related to Mangle that I'm working on, I'm hoping to release a beta version within the next couple months. Stay tuned! August 26/2004 Mangle has been moved to a new host, and everything appears to be working ok. I haven't had time to thoroughly test everything yet, so if you spot any problems, please drop me a note. Thanks. August 20/2004 Mangle is broken thanks to my webhost. I am tired of the downtime and excuses they've made for the past couple months, and will be moving it. For now use the Random Homepage or Random Archive. August 1/2004 You've probably noticed there are ads on Mangle now. No one likes ads, however, these are unobtrusive text ads served by Google's Adsense Program. They are at the top of each page and static, so if they bother you, just ignore them. They will NOT be on any of the script pages, only on the information pages. Feedback is always welcome. Stats will be up this week, for the previous three months. June 21/2004 Mangle was moved to a new server and some of the code was broken. The random scripts still work, but the web pages might not. This will be fixed shortly. May 9/2004 Stats for March were corrupt, it took some time to figure out what was wrong and then I went on vacation. Anyways stats for March and April are both up now. Usage for Mangle has dropped, however people are using the random homepage more so that makes up the difference. A few corrections to fix out of date pages here and there were also done. March 1/2004 Stats for February are done. The random personal homepage is quite popular! It had a good amount of hits, and myself I find it very entertaining. I got a few emails about the 'Region Mangle'. The key is to use only one or two words when restricting to certain countries or languages! Remember Mangle uses Google's database -- it works exactly the same way as if you went to Google's language/country tools and selected specific countries or languages using english words. Try using the same parameters and words as you did with Mangle, you should get the same results. February 19/2004 I've updated the front page layout and hope to update the rest of the site soon. I've added a cool new feature -- the random personal homepage finder! A random webpage created by your average person is chosen out of a modest database. I also hope to (finally) add a selectable dictionary that will add some variety to the words used to find the random pages. It looks fairly easy to update, so I should be able to get to that in the next couple weeks. February 15/2004 I spoke too soon about the updates. I updated the 'Country' option, so now you can restrict your search to 67 countries, up from 26! I tested it out, and they all seem to work fine. Just remember if you are restricting your searches to mainly non-english countries (like China) or countries with a relatively small internet population (like Ecuador), use only 1 or 2 words and you'll get less "URL not found" errors. February 7/2004 Finally, stats for January and December '03 are up. Maintaining this website has taken a backseat to other projects and life in general right now. Putting up the stats every month really doesn't take much time at all, so I'll do that on a regular basis now. I still have a few ideas I'd like to implement, I just have to find time to do it. December 5/2003 Stats for November are done. Usage was down this month however the website crashed for a couple days. I didn't get around to putting up the new features I talked about last month, I'll try and get it done for the New Year. November 8/2003 Stats for October are done. No big surprises, and usage continues to climb. The search limit has been hit several times this month. There were almost 25000 searches through October, and with Google's 1000 daily search limit, for 30 days that allows only 30000 searches (however some people have been using their own license key, thanks!). I have a few new features I want to implement, such as installing more word databases. This would allow you to choose different 'areas' to search from, such as tech words, common words, commerical names, places, etc. I have downloaded the public domain Moby words, which contain word lists of names, places, most common words, and a massive 350,000 word database. I would appreciate any links to word databases of anything you think I could use I can include them next month. Email me any links or small (<1 Meg) files that you think would be interesting. November 3/2003 Mangle is back up! If you spot any problems, let me know. Stats coming soon. November 2/2003 WEB CRASH! The server crashed bringing down Mangle. The good news is that everything has been restored, and I'll be able to do the stats for October. The bad news is that Mangle is broken and I need a bit of time to fix it. October 9/2003 Thanks to Marcos for pointing out the bug that prevented images from being displayed in the Mozilla browser! Mangle should now be compatible with all major browsers, if any more bugs are spotted please let me know. October 2/2003 September stats are done -- Amazon.com is now the most hit site, taking the crown away from geocities. I've also added some more links! Random image searches are becoming popular now, if Google adds an Image search to the API, I will implement it asap! This is a much requested feature. Bugs! I've checked the compatibility
of this site with the most popular browsers (IE, Mozilla, Opera, Netscape) and found
some bugs. IE accounts for 89% of all hits to this site, Mozilla is second at 6%, so its
not really a big deal, but I fixed it up for completeness. Here's what I fixed:
September 4/2003 August stats are up. There were almost 2000 searches using the custom word generator, so I had to remove those entries as they would skew all the statistics. I was looking over the custom words you peeps have used, and they are, well, creative! I think I'll be adding that filter for the search history for the youngin's out there! I've also added a few more links. The Mac OS X Random Screensaver is a screensaver for the Mac that displays random webpages (I haven't tried it because I don't own a Mac!) and Random Personal Picture Finder uses commonly known digital camera filenames and Google to find pictures! Keep sending in those links! August 25/2003 Oooops. I fixed a bug where the custom word random webpage generator wasn't using the custom word you wanted in the search. The cause: Mangle hit the search limit on the weekend, and the next day when it reset itself, it overwrote the script with an old version. August 1/2003 Stats for July are up (on time too!).
Ok, I've added a new feature, its pretty cool! Its an
almost random webpage generator. It works like this:
Along with the random words that Mangle picks to find a random page,
you can provide a word that is always
used. So if you type the word 'motorcycle', Mangle will find random pages that
all use the word motorcycle! Since it needs a little testing, its only available using
frames right now, but if it works well I'll expand it. I had to remove the 'language' option
to fit it in, but nobody really used it anyways. If you want to find foreign pages,
use words in a different language. Safemode works fine with custom words, if you use
dirty words the pages are automatically filtered by Google. The
history page is also filtered of anything 'naughty'.
July 12/2003 June 5/2003 Stats for May are up. Enjoy. Looks like usage was up quite a bit this month. May 27/2003 Ok a little late with the statistics thanks to a hard drive crash. April and March are up, no big changes from usual. Stats for May will be up next week when the month ends (really, this time!). Also, I'm working on a new feature for Mangle. Right now there are 7111 words in the dictionary that Mangle uses to pick a website. I want to make a user-built dictionary -- so users enter words into the database and these are in turn used to pick random sites. It will start at zero entries and increase as users enter more words in. I hope to have this done within a month, but it is summer now afterall so don't get your hopes up ... :) March 8/2003 Yay, more stats. I've finished the February stats and there are some interesting trends. The archived search, where a URL is randomly picked from sites already visited by Mangle, was used more than the random Google query. I suppose its because the search limit was reached on a few occasions. Now, if you get the 'search limit reached' page, my license key of 1000 queries in a day has been used up. The friendly people at Google imposed this limit for each license key to anyone who uses their web database. SO, to keep using Mangle, please go get a (free) Google Key and you can have 1000 queries per day all to yourself! Thanks. February 1/2003 Stats for September - November, December and January are finally up! Usage is starting to climb after a big decline in users while Mangle was broken. I've added some links, (thanks Insidious Plots)! Also if you've sent email between January 1st and January 30th, I didn't get it, for some reason all the emails got lost! Use my new email on the contact page. January 26/2003 I've fixed some broken links and bugs with Mangle, and added some other random web generators to the links page. There also have been no problems with the new host! I've been a bit behind on the statistics and I'll get those done for the end of the month. December 2/2002
December 1/2002
A host has been found for the domain mangle.ca! Not everything is totally functional at this moment, however you can still use the old site, or go to a random site selected from Mangle's archive using this version while everything is ironed out. I hope to get everything working shortly. October 10/2002
Mangle hasn't been working properly since August, the same day that my web administrator made some modifications to the hosting computer (coincidence? nah!). I've rewrote it and right now only the frames version works, I'll put the over versions up in time. If there are any problems please let me know! Also, Mangle seems to be a little slow, if you want something fast, try this version, it just selects a random site from Mangle's archive of web sites already visited. September 2/2002
I added the stats page for August. Amazon.com made a huge jump into the top-5 domains hit with 35 hits, where as it only registered a single hit all last month. The top sites seem to be mostly news sites or personal homepages, such as Geocities, Angelfire, AOL, Tripod and Earthlink. Mangle has seen a steady increase in traffic, especially from Australia, Japan and Russia thanks to some media exposure! Unfortunately Mangle has been having problems since August 26th because of some changes to the server by the web host provider. Use this temporary search for now until it gets fixed! August 1/2002 I added the statistics page for July. Things look similar to last month, except there were more searches. I also added the types of files that were found (.html, .php, .txt, etc) to the June stats. My Google key (which only allows 1000 searches per day) has run out a number of times, and unless you get your own key, Mangle stops working. I am going to add a feature that chooses a random site from the list of already chosen sites (about 20000 or so, and growing fast) once my key runs out so you can keep using Mangle without a key. July 22/2002 July 7/2002 May 27/2002 Apr 01/2002: Framed version now displays the words used |