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  • Frappr and Me

    A few people have started doing this, so just to be trendy I’ve decided to do it also. Frappr is a site that lets you map where people are. For instance, if you click on the button below, it will take you to the page for this blog (with one whole person on it as of this posting). And then you can add yourself to the map. I’ve always kind of been curious about the readership of this blog. I know it isn’t huge, but there do seem to be a fair number of people who read it. So please, leave a marker for yourself (It only requires a name and a zip code, so no other personal information is required).

    Check out our Frappr!

  • How Much?

    How much is my blog worth?


    My blog is worth $10,726.26.
    How much is your blog worth?

    Damn, not bad, but I could do better I bet. Find out how much your blog is worth.

    [via Don Park (who is worth much more than I)]

  • OpenID, again

    A new beta of the OpenID plugin for Movable Type came out recently, so I thought I’d see if it would work better than the version I had been trying. After one try it was working just dandy. Even had someone else try commenting with it to make sure it worked (thanks again!).

    For those of you who haven’t heard of OpenID, it is something that was come up by the LJ folks at Six Apart. It lets people who have accounts on systems with OpenID post to remote blogs. I’d actually like to see the plugin I use have a list of trusted remote systems, since it really isn’t an authentication system. I hope to post a bit more on this in the near future.

    So just follow the instructions if you want to post here and not sign up for TypeKey. As usual, if it is abused, I’ll just turn it off.

  • Ads on Flickr

    AdRants has an post about people being upset about ads on Flickr. People seem to be blaming Yahoo! for this practice.

    With Yahoo’s purchase of Flickr, it didn’t take too long for Yahoo text ads to begin appearing next to Flickr member’s pictures. Unlike Google AdWords, Yahoo text ads, at least on Flickr, appear on personal Flickr pages whether or not the member wants them. Granted, Flickr provides the service for free which negates a non-paying Flickr member’s ability to completely control what appears on their photo pages but one Flickr user, tanais, doesn’t like the practice, commenting on an ad placement next to an image of, we assume, his dog, “I do not like my pictures being used to advertise a specific breeder (they may be excellent they may be terrible – that’s not the point)… so I shall sit down and think about how best to AdBust this.” [AdRants]

    IMHO the people complaining are idiots. I’ve been a user for ages, and Flickr has always had ads for free accounts. It’s been one of the big selling points for their Pro accounts. I’m not a fan of advertising, but you can’t expect to get something for nothing.

    Flickr is one of the few web sites that I think does get it right. And my Pro account has been a very good deal. If it’s that much of a big deal pay for the service.

  • Blog Stuff

    People have been pestering me to get crossposting working again so that my blog posts show up over on LJ. I finally got it working this morning after quite a bit of fiddling. I’m using the ljcrosspost plugin for Movable Type. It works fairly well, but took some fiddling to get it to work right. I should email the author and let him know the issues I was having.

    Next step is to get OpenID working so that people over on LJ can log into my blog for comments using their LJ info.

    One big gripe I have about MT plugins these days is that not enough of them work with dynamic pages. I’ve got 4000+ entries and rebuilding it all just for a new plugin really sucks (and takes forever).

  • Wiki Madness

    Last night, in a fit of boredom, I deleted my wiki. Of course as soon as I had done it I wanted to find some new wiki software to run. I’ve played with tikiwiki and Moin Moin. Both were decent (and I’m leaning towards Moin Moin) but I figured I’d do the lazyweb thing and see if anyone out there had any recommendations. I think I’m looking for small and lightweight with access control, that has a fairly simple interface.

    On another note, I was trying to edit something over on Wikipedia the other day and discovered that some control key commands were intercepted by the site. Kinda cool, but when editing a text field in Safari you can use emacs controls for moving around and editing. Works great till you do ^e and suddenly find yourself moved to another page because it’s some wiki command. So the question is this. Anyone know how to turn it off? I tried searching around the Wikipedia site, but nothing jumped out at me.

  • More on Feedster (and why I love the web)

    The other day I posted about issues with spam in the search results I was getting at Feedster. Within hours there was not only a post on Scott Johnson’s blog, but I got a nice message from him about how to remove blogspot results from my NetNewsWire searches there. I love to see companies being this on the ball. Especially a place like Feedster. I wasn’t really looking for a solution right that second. I more was commenting how spammers seem to be doing their best to devalue a lot of the usefulness of the web.

    So here’s a quick thanks for the help!

  • Blogger + Feedster + Spammers = Useless

    I use NetNewsWire for reading RSS feeds. One of the great features up till recently has been the ability to have it search places like Feedster and have the results show up as a feed. In the recent past my regular search for anything to do with Pulmonary Fibrosis has achieved nothing more than hugely long posts of spam (click and see). Since the 15th there have been around 27 hits on that search, only ONE of them being an actual post by someone. And all the offending posts have been at blogger.

    I think Blogger needs to do something about this. Have a better way of detecting automated blog signups or something. Currently it has drastically reduced the usefulness of things like Feedster for me. At least Feedster does have the ability to filter out responses from some urls. I just need to see if I can get NNW to support doing that.

  • Podcasting, Again

    When the whole podcasting thing started to take off I found I was quite into it, but then RL got in the way a bit and it kind of fell off my radar. Interestingly enough, this happened when I stopped being good about using the treadmill three times a week. Today as I was getting ready to walk I realized I needed something to listen to and decided I needed to upgrade iPodderX and start listening again.

    iPodderX looks like it is really progressing nicely, even if I’m going to end up having to shell out some $$ for it soon. It’s got some really slick features, and I’ve already found one feature that I want in it. It lets you set the genre of what you download, which is cool, but I want to be able to access other tags also. iTunes has one called ‘grouping’ which I use for any extra data/keywords to describe the track. For instance, anime soundtracks are in genre soundtracks with anime in the grouping tag. So I’d love to be able to put ‘podcast’ into the grouping (as well as any other info).

    Now I need to get off my ass and figure out where to set up my turntables so I can start doing a mix of the week podcast.

  • Project D.U.

    Seen via Compendium, SBC’s new RSS reader: Project D.U.. I guess D.U. stands for Digital Universe.

    proj·ect · d. u.
    (noun) 1. a reader populated with headlines pulled from across the web.
    2. relater of news and rumors
    3. hiding place for next month’s topic of conversation.
    4. the center of your Digital Universe. Synonyms: middleman, informant, eavesdropper.

    First off, the site. It feels like it is trying way too hard to be ‘Hip’. Almost all the buttons you can click are animated in some way. Luckily none of them burst into flames. Next, the Project D.U. Reader. I personally found it to be pretty lame in a bunch of ways.

    • The interface leaves much to be desired. It just feels clunky.
    • When you look at the lists of posts for a blog it only shows you excerpts, even if the blog provides full posts. Clicking on their ‘read more’ link opens up the actual post .

    • No way to export your subscriptions.
    • No support for enclosures.
    • Kinda slow and clunky.
    • When it couldn’t resolve a hostname right away it told me that the feed was bad.

    • Project D.U. is a stupid name.

    And as I was about to close my browser window on the site, I noticed this on their about page:

    One of the best features of this site, not unlike the advent of color television, is the Project D.U. Reader. It’s filled with headlines from some of the best blogs you’ve never heard of. In fact, we’ve spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours scouring the web, trying to find the most intriguing sites the world has to offer. To be fair, we pay the favored blogs a bit each month for the right to use their stuff. But we don’t edit what they say, that would be a very un-fun read.

    Wait, they are paying the blogs they list money?? How can I get in on that racket.