Freshblog

Fun with 2D Barcodes on Your Phone

2008-07-27T10:43:00.002-04:00

Have you noticed those strange black and white grids - like demented crosswords - popping up around the place? In newspapers, flyers and the like? No? Well, I have. And I dare say if I lived in Japan I'd have seen them on T-shirts, coffee mugs and a whole lot more.

They're 2D barcodes for your mobile device (primarily phones). You take a photo with the built-in camera and the onboard software automatically extracts some text, a phone number or a link. (If your phone is a bit older, you can download the software from your manufacturer.)

I've been playing around with these mobile codes (QR codes and Datamatrix) for the past few weeks, thinking of things to do with them. As a starting point, Nokia's handy webservice for creating the images needed to meet our friends at Yahoo Pipes.

The result is Mbarcode URL. It's run along the same lines as Embiggen TinyURL: there's a page where you can see it working, plus a bookmarklet for browsers and a button for publishers.

Go on, give it a click! (Click anywhere on the popup to close it.)

One of the limitations with the QR and Datamatrix codes is there's a limit to how much you can pack in. As it gets bigger, the blocks get smaller and the decoding error rate grows. This limits the effective size of a URL to around 50 characters - even less if you want to be robust.

So behind the scenes, Mbarcode uses TinyURL to shorten the target link into something much more compact. Now you don't have to worry about the size. As a result, you can use the data: URI scheme to pack as much into your mobile codes as you want. I've "compressed" a 10K PNG image into a QR code using this approach, effectively achieving far higher resolution than you deserve with a mobile phone camera. Neat.

What's the point? Not sure, really. Here's a couple of ideas:

You're browsing along on your desktop and you want to send a link to your phone for when you're out and about later. Click the bookmarklet, point your phone at the screen, take a snap. Done. It's in your phone.

You're out with a cool friend who owns an iPhone with GPS. She's checking out nearby bars on Google Maps. You'd like to look too, but while your phone has a web connection, it has no GPS. What are you going to do? Laboriously type the address or longitude/latitude into Google Maps? No! You're friend clicks the bookmarklet, it creates the QR code, you snap her screen with your phone and now you're both browsing the current location!

Yeah, it's not a lot, but it's still fun to play. Maybe more uses will come later, especially if I figure out what to do with the cool experimental online barcode decoder at ZXing.

Suggestions?

Filed in: webtech, hacks, tinyURL, bookmarklets

Embiggen Those TinyURLs

2007-06-10T03:46:00.000-04:00

If you use a lot of TinyURLs on your blog, you might want to checkout this new tool - Embiggen. It expands those cryptic TinyURLs (eg tinyurl.com/2dfmty) to their full version, allowing your readers to make an informed decision about following a link. (That's good URL etiquette.)

It's available as a button to insert into any page eg Blogger, but it's especially handy for micro-blogging services like Twitter. You can also get it as a bookmarklet for when you're browsing around and come across a mysterious TinyURL.

See demo and get buttons

The hack works by using Dapper to grab the URL from the TinyURL preview page and munging the resulting JSON object with regular expressions.

I cobbled this together as part of another project on URL manipulation and tagging, but thought it might be useful enough to release on its own. There's no reason why this approach couldn't be applied to other common-yet-cryptic URLs, like YouTube, so watch this space.

Any other suggestions, feedback, bug reports etc? Please leave a comment.

Filed in: webtech, hacks, tinyURL, bookmarklets

Blog Update Feed and Sidebar Display

2007-04-29T08:22:00.000-04:00

One question that arises regularly with my blogging is the update dilemma - what should to do with those little scraps of information that pertain to an earlier post? This article outlines an approach to dealing with this common issue.

When I'm following a breaking news story or there's delayed developments or even a random thought occurs, I want to inform my readers in the most convenient way. If it's big enough, a whole new post may be warranted (with a link back to the earlier post). Otherwise, I ask myself: should it be done with a comment or with a manual update to the bottom of the original post? Thanks to Hearsay (and other recent comments hacks), a comment will have visibility across all blog pages, informing all visitors (but not subscribers). If there's a lot of comments on a particular post or a high rate of commenting on the blog, important updates can get lost. Alternatively, appending an update (or follow-up, postscript, addendum, errata or correction) to the post may not get out to subscribers and visitors who are interested.

I've tried to get the best of both worlds by using Yahoo Pipes to automatically generate an update feed for my blog. This feed consists of the most recent updates (to any post on my blog) and can be offered to subscribers, much like a regular post or comment feed. It can also be combined with Hearsay to produce a friendly sidebar panel to display the most recent updates to your site visitors.

The rest of this article introduces the Blogger Update Extractor pipe, explains its operation and how you can use it in your blog. I conclude with some possible alternative uses and pointers on future developments.

First of all, to get a clearer idea about the problem I'm talking about (and my solution), have a look at this post about a court case I was following. As you can see, there were five updates (each about two paragraphs) over the twelve months after the original post. This is fairly common with my posts - perhaps a quarter of them feature one or more updates like this.

I have long adopted the convention of using *** UPDATE *** to indicate that the subsequent text has been appended to the original post. I also use a named anchor (eg <a name="update1"> ... </a>) on each update heading. Why? Two reasons. Firstly, it gives me a unique URL for each update (ie http://...#update1) in case someone wishes to bookmark it. Secondly, my Blog-Nav system picks up anchors so that users can jump up and down the page (use the up/down arrow in the top right to see).

What the Update Extractor pipe does is gather my blog's RSS feed (not Atom - see below) and parse out the updates, returning a new RSS feed that consists of just the most recent updates. This works because of handy feature in Blogger's RSS feed that is not present in Atom: when you update any post it automatically goes to the top of your RSS feed. The rest is just straightforward regular expressions in Yahoo's Pipes.

With this new feed, you can offer it to readers (perhaps after burning it through FeedBurner for stats) and/or display it in your blog's sidebar to let all readers know. The links will point to the actual update, not just the post (eg http://...#update1)

Now, the latest Blogger has support for displaying arbitrary RSS feeds: you can simply use that. Or, you can create a "special" feed that will work with the Hearsay hack to give you a bit more control over presentation.

If you want an RSS feed of your recent updates, use this URL:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?BlogID=xxxxxxxx&_id=pAQ35A322xGwxdeMouNLYQ&_run=1&_render=rss

(replace xxxxxxxx with your blog's Blogger ID)

If you want a Hearsay-style sidebar panel of your recent updates, insert this code into your Blogger template sidebar:

<div id="recent-updates" ><center><br/><br/><br/>Please wait ... <br/>loading updates.<br/><br/><img src="http://ghill.customer.netspace.net.au/snake_transparent.gif"/></center></div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ghill.customer.netspace.net.au/hearsay/hearsay-v01c.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
hearsay("http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?BlogID=xxxxxxxx&_id=Ik9FeAz22xGZT18tqWIyXQ&_run=1&_render=json", "recent-updates", true);
</script>

(Again, where xxxxxxxx is your blog's Blogger ID.)

The Update Extractor comes in three flavours: "Full" grabs all the text following an update (ie to the end of the post); "Partial" grabs just the next (substantial) paragraph and "Hearsay" grabs the partial feed but prepares it for display by the Hearsay script. Please feel free to clone and modify the pipes as needed; I'd appreciate it if you could put a comment here so I can have a look.

NB: Using more Pipes, your blog's update feed can be merged easily with your blog's comment feed if that would make more sense for your blog.

One downside of this solution is when there are multiple updates to a post: it will only "see" the most recent (ie physically last) update. This is okay for low-frequency updates but completely inadequate if you put your updates at the top of the blog.

The problem is that the feed doesn't contain any information about the time of all the updates, just the first publication timestamp and the most-recent update timestamp. To deal with this, I'm now using a new convention whereby instead of naming my anchors "update1", "update2" etc I'm using a timestamp "update1177829961000". Future versions of the pipe will be able to see this and handle multiple updates per post intelligently.

Rather than typing all that in each time, I've made a bookmarklet to help out. (See below for code.) The automatically generated update heading looks like this:

<center><a title="Sunday, 29 April 2007 04:59:21 PM" name="update1177829961000"><span style="font-weight:bold;">*** UPDATE ***</span></a></center>

This same basic approach - mark out content with an anchor, process the RSS feed through Pipes and display via JSON - can apply to other content too. For example, I quote heavily from newspapers in my blog posts, so I could create a feed just of quotes. You could also make a feed for hat-tips, code, links, images, citations, headings or pretty much anything else.

So there you have it: blog update feeds for your subscribers and visitors. As usual, comments, criticisms and suggestions are most welcome.

Timestamp Anchor Bookmarklet Code:

javascript:var insert_date= new Date(); insert_timestamp=Date.parse(insert_date); insert_html='<center><a title=%22'+insert_date.toLocaleString()+'%22 name=%22update'+insert_timestamp+'%22><span style=%22font-weight:bold;%22>*** UPDATE ***</span></a></center>'; document.forms.stuffform.htmlPostBody.value+=insert_html; void(0);

*** UPDATE ***
It occurs to me that maybe a live working example on this page might help. This is what I mean by an update - some content added some hours laters. If you mouseover the update heading thingy above, you'll note that it gives you the time of update. At the risk of inducing recursive madness, here's Freshblog's update feed. Note that the embedded link in the feed doesn't just point to this post, it points to this update (via the named anchor).

*** UPDATE ***
After noticing "something screwy" going on, I've modified this Yahoo Pipe to append the now-required orderby=updated to the feed fetch module. Props to Phydeaux3 for the explanation and syntax.

Filed in: blogtech, blogger-hacks, feeds, how-to

BuzzFlux: Recent Search Queries

2007-04-26T02:20:00.000-04:00

In my ceaseless quest for content to clutter up my blog's sidebar, I have found a rich new source: reader search queries, or "buzz". BuzzFlux allows you to retrieve and display these search queries in near-real-time, right in your sidebar, for the amazement of your readership. It also signals my return to blog-hacking after a six month hiatus.

Should I Do This?

First things first: is it a good idea to display your readers "live" search queries on your blog? On the plus side, it gives readers a good idea about what kinds of content your blog has (at least, as far as search engines and their users are concerned). In that sense, search queries may be considered as micro-content, a bit like tags. It may also help keep readers on your page, especially if coupled to your built-in blog search (see below).

On the downside, it may disturb some readers to see their recent queries displayed like this and some may be sensitive to the privacy side of things. Also, you have no control over what readers type into search engines, so you may be displaying potentially defamatory, profane or otherwise inappropriate content on your blog.

I'd be interested in Freshblog's readers' views on this one, so please chime in with your own thoughts on this question.

How Does BuzzFlux Work?

Most blogs worth their salt employ some sort of web stats service. Typically, you put a bit of code into your template that "phones home" to a central server every time a page is hit. Among other things collected is the referring URL, which contains the search query if the reader used a search engine to find your blog.

I think all stats services report on search queries. I use BlogFlux for some of my web reporting. They make some (though not all) of their stats available via RSS, which is handy for hacking. Unfortunately, the search queries page isn't one of them. To get the search page info in a useful form, I made a simple Dapp to retrieve the target page. (Here's the Dapp.) Once the contents are returned as a JSON object (an array of the top search queries), the BuzzFlux script just formats the results for display in the sidebar.

If there are more search queries than space permits, BuzzFlux "rotates" the queries every few seconds. (That is, it swaps in other queries at random).

As a nice add-on, readers can click on a search query of interest and my sidebar searching hack will scour your blog for that query, displaying the results in your sidebar too. By showing readers other people's queries and the results on the page, it's hoped that it will help readers find relevant content without leaving your site. (NB: This extension requires you to install the Recursive Backlinker hack.)

Check out the magic in action on The Speccy (scroll down to "Catch the Buzz" in the sidebar).

How Do I Install BuzzFlux?

First, go and register with BlogFlux and install their stats counter on your blog. (This hack doesn't have to rely on BlogFlux, but that's how it is at the moment.)

Next, put this in the header of your blog template:

<script type="text/javascript">
// BuzzFlux
Buzz = {"divid":"BuzzFlux", "limit":"15", "timer":"2000", "blogid":"1413", "period":"hour", "scan":"", "queries":[]};
</script>

<script type="text/javascript" src= "http://ghill.customer.netspace.net.au/buzzflux/buzzflux.js"></script>

The parameters are as follows:

divid = the ID of the div in your sidebar where all this content will be displayed.
limit = the number of queries to display at any given moment
timer = the delay (in milliseconds) between rotating queries
blogid = the BlogFlux ID number for your blog. Found in the URL of your results pages.
period = the period over which search queries are drawn. Allowable values are month, week and hour. Only use hour for high-traffic blogs since you want a reasonable number of queries to display (ie less than five search hits an hour and it will look a little sparse).
scan = the ID of your in-blog search field. Leave it as "" if you're not using the extension.

Now, edit your blog template to put this in your sidebar:

<div id="BuzzFlux" style="text-align: justify"> ... loading recent search queries ...</div>

Finally, you might consider throwing some CSS styling in. Either add these to your CSS file, or put them in the <style> part of your template header:

.BuzzList{ height: 9em; overflow: hidden; padding: 10px;}

a.BuzzItem{ text-decoration: none;}

a:hover.BuzzItem{ text-decoration: underline;}

Where To Next?

This opens up a range of possibilities. Not least is that FreshTags has for some time supported tag extraction from search queries, providing a means for some sort of query/tag cross-over. Another thought would be to use Yahoo's Pipes to merge, sort and process buzz from other (related? or rival?) blogs too.

As alluded to before, there are also pitfalls too. For example, who owns the copyright on a collection of search queries? Who's liable for publishing them? Of course, it's anonymous - to a degree. Without the aggregation effect of a Google Zeitgeist, it may be more like AOL's search debacle from last year.

Filed in: blogtech, blogger-hacks, search, blogsearch

Google offers free wireless broadband to your home

2007-04-01T18:16:00.000-04:00

Solution for the last hundred yards

For those who haven't seen the news yet, Google has announced TiSP, a free in-home wireless broadband service. It's in BETA, and those wishing to participate must apply TODAY, April 1, 2007.

Installation couldn't be simpler: Remove the spindle of fiber optic cable from the installation kit, activate the patented "GFLush" system which connects the cable to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes, where Plumbing Hardware Dispatchers (PHDs) complete the access point connection.

Drawbacks: Google Toolbar must be installed, presumably so Google can serve up their ads on this advertising supported service.

Don't forget, incidentally, that today is Internet Spring Cleaning Day.

Pipes, JSON, and code for your website

2007-03-17T03:15:00.000-04:00

Although there's still quite a bit going on with Yahoo Pipes, interest in the gee-whiz user interface seems to be waning around the blogosphere. While the drag-and-drop interface is cool, I think one of the more useful and interesting features of Yahoo Pipes is its ability to export data as JSON data.

Yahoo makes all of its data -- including Pipes feeds data -- available as JSON. JSON -- Javascript Object Notation -- is just data presented as Javascript code. That means you can write Javascript to work directly on the data without any XMLHttpRequest objects to open, get and parse. And because Yahoo provides a nifty callback mechanism, you don't run into the cross domain security issues that plague Ajax developers -- everything runs on the client and Yahoo Pipes enables some truly interesting mashup possibilities that go way beyond the "aggregate 200 feeds and filter on my keywords and pull in some Flickr photos" examples that dominate most blog discussion on Yahoo Pipes.

Code for your site

The most frequently asked question I see on the Pipes discussion boards seems to be "How to I put Pipes feeds on my website?" Here are code examples showing how you can pull data from a Pipes JSON feed and display it automatically on any web page.

Get the JSON feed data. Here's the code to do that. Replace "PipeID" with the feed you're interested in. Be sure to retain "_render=json&_callback=pipeCallback". More about the callback parameter later. Make sure this script is someplace it will be executed when the HTML page loads.
```
  <script type="text/javascript" 
  src="http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=pipeID&_render=json&_callback=pipeCallback">
  </script>
```
If you need a real life example, try this:
```
 <script type="text/javascript"
  src="http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=lLJMf7HH2xGlUlFRJjBjOg&_render=json&_callback=pipeCallback">
  </script>
```

Write some CSS. To keep my example simple, I'll use <div> to put things where I want to go. Because this is a callback function, you can't just use document.write because you don't know where the text will actually end up unless you use CSS to place the text. You can define this however you want, but in my sample code I'll use a CSS ID called "leftside" and define a left sidebar.
```
#leftside {
 position:absolute;
 left:10px;
 width:180px;
 border:1px solid black;
 font-size:0.8em;
 padding:8px;
 margin:8px;
}
```

Create the callback function.The <HEAD> section of the HTML page is as good a place as any to put this code.


<script type="text/javascript">
function pipeCallback(obj) 
 document.write("<div id=leftside><h3>My Pipes Feed</h3>");
 var x;
 for (x = 0; x < obj.count ; x++)
 {

  var buildstring = "<b><a href=" + obj.value.items[x].link + ">" + obj.value.items[x].title + "</a></b>. <span id=desc>" + obj.value.items[x].description + "</span><br />";
  document.write(buildstring);
  buildstring = null;
 }
 document.write("</div>");

}
</script>

Some explanation. The function pipeCallback is called by the JSON method that you loaded in Step (1) above. Note that the name of the function matches the _callback parameter you used in calling the first script. obj is the JSON object with one or more members. I'll describe the members in the next step. You can modify this function to change how the link text looks and where the text is placed, but in this example the Title will be a link to the URL of the original article, and the description is also displayed. In real life, you may want to limit the number of items that are actually displayed.
Arrays and fields. obj.count is the number of members that are in the object. obj.value.items is an array of the members. These members may have different elements depending on how the Pipe was constructed -- you'll need to look at the actual JSON data to see what's specifically available -- but typical RSS feed things will be there, including
- obj.value.items[x].title -- the title of the article.
- obj.value.items[x].description -- the text or summary of the article.
- obj.value.items[x].link -- the URL to the original article.
- obj.value.items[x].pubDate -- the publication date of the article.

If you're able to make use of this code, please feel free to post your example in the comments.

Stem the flow but find what you need

2007-02-26T17:16:00.000-05:00

Technorati has their top 100 blogs, with popularity based on the number of links to the blog. These popular blogs are high volume and tend to be heavy on geek-tech subjects, though a number of political blogs are also featured.

These blogs are linked to because the content tends to be pretty good, but the busy blogger may not have time to follow these feeds effectively. If you blog about a niche topic, you've probably been scooped by some of your friends who caught a mention of your favorite subject on BoingBoing or engadget.

I've created a handy, subject-filtering tool just for you. Enter the keywords you're interested in and you'll have your own, custom RSS feed that search for those keywords from many of the most popular, English-language blogs. Subscribe to that feed and you've narrowed your view of these high volume blogs to just the topics you're interested in.

For example, I blog about bicycling. I watch for the terms bike, cyclist and bicycl. With these words, I get bikes, bikers, bicyclist, bicycling and so forth. I tried "cycle" at first, but I got a lot of posts about recycling, budget cycles, and the water cycle. You may need to experiment similary.

Let me know if you find this tool helpful. I've created it with Yahoo Pipes; if you need more than four keywords or you need some flexibility in where the searches are done, it's not difficult to copy my Pipe and create your own.

Try out the user provide keyword search for top blogs tool.

How to watch for Diggs to your site

2007-02-26T12:50:00.000-05:00

I plan to post a series of tips on how to use RSS to help with your blogging. This first one comes from howtogeek.com.Digg.com can be a great source of traffic to your site. If you want to know if an article has been Dugg, follow the link and read the post.

read more | digg story

Post every 90 seconds

2007-02-15T18:25:00.000-05:00

Media Guerrilla has a provocative post on the 90 second news cycle. The secret to media exposure and worldwide fame, then, is to post something good every 90 seconds, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That's over ~~9000~~ 350,000 blog posts a year.

Alternatively, you can create good quality relevant content and maybe get somebody's attention.

Via Hyuku.

Update: Correction to a simple arithmetic error.

Mashups for the rest of us

2007-02-10T18:14:00.000-05:00

Yahoo calls it Pipes, but I call it drag-and-drop mashup creation. Absolutely no programming knowledge is required to create Pipes with Yahoo's new tool.

With Pipes, you start with one or more sources of data. These can be search results from the web, from a map location, or from Flickr; or the data can be an RSS feed like from a blog or news site.

After you create your inputs, you can massage the data with Yahoo's secret sauce -- modules that you can drag in to filter, translate, and otherwise modify the incoming data.

An example of a Pipe you can create is this one where I combined the posts and comments feeds for Freshblog into one aggregate feed using the "Union" module.

In this simple example, I've taken the Freshblog feed and run it through the BabelFish module to quickly create a Spanish language version of Freshblog. You can conceivably expand the audience of your blog by providing a separate feed for each of the 12 languages Babelfish supports.

A great way to learn Pipes to to start with the simple examples above and modify them. Have fun with it!

Forced Migration

2007-01-27T10:31:00.000-05:00

So, after noodling around in beta in response to a reader's question about using Haloscan's new auto-import system with the new blogger, I was greeted with an arm-twisty hammerlock (I exaggerate for comic effect, of course!) in my old account and encouraged to make the move, thus Freshblog now resides in Beta.

Re: Scripted Re-Mark Re-Released

2007-01-10T00:38:00.000-05:00

Readers may be interested to know that the Scripted Re-Mark del.icio.us bookmarking utility has been updated. Previously launched on Freshblog, I've taken onboard the freedbacking therein and the re-hashed Scripted Re-Mark now sports the following features:

It works again. Yes, changes in the delicious interface crippled it. Sadly, I was travelling and unable to fix it. Thanks to those for pointing out the problem, and even better - the solution!

Supports functions-as-parameters. Strictly for the hard-core, this means you can now get it to operate on your titles, tags etc with JavaScript functions. Eg use toUpperCase() on your text. Or whatever you like. Dangerous in the wrong hands, please read the instructions. I'm curious to know what people will make of this.

Zip through. Faster operation since it will now only use that pesky del.icio.us-mandated delay on the bookmarks that it changes. If no rule changes the bookmark, it will jump straight to the next one without waiting. Now you can ruin your bookmarks even faster!

As always, I love getting comments so please send 'em in: horror stories, bugs, fixes, extensions, navel-gazing, use-cases - and especially your regexps and (shudder) functions.

*** Update ***
I've bolted more bells and whistles on to this power tool. It now supports tag stemming. Suppose you have similar tags like blog, blogging and blogs. Scripted Re-Mark can detect that these are similar (ie share a common stem, blog) and rename accordingly. Great for rationalising your tagspace, especially with plurals, tenses and the like.

There's also new support for a "touched tag" ie a tag that is added to all bookmarks that are updated. This is handy for multi-stage processing and manually reviewing edits.

I'm always looking out for more ideas, so please send them in!

*** UPDATE ***
Bowing to public pressure, Scripted Re-Mark now features a mass delete option. Wanna make some bookmarks drink the grape-flavoured Kool-Aid? Now you can ...

Please, be careful with this as it has the potential to inflict much sadness.

Filed in: blogtech, tags, bookmarklets, bookmarks, del.icio.us

Hacks Wiki Update

2006-12-30T15:14:00.000-05:00

Major kudos to Singpolyma for putting in some significant effort at the Blogger Hacks Wiki, updating the navigation and sorting the hacks by platform. Now you can see the hacks as follows:

New Blogger | Blogger FTP | Blogger Classic | Platform Unknown

The goal of Stephen's restructuring of the Wiki is to keep the content relevant, as well as providing a dedicated hub for all of the great new hacks that have been generated for the new Blogger platform. This is great work!

So over to you.... If you've got a great hack (whether for Beta or Classic), and you want to ensure maximum exposure for your work, as well as placing your hack up against similar ones to allow users to make comparisons, make sure you're adding your hacks to the wiki.

If you're working on your template (whether in Beta or Classic) and you want some extra features for your blog, borrow a hack or two from the wiki and test them out. As Stephen notes, it would be particularly useful to the Wiki community if you'd road-test hacks from the (currently rather large) platform unknown collection so that they can be cataloged appropriately according to platform.

Check out Stephen's wiki update to get the latest on the request hacks process and page.

Filed in: blogger blogger-hacks blogtech wiki beta

Pressure to make the Beta Switch

2006-12-16T15:31:00.000-05:00

Now that team blogs are able to make the transition to Beta, my Google interface has a couple of new and highly suggestive arm-twists to encourage the move... Are these new, or just new to me?

Filed in: blogger beta

New Hub for Hacks

2006-12-14T17:15:00.000-05:00

Volker Lehmann has developed a very cool feed hub for Blogger hacks that pulls feeds from 9 of the usual suspects & displays the content all on a single page. Click the magnifying glass / plus sign icon to expand the post you're interested in. You can see what's hot in the hackosphere with one click. All v. non-plagiaristic too, since Volker asked permission, links to both source blog & source feed in each box's header, and doesn't carry links over into his reproduced posts. A fine resource, w/ space for expansion & the addition of other sources.

Oh, and another great incentive to write descriptive, explanatory post titles!

Filed in: blogger beta feeds blogger-hacks

Widgets on Main / Archive / Label Pages

2006-11-12T16:14:00.000-05:00

Vivek writes to point out his latest beta how-to... Conditional code for your widgets. Using this info, you can tell a widget to only show up on the main, post, archive or label page, and thusly customise your beta blog. All good stuff. While we're zipping through a new beta hack or two, check out Deniz's repackaging of the good ole' referrer script for beta blogs. If you're looking for a recent referrer list, this is the way to go.

Filed in: blogger blogger-hacks blogtech beta

When is a Draft Not a Draft?

2006-11-04T10:22:00.000-05:00

When you know the Post ID#.... Richard at Philosophy, Etc points out that the comments page for a draft post can be accessed by anyone who knows the post ID. This presents an interesting (though not 100% secure) option for using the non-beta version of Blogger as a private discussion board, by circulating the post ID / URL of the comment page to members of the discussion.

Interesting to note that the comments feature gets attached to the post before publication, & that the "full" comments page appears when you do this, even if the blog you're (not) publishing to has pop-up comments enabled.

All good stuff....

Filed in: blogger drafts comments

Blogger Beta Feed Tips

2006-11-03T09:22:00.000-05:00

There's some good stuff happening over at PurpleMoggy's Blog. Check out the Blogger Beta Feeds post for a full catalog of available feed links, & spend some time in the notes section where there are all sorts of great tips & tricks for customising your feeds in beta.

In the PurpleMoggy sidebar you'll see that the labels widget has a feed icon next to each label, leveraging and advertising the label-feed subscription option to your readers in a clear and obvious way. PurpleMoggy has a how-to for that as well. Very cool! Let the label subscriptions increase and multiply...

(well, er... increase, at least...)

Filed in: blogger, beta, feeds, labels

Blogger Beta now fully loaded

2006-11-02T16:33:00.000-05:00

Blogger Buzz reports that the beta is done cookin' and that all systems are getting towards go on wider migration / rollout. Note that (for now) this says that migration will be possible for all users, but not compulsory. I guess the whole "team blog" deal must be mostly fixed now too, then?

The addition of FTP to the beta means that account migration will soon (like Really Really Soon) be available to all Blogger users -- it's currently just enabled for blogspot users.

Let's see what's next! (Really really soon would tend to suggest hours to me in terms of a timescale....)

Filed in: blogger beta

ClipClip revives Clipmarks Debate

2006-10-30T17:38:00.000-05:00

My previous post was recently clipped to a new service called ClipClip. As Darren wrote last December in regard to Clipmarks, I'm curious to know when a clip is more than a bookmark, especially since ClipClip reproduces the post template n' all, includes existing Freshblog comments, and offers the opportunity for users to add comments that will sit on the complete reproduced post, not on the original.

So... Clipping. What's up with that? Here's some ideas for discussion pro & con:

What if all clips sat in a private user's account, & were not publicly visible?
What if the ClipClip default "whole page is bookmarked when no text is selected" was actually "nothing is bookmarked when no text is selected?
How about an intro phrase for the link at the top of the page. "This content clipped from...." or similar.
What about clip technology that doesn't reproduce the template? Is that more acceptable? Clipmarks appears (at least based on my quick refresher visit) to work that way.
Is there a Search-Engine penalty here, since this is 100% duplicate content at a different URL?
Where's the benefit of a "clip" over a web-based bookmark w/ limited notes, such as those at Del.icio.us?
What if there was a way (either on the source page or the clipping service) to limit the amount of a post that could be clipped, so that it was truly an extract, & not the whole thing?

Clipmarks looks a bit like Google Reader now, with a nav-pane of multiple posts on the left and a window that displays the whole text on the right. This seems to me to be a bit more feed-reader-like than ClipClip, although of course the "river of news" that is being fed is a composite of multiple users' selected content, rather than the account-holder's selected feeds.

I'm still making up my mind (insert Whitman quote here.... the one about Multitudes...) but I think my ultimate issue here is the risk / possibility of a "rival focal point" developing for the conversation. If there's action around one of my posts / ideas, I'd like it to either be on the post, or link directly back to the post, rather than coalescing at the clip. See section 3 "Parallel Microspheres" of my Community Participation post for an earlier and broader statement of the same psychosis. Ok, so I have issues....

Hit the comments / trackbacks (or the comments on the clip?) to set me straight!

Filed in: blogging blogosphere microspheres clipmarks feeds readers bookmarking clipclip

Social Searching with URL.com

2006-10-22T14:15:00.000-04:00

There's an interesting innovation in the search field that is an effort to leverage social participation for search result relevance. URL.com is a search engine with a difference. The goal of the service is to harness the social power of the search community in order to increase the relevance and usefulness of results.

To see it in action, let's try my default comedy test search for chickens. You'll notice that URL.com returns a consolidated set of results derived from the top 10 results on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Interesting so far, esp. w/ the ranking for each engine displayed there on the left, and the small icons at the top of the ranking columns that let you jump direct to those results, but nothing that blows your socks off....

So what's new? Well, let's sign up and see. If you sign in before you search, then click a result, the result loads in a frame, which gives you the chance to rank your result.

The frame makes sure that you visit the page that you're evaluating, rather than expressing an opinion on the list of results page. In a sense, this relies on the same sort of social contract as a wiki. "First do no harm, respect the common good" etc. Of course, search engines aren't always the premier forum for this kind of ethical web-citizenship, & I'd be interested to see what sort of tools are employed to prevent an American-Idol style "Chickens Rock" campaign from taking over the universe. (Bwahahahahahah!) I'm growing my Bo Bice hair as we speak....

Anyhow... (sanity returns...) there's a Techie About page at URL.com that explains the weights and rankings that are assigned to results. There's also an FAQ, containing the nugget that votes are superceded... If there are multiple votes from a single account, then only the most recent will count. Thus, the universe would have to be conquered by committee!

Privacy is also addressed at the FAQ. URL.com state that they only publicise the links that you vote or comment on... so I guess your personal search history is no more or less problematic than with any other search engine. The long & short of it, I think, is that searches shouldn't be regarded as private, whichever engine you use.

Here's my thought / wish for the future. The evaluation of the page doesn't seem to get at accuracy or "aboutness" as clearly as you might wish for. Your vote for "good" & "not so good" results affects the way that results from that engine are interfiled with results from the other two. It does not unequivocally state "This page was / was not about Chickens..."

Now I realise that we'd be talking 8,000,000 servers to do it this way, and that other engines approximate an "aboutness" voting system by boosting the juice of pages that are frequently clicked results for a given search, (the implication being that regular traffic = aboutness) but if you're asking for my vote, I'd like to be able to say "This page wasn't about Chickens" and have it affect the page in relation to the search, rather than the bulk of engine results in relation to the other engines.

I'd eventually like the judgement to be about the page and not about the engine.

Some challenging new issues, then, but an interesting combination of two different models / technologies, and one worth keeping an eye on.

Filed in: webtech search url.com

BloggerHacks Wiki Hack Requests

2006-10-18T18:23:00.000-04:00

A whole bunch of new hack requests were posted to the wiki in the last couple of days. If you've got some time to spare this weekend, and you're wearing your hacker hat (the one with the blue flashing light & space for a can of soda), take a look & see what you make of the requests:

Merge Blogs: Basically, I have 6 personal blogs on my Blogger dashboard. That's because I wanted categorization before Blogger Beta introduced labels. For a number of reasons, I want to merge my blogs into one. If there is a way to import all the posts from one blog into another, that would be an ideal solution. Please advise or create a hack to do this, thanks in advance. My blog is here at www.Shan.ca.tf
Blogsend: No Linkback to Main Blog: I have a Blogger Blog that I've been updating since the Dawn of time, but my friends are all on LiveJournal. Using the Blogsend function, I'm able to update the LiveJournal without actually ever stepping foot on LJ, BUT the issue becomes that BlogSend automatically adds a footer with a linkback to the main Blog. I need to figure out a way to circumvent that, for privacy reasons on my main blog and to protect my guestbloggers. Any ideas? Thanks!!
Pick up labels in adding to delicious (beta): I know there is a known hack to add capability to link to delicious from beta blogger posts. But right now it does not pick up labels of the post and create automatic tags for delicious bookmark. I know it should be not so difficult to include the tags for the delicious link. I am quite used to the current Greasemonkey method to tag my non-beta blog posts and am itching to move to the new beta, but this is one big roadblock for me. Any takers? http://usctrojan98.blogspot.com
My feeds for Autodetection (beta): Is it possible to add my feedburner feed in the beta blog so that autodetection is done on the feedburner feed rather than the default Atom feed or even the beta blogger RSS feed? http://usctrojan98.blogspot.com
Tag Hack for Qumana: I want to use Qumana for my post editing for Blogger. It works much better with Blogger than Performancing. But I want to change the tagging option from Technocratii to RawSugar (as exists with the great BlogThis/Tag hack.) My guess it's a simple business of changing the url somewhere in the Qunama script. Where? How?

To date, the convention for replying has been to edit the relevant section of the Request Hacks page, and add your advice / recommendation under a bolded "solution" heading. Thanks for your input. Check out the Wiki & have fun supporting your fellow bloggers!

Filed in: blogging blogger-hacks blogtech webtech wiki

Blogger Beta Hack Round-Up 2

2006-10-17T08:47:00.000-04:00

A whole raft of new hacks for Blogger Beta since the last time we cataloged your available options. Most of these are courtesy of your usual suspects: Hoctro, Ramani, Hans, Vivek, Singpolyma, but there's some other folks working on this good stuff too.... Here's the latest:

First, Hoctro notes the new Beta feature that allows the mass-application of a single label to a number of posts by selecting the checkbox on a list (just like when you delete your e-mail!) Good call, Blogger! Update: See screenshots etc at Phydeaux3.

Since we're talking labels, check out Ramani's mighty-fine multi-mode choose-your-own-format label menu widget for your beta sidebar. Would you like your labels in a list? A drop-down? A cloud? (Mmmmm... Clouds!) How about all three, with the option for the reader to switch between them? 'Tis done....

As I noted earlier in the week, Trackback for Blogger Beta is now available, using custom Haloscan code courtesy of Logical Philosopher, modified by Pete from Utter Muttering. If you have Haloscan comments, you'll need 2 sets of the code... 1 for the comments and a second (Pete-style) for the Trackbacks.

Singpolyma has developed peek-a-boo comment code for beta, so that you can have inline comments that pop out beneath the body of your post. Apparently he's now investigating the possibilities of an inline comment form that will peek-a-boo too!

Another goodie from Singpolyma... A feed-links widget for your sidebar, to get feed links up and away from your page footer, where they may not be having a lot of fun!

Mohammed at Daily Routines explains how to add a third column to your Blogger Beta template, and suggests a strategy for adding HTML / Javascript elements to your template that are true page footers.

Vivek Sanghi presents a workaround that will display "subscribe to comments" links on each post without displaying the default post-feed options.... Useful if you're on Feedburner or similar.

Since Feedburner Feedflare is now post-footer legal, Loup d'Argent points to Feedburner's new Beta-friendly Feedflare insert code on the Feedburner forums. Flare your Beta Blog's Footer forthwith!

More good stuff from Ramani. He's upgraded a couple of pre-beta hacks for the new system. You can now highlight your comments on your own blog, as well as setting up your comments section with e-mail icons so that you can e-mail a previous commenter to notify them of your comment / response. Very cool, & an additional tool to use alongside the beta comment feeds.

Hans at Beautiful Beta has the scoop on creating a horizontal navigation menu between your header and your content on Blogger Beta. A useful & welcome addition.

Hans also points to Gabriel Lau's Random Rotating Banner Hack for Beta. Change out your Beta header images automagically and in a random-type way! Grand.

In a comment on Amit's Digital Inspiration, Vin from Blog Widgetry explains how to add a second element field to the main body section of your beta blog (where the posts go) so that (for instance) your adsense stays where you put it instead of scrolling down with the posts.

While we're talking Adsense, Improbulus points out that the addition of Adsense to Beta blogs is now an officially sanctioned / supported activity, with official Blogger help etc, & that there might be an overload in the circuits due to the additional demand for accounts.

Finally (for now)... If you still want to lose the Navbar from your beta blog, in spite of the new cool functions and the interface to your blogger acct when you're signed in, Epirater has edited the Blogger Templates nav-bar hack to make it work in Beta.

Lots of great stuff, and more to come, I'm sure. Update: Phydeaux3 looks at the promise of more to come by evaluating beta code that hints at more features than are currently offered.

For more, see our first Blogger Beta Hacks Round-Up, & watch for volume 3 in the series...

Filed in: blogger blogger-hacks blogtech beta

Integrate Google Reader with GMail

2006-10-16T20:14:00.000-04:00

Philipp at Google Blogoscoped points out a nifty Greasemonkey script that will integrate Google Reader capabilities into GMail, which comes to us courtesy of Mihai Parprita of Persistent.info.

The script will add star, share, e-mail, mark as read, & tag management tabs to feed-sourced entries that appear in the message list in G-Mail, & make it that much easier to view your e-mail feed subs in a full-fledged RSS reader, as we've recently discussed in relation to R-Mail. A great way to consolidate two major streams of incoming information, & perhaps to save a bit of time? Philipp and Garett at ZD.Net's Googling Google speculate as to the eventual integration of the two products. Sounds good to me!

Filed in: feeds readers blogtech google gmail

E-Mail for Feedreading

2006-10-12T19:35:00.000-04:00

Randy notes that R-Mail has passed 27,000 users and 68,000 subscriptions. Many congrats, Randy! A great service, which (among other, more significant milestones) is clearly impacting the distribution of Freshblog's content. Warning: Stats Ahead.

As you may recall, I was surprised last August to see that 37% of our 929 subscribers accessed Freshblog via R-Mail. Well, the trend continues. 519 of Freshblog's 1180 subscribers, or 44% now use R-Mail. We're 8th on the R-Mail top-blogs list. This is our biggest single subscriber chunk, and we've piled on 172 new R-Mail readers since Aug. More than twice as many readers see Freshblog posts through R-Mail than through Bloglines, & we're 46% R-Mail - 54% All other Readers at this point, which is much heavier on the e-mail end of things than I would, off the top of my head, have thought.
So let's revisit my questions from Aug, & provide an opportunity for some delurking on the part of our e-mail subscribers. We want to hear from you! If you access Freshblog through R-Mail....

How many other blogs do you read that way?
What prompted your choice to read blogs through e-mail?
What e-mail program do you use, & have you crafted filters and such to help to sort the incoming content?
Was the prominence of the R-Mail widget here a factor in your decision?
Are you "new" to RSS?
Do you have a Feedreader account as well as some e-mail subscriptions?

If you use R-Mail to read Freshblog (& we know there's 500+ of you) we want to know what you think! Please delurk forthwith.... Oh, & if you subscribe through a reader, feel free to chip in too!

Filed in: feeds readers blogtech

Trackback Works in Blogger Beta

2006-10-11T08:29:00.000-04:00

Pete from Utter Muttering has taken the beta code for Haloscan comments provided by Logical Philosopher, made a minor but significant edit, & voila, Haloscan Trackbacks now work in Blogger Beta. See Pete's comment on LP's original post for the details of the edit. You'll need the code from the original post too....

If you're asking "What is a Trackback?", check out the Freshblog what, why, how?

Another example of collaboration, sharing, & an individual response to the beta upgrade being put out there for the benefit of all. Gotta love this stuff! Now go make your beta blog all trackback-y!

Filed in: haloscan trackback blogtech webtech beta

Lurkers and Blog Participation

2006-10-09T10:32:00.000-04:00

Here's usability guru Jakob Nielsen on participation inequality in online systems, providing much-needed grist for our blog-participation mill. As usual, Dr Nielsen is succinct and insightful. The thrust is that "In most online systems, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.".

This disparity follows Zipf Law, whereby 90% of users are lurkers (yes, you know who you are), 9% contribute occasionally while only 1% account for most activity. This pattern seems to hold up to a wide range of online activities, like wikis, discussion forums, review sites and the like. But, interestingly, not blogs. Blogs suffer from this phenomenon to a higher degree, with a 95-5-0.1 split!

If the Freshblog subscription figures (currently around 1100) proxied for readers, then this would indicate we have 1045 passive lurkers, 55 occasional contributors and a measly 1.1 readers doing most of the heavy-lifting. While I'd be the first to congratulate John on his prolificity, I think the real split's probably closer to 95-4-1, or in whole numbers, 1045 lurkers, 44 occasional contributors and 10 regulars. So we might be doing better than the average blog, but there's more to be done. Fortunately, the good doctor also has a prescription. Most obviously, encouraging lurkers to "decloak" (yes, "delurk" is the approrpriate Usenet-era term) will get the participation rates up. Here's some blog-relevant tips from Jakob Nielsen:

Make it easier to contribute. C'mon people, hit that comment button! Honestly, how much easier could it be? Thumbs up / thumbs down buttons on each post footer?

Make participation a side-effect. A great suggestion, but it requires users' passive actions (looking at, bookmarking, forwarding a page) to somehow "count". Displaying the popularity of outgoing links ("24th most followed link") might fall under this category. As does "today's top searches" and "today's top pages".

Edit, don't create. Sure, give people templates. Works great in wikis. But blogs? Would people want "comment templates"? Or even a "clone this comment" button? Would that increase or decrease the signal-to-noise ratio?

Reward participants. Sounds good in theory, but you invariably end up with some sort of unwieldy, readily-gamed, karma-based system, like Slashdot's mod points. (In fairness, imagine how much worse that site would be without karma.)

Promote quality contributors. Dr Nielsen suggests giving greater prominence to quality contributions. This smacks of the "highlight own comments" hacks by Adi and Singpolyma - the presumption being that a blog's owner is likely to be of high quality. In a similar vein, sometimes blog owners invite their more-profligate commentors to join officially (effectively graduating from long, unreadable comments to long, undreadable posts :-) Is there a middle ground, whereby high-quality commentors can have their "associate" status recognised in the form of prominence?

Perhaps an alternative view is to say "well, if you want to get the participation rate up, why not just work hard to repel lurkers?" At which point, maybe it becomes apparent that the participation rate is the wrong metric ... after all, lurkers are pretty easy to tend, mostly feeding and watering themselves. Besides, they may make contributions behind the scenes, forwarding and discussing post via email or suggesting blogs of note to friends. Should bloggers be focused on the quality and quantity of contributions, not the proportion of seemingly-passive readership?

With a nod to that mischievous logician Lewis Carroll, can I ask: any lurkers feel like commenting on this?

With these discussion points in mind, perhaps this is the perfect post on which to decloak yourself and add your first Freshblog comment ...

Filed in: blogging, blogosphere, blogtech

Technorati Link Counts

2006-10-07T09:20:00.000-04:00

In a recent post, Brian at Technorati dissects the statistics that t'rati displays for each blog:

Rank 1,375:the number of blogs, plus one, that have more than 1,005 blogs linking to them
1,919 links: the number of links pointing at this URL in the last 180 days
1,005 blogs: the number of distinct blogs pointing at this URL in the last 180 days
3,149 links: the total number of links we found pointing at this blog, ever

There's some explanation and discussion too, esp. of the ranking number, & the notion that several blogs w/ the same number of inbounds within the last 90 days can (& do) share a ranking.

Brian's post is now accessible from the green-circle questionmark next to the rank on your search results page...

Filed in: technorati blogtech webtech

Agitate for Full Feeds

2006-10-04T19:36:00.000-04:00

You can now express your need for (full) feeds by adding your signature, URL & comments to the petition at FullFeeds.com, where you're invited to "use RSS properly."

No indication of what will happen to the petition when it reaches critical mass, & not all of the signatures are commented, so they don't all move the ball forward in the debate, but still worth a look.

For my part, I'm onboard with the full feeds, because I'm interested in sharing my ideas, & don't have any ads that I need you to come here & click. For more on the debate, and a challenge to see whether full or partial feeds are more effective, see Punny Money

via the RSS Blog.

Filed in: feeds, readers, rss

Moving a Blog to a different account....

2006-10-04T09:36:00.000-04:00

Blogger Tips & Tricks walks through the process of migrating a blog to a different account (so that you can have a different profile on one of your blogs...) Simply put, create a new account, add the new account as a member on the existing blog that you want to "move", make the new user an admin, then delete the old user as a contributor. Interesting, esp. if you have multiple blogs & the one that has taken off is not the one that your profile is optimised for.

For the detailed walkthrough, see Blogger Tips & Tricks

Filed in: blogger blogtech

Javascript in Blogger Posts

2006-10-03T12:57:00.000-04:00

Amit reminds us that you can run scripts in your posts, by clicking the "stop showing errors" checkbox and allowing the post to publish. Does stop showing errors mean that the errors go away, though? One to test, I think....

Filed in: blogger blogtech

Matt Cutts on Pagerank

2006-10-03T12:08:00.000-04:00

Matt Cutts has answered some of his frequently-asked pagerank questions in response to the buzz around this week's PR update. There's some good stuff there, exploring and explaining the mysterious mystery that is page-rank.... I especially like the "why should we care?" question, to which Matt's answer (I'm paraphrasing) is "if you don't, you shouldn't!"

Filed in: google pagerank seo

Netflix Recommendation Engine Contest

2006-10-02T17:26:00.000-04:00

Netflix is looking for a new recommendation engine, & they're putting $1 million behind the effort. They're opening the effort up to users, and apparently (longitude prize stylee) they're willing to pay 50k/yr for anything over a 1% improvement 'til the grand-prize winner comes along. Check out the press release for the details.

The threshold required to win the Netflix Prize is a 10 percent improvement in accuracy over the current Netflix recommendation system. If no one wins the grand prize this year, the company said it will award a $50,000 progress prize to whoever makes the most significant advancement toward the goal and will award a progress prize annually until someone wins the grand prize.

Who will be the John Harrison of the online movie world? See Slashdot, or check out the audio on NPR.

Oh, & if you win because of this referral, I'll be looking for 10%....

Filed in: netflix business webtech movies

Beta Feeds and Your Subscribers

2006-09-27T19:00:00.000-04:00

Keeping the subscribers in mind above all, Julie has some ideas for those of you who are recent migrants to beta to ensure that you keep your subscribers happy and connected to the good stuff that you're publishing. These include announcing your new feed URL & updating your feedburner source feed. All good stuff.....

Filed in: blogger blogtech beta feeds

The Challenge of Blog-Community Participation

2006-09-26T08:44:00.000-04:00

Taking as a starting point the idea that there is undiscovered quality content out there, I've been doing a lot of thinking lately (hence the smell of burning) about the structure of the blogosphere, "microspheres philosophy", and the pluses and minuses thereof. I'm interested in three main issues:

The reputation / authority economy in the blogosphere, & how that creates & encourages "microspheres" - communities of shared interest with similar authority levels.

The challenge of developing your blog, when the above-mentioned structure can be hostile to competition.
The limitations of the structure of the blogosphere, and the emergence of parallel / duplicate microspheres.

So what is a microsphere? Well... the notion of "the blogosphere" is no longer very helpful (if it ever was). There are now blogs about anything you can imagine, and many thousands of "microspheres" made up of sites that are both interconnected by links and shared by a community of readers. To my mind, the microsphere is a much more useful tool for thinking about the social & informational connections between blogs than is the concept of the monolithic "blogosphere." The microsphere (at least the microsphere defined by Freshblog's inbound links) is graphically represented by the new graphics at The Truth Laid Bear:

I imagine each blog as having multiple microspheres.... Inbound links, outbound links, readers, subscribers, sources.... These are the online communities in which either bloggers or their content participate. Significantly, these seem to coalesce around a couple of different factors. The first of these, similar content, is no great surprise. I want to read, be informed by, & respond to blogs that post about stuff that I'm interested in. Far more interesting to me is the notion of microspheres and authority.

1. The Reputation / Authority Economy

I have riffed previously on how useless rankings are for anything other than estimating the "weight" of incoming links or assessing the relative performance of your blog against the blogs you want to emulate. What else is the reputation / authority economy about?

Adding to the conversation with relevant, original and insightful material
Drawing attention to that material
Actively participating in discussions to support your positions / respond to challenges / integrate new material

What is the currency in this economy? Links. The relationship here is, of course, cyclical:

The more inbound links you have, the more people will see your stuff
The more people see your stuff, the more links you'll have

This is great, because it is self-reinforcing, & a single post can reverberate through the blogosphere for a good while and change the fortunes of your blog. It also means, though, that it is hard to get started. Authoritative bloggers are selective in their linking, and very authoritative bloggers are very selective. This suggests that Microspheres tend to include blogs of similar levels of authority, & that it is difficult to gain attention from blogs which are more authoritative than your own. The process of community formation amongst peers seems to be the strongest phase in the formation of a microsphere. These blogs then grow in reputation and authority together.

2. Niche Building: Becoming Reputable and Authoritative

The Squidoo folks invite the authors of complete lenses to "create your own recommendation economy and traffic network online." Well, isn't that just the thing of it. The work of years in 10 words or less.... Ultimately (and at multiple levels as your microsphere expands) your blog will gather momentum and come to be viewed as both reputable and authoritative by some percentage of your readers. How to get this done? Time is critical, of course, (you can't turn this around in a week!) as are links, and active participation in the conversation.

Steve Rubel encourages us to "be generous to be effective." To my mind that's the key and has always been. Link as you wish to be linked to! I noticed a significant percentage of the blogs that I read regularly because they linked here, or because they were "recommended" by a link from another regular read. Dialogue in comments and e-mail also raises the profile of your blog & enables you to sharpen opinions / clarify confusions in exchanges with individual readers. Ultimately, I think that reputation and authority in the virtual world are derived from the same sources as in the real world (however much we'd like to think otherwise).... Civility and relevance / interest. To grab a niche, write well about something that you know about, and add value to the debate.

While we're talking about niches, Amit links to Mike Rundle's plea to "go find your own niche" rather than trying to emulate the top 100. Agreed. Write what you know. The structure of blogging as a medium will allow you to choose any topic that sounds good to you. So let's say you find a niche... a half-dozen blogs that talk about the same good stuff that you do. How do you get a seat at the table?

3. Parallel Microspheres

Whether deliberately or coincidentally, the blog world is a place in which multiple communities address similar concerns, and are not always integrated effectively with one another. What is it about the structure and functions of blogs that fails to discourage duplication?

The structure of blogs encourages and places disproportionate value on "fresh" content, and so there is a pressure to produce.
Mechanisms for finding content are imperfect, & so existing quality content can't always be found - this encourages duplication.
Authors may not search for existing content before making their contribution.
The volume of content in the blogosphere is too great to navigate comprehensively, and so we define our own "microspheres" and navigate those.
Duplicate content can be rewarded if your post has the highest profile.

Is the duplication of information necessarily a bad thing? No. Content theft is, of course, but the offering of similar information in multiple locations spreads the wealth and maximizes the chance that a curious reader will find what they're looking for. There is, though, an inefficiency there. If you can find my "page titles optimization" hack, for example, your time might be better spent improving upon it, rather than re-creating it.

What about integration? Well, there's a counter-argument there too. Maybe your "page titles optimization" hack is your ticket to the big time (or at least to a bigger time?) & so not only do you want to present your hack to the world, but you want to obliterate mine in the process (bwahahahah!) Now sure, competition drives creativity to a degree, but collaboration (at least in my experience) has a significant role to play.

How might the blogosphere recognize and reward collaboration? Mary Hodder has argued persuasively for a "visible microsphere" of declared interconnections between authors:

We want to see where people link, what the relationships are between them, and make our own decisions as readers and conversants about what those author relationships mean, as we take in the work. It's the author who matters, and the author who must decide how and what to show about their own biases and relationships. Because otherwise the online communities will decide for that author. It's so much cleaner if authors and creators give it to us up front. Readers like it and we need it to evaluate trust because authors have become uncommodified.

Such a "declared microsphere" would also make it easier for authors to locate related content, & to identify online communities that they'd like to integrate with. This would also increase the level of “personal” interaction in the blogosphere and therefore require a certain standard of civility.

4. Over to You

As you can tell by now, I'm interested in Blogging as a social process, and as an opportunity for community building, collaboration and the sharing / refining of ideas so that they might reach their greatest potential. Nor am I alone. Confused of Calcutta explores a list of six unintended consequences of blogging. They all have to do with testing opinions, forming communities and opening up new avenues for collaboration. Meanwhile John at Beelerspace develops a great theory of blogs as tools for social networking and communication:

We have created blogs – and other technologies like it (email, for example) – so that we can maintain our village, so that we don’t have to create new meaningful relationships every 2-3 years. Technology hasn’t created a global village, it has enabled global villages. Blogs and email are a direct evolutionary reaction to the demanding mobility of modern society.

I'm curious to hear your ideas for consolidation and integration.... I'm not talking about censorship, exclusion, or steamrolling the spheres that operate in parallel to yours, but about ways to form stronger bonds between blogs that have similar content, & ways to present a single (expanding) topical microsphere that encompasses more voices. This might be a new third-party service for blogs, tighter search, more widespread use of search by bloggers, a consistent pattern of tagging, a declared community hub, or more personal activity (off site) between bloggers. What do you think? Write your own post & track back, or leave a comment here.

How do we tie this thing together more tightly?
How can we find related and relevant content more effectively?
How do we restructure the process so that there is a greater reward for collaboration / inclusion & a diminished incentive for excluding / marginalising “competing” blogs?
How might we encourage or achieve greater "vertical" interaction between blogs to complement the "horizontal" process of peer-to-peer microsphere formation?

Answers on a postcard please.....

Filed in: blogging blogosphere microspheres

Sharing Code in Beta

2006-09-25T08:30:00.000-04:00

My eye was recently caught by a Slashdot comment on Scott's code-table submission. The uber-geek commenter in question, in an attempt to belittle Scott's efforts, wondered "just how hard is it to view source".... (har-de-har!)

Not hard, of course, but in the Blogger of the Beta it doesn't work. Beta Help says that "in your published blog, all <b:section></b:section> and <b:widget></b:widget> tags will be replaced with <div></div> tags, which will have the specified ID. So you are welcome to refer to, for example, div.header or div.myList in your CSS if you want to."

Long & short of it.... View source is no longer going to reflect cut & pasteable examples of features that you want to add.

I bring this up because it presents an opportunity for collaboration & for the sharing of widget code. Singpolyma has taken a major and significant step down this road by establishing & publishing a proposed shared standard for javascript widgets known as widget data. Excellent.

Might I also propose a "beta code" category on the wiki for swapping & sharing beta widgets?

Filed in: blogger blogger-hacks blogtech beta wiki

Comment Count in Beta

2006-09-24T14:38:00.000-04:00

Another very useful hack for Blogger Beta from Michael at Basang Panganip. This one takes advantage of Beta's new if - else architecture to correct the grammar of the comment count (0 comments, 1 comment, 2 comments etc). Michael also has a helpful review of the history of the hack, & catalogs your existing options for getting this done if you're not on beta yet. Great stuff!

See Also: Freshblog: Grammatically Correct Comment Count

Filed in: blogger blogger-hacks blogtech beta

Digg Traffic vs. Del.icio.us Traffic

2006-09-23T17:25:00.000-04:00

Brian Clark at Performancing compares the two, & finds that, in the long run, 'tis better to be Del.icio.us'd than to be Dugg.

Creating content with the bookmark in mind tends to make you concentrate more on delivering truly useful resources, rather than just pulling stunts to pull traffic. Getting the right type of traffic (rather than just tons of traffic) is one of the main keys to a successful blog. So, aim for getting a bookmark, and you just might get Dugg too.

Go read the 3 reasons why.... As you know I'm philosphically pre-primed to agree with Brian that quality content is the critical issue. Whether you carefully craft your posts so that they get bookmarked, so that your ads get eyeballs, or so that they make sense and can inform / persuade your reader, the important part is that you craft (the majority of) your posts, rather than slapping up the first thing that comes to mind. Say it with me... Content then Linking then Ranking.

Filed in: social-bookmarking blogtech digg del.icio.us

Label Feed Addresses

2006-09-23T17:08:00.000-04:00

In a post that I missed at the time, Phydeaux3 has decoded the info required to determine label-feed addresses in Blogger Beta. Now you can set your beta blog up so that readers can sub to your labels!

Filed in: blogtech feeds labels beta

Collective Wisdom: From Polls to Markets

2006-09-20T22:56:00.000-04:00

In the ceaseless quest for stuff to roll into my sidebar, I thought I'd try that old standard, the reader poll. Beloved by all media, it's found a natural home in the blogosphere. And why not: it's a great way to make your blog interactive, foster a sense of community plus garner some insights into your readership.

The downside is that (as any losing politician will happily point out), polls are meaningless, arbitrary, prone to abuse, afford only a snapshot view and, for participants, finding out the results isn't exactly exhilarating. From a bloghacking perspective, the widespread availability of good quality in-blog polling options means it's very quick and easy to get a polished result with hardly any effort. Honestly, where's the fun in that? So I thought I'd turn all that on its head with integrated prediction markets.

Read on for how to build a deeply-committed interactive community around your blog, using the latest ideas in applied economics and cutting-edge web technology.

The Prediction Market Concept

The idea behind prediction markets is that if you want to know what will happen, you should let people speculate (ie bet) on those outcomes (or events). The hope is that the prices in the market represent the distilled aggregate assessment of the underlying odds (or probabilities) by informed participants. The net effect of a large group of people putting money on the line is that it encourages individuals to divulge their private information, plus movements in prices (ie changes in odds) are quickly assimilated by the market.

These markets have been put to use (very successfully) in a range of human activities. Some of the more notable ones include picking the US president, picking Oscar winners and picking champion sports teams. There was also the unfortunate matter of the US Defense Department's Policy Analysis Market, designed to predict coups and the like. It was lambasted as a "terrorism futures market" and unceremoniously dumped. Of course, big, forward-looking companies like Google are not stymied by knee-jerk popular opinions and so use these internally.

Prediction Markets as Polls

Generally speaking, a poll lets you pick one option (from a set), once. Some might ask about your preferences (not open to speculation), but a lot ask you to make a prediction about the future or other unknowns. This is where Prediction Markets come to the fore.

You need to set up a contract-type for each alternative, with a "pay-off" (say, $100) if that outcome eventuates. You then release a fixed number of contracts of each type (say, 100), and let readers buy and sell at whatever price they wish. If someone thinks the chance of an event is 15%, then they'll pay $15 for a $100 pay-off. (That is, a 15% shot at $100 is worth $15.) If a second person thinks the odds are really 30%, then they'll pay $30 - and the first person will gladly sell them the contract. In this way, market mechanisms ensure that prices tend towards the best assessment of the underlying odds. This is sometimes dubbed "the wisdom of crowds".

Participants can trade as often as they like across whichever outcomes they choose. Typically, they would have a "portfolio" of events at different prices, and they would buy and sell contracts as news comes to hand. When the event materialises, the market owner "closes out" the contracts - the "winning" contracts pay out $100 each and all the rest are worthless. Savvy pundits will make sure they're holding more of the winning contracts than anyone else - and they would have bought them at a cheaper price. (Hey, if you just paid $99 for a winning contract, you're hardly ahead, are you?)

So, you can see why prediction markets out-perform polls: you can "spread your bets" across multiple outcomes, revise your estimates continuously and see what "odds" (prices) others have set. As a blog publisher, this translates into more readers, more monitoring activity, more discussion and an emotional commitment to keep coming back as news comes to hand.

Implementing Prediction Markets

This might be sounding all a bit pie-in-the-sky, right. Well, as they say on the cooking shows, here's one I prepared earlier. The Aussie Rules Misbehaviour Market is a prediction market I set up last month that allows people to speculate on which football club will next see a player appear in court. (We have a problem with criminality amongst professional footballers where I live.) Check out the market link. You can see there are 16 mutually-exclusive options (one for each team in the league). There are presently 13 participants in the market actively trading contracts which, in turn, determines prices. The only footballers in court this past month have been for prior matters (which don't count under my rules), so I haven't "closed out" the current contracts. Once that happens, I'll start it all up again for the next round of speculation.

My technology partner in this dubious exercise is CrowdIQ, a Web 2.0 startup that, amongst things, makes a damn-fine free prediction market product. They host dozens of markets in all sorts of sectors, and I heartily recommend them for this purpose. Please note, this is play money only, so it's egos only at this stage. Still, that's a sufficient motivator to get things rolling.

CrowdIQ makes it easy to setup a market - one minute to create an account and perhaps ten minutes to get the market up and running. It has nice financial engineering flourishes: an IPO (Dutch auction style, like Google) to set the initial prices, limit buys/sells and short selling.

More importantly, they publish the market as an RSS feed. For those of you using Blogger Beta, you should be able to just plug the feed into a sidebar widget and get the information flowing. (Or, install it using WidgetData for nice presentation.) They also have a REST API, which means you can programmatically poke and prod at your market, if you so desire.

Collective Wisdom - Prediction Market Blog Integration

Not surprisingly, I wrote my own hack - humbly dubbed Collective Wisdom (source code) - for rolling in the information. The goals are two-fold. Firstly, to display a formatted list of current contracts and prices in the sidebar. Secondly, to highlight keyword occurrences in the blog text, with current prices and links, much as the financial media does for company name mentions.

While I sweet-talked the principals at CrowdIQ into adopting JSON (Hi, Chris!), there's still some technical foibles, so I run their RSS feed through Singpolyma's Ning converter. The client-side script uses that info to build a drop-down menu with the current contracts and prices, and extra details in the mouseover. It also goes through the blog page, looking for text that matches a contract name and then inserts a link to that contract along with price and other details.

At this point, you might want to check out an example page. In the sidebar, check under "Informants' Tips" for the contract menu. In the blog text, look in the second block of quoted text. You'll see that two team names (Cats and Tiger - it's a feline article) have been dolled up with a fancy stock code and price and linked to the contract on CrowdIQ, with more details in the mouseover.

The Getting of Wisdom

Want that for yourself? Once your market is up and running on CrowdIQ, install this code into the header of your blog (or in the external script, if that's how you arrange things):


<script type="text/javascript" src = "http://ghill.customer.netspace.net.au/wisdom/wisdom-dev-v01.js">
</script>

<script type="text/javascript">
function setCollectiveWisdom()
{
// Collective Wisdom Parameters

crowdRSS='http://www.crowdiq.com/opex/rss/ ...xml'; // URL of market RSS feed
crowdNode='collective-wisdom';    // ID of div to put list
scanNode='main-content'; // ID of div to scan for keywords

doHighlight=true;
doList=true;

return;
}
</script>

Update: Code truncated on suggestion of Singpolyma (thanks, chief!).

The options are straightforward: crowdRSS is the URL on CrowdIQ for your market's RSS feed. crowdNode is the ID of the element where the list will be put (see below). scanNode is the ID of the div to scan for keywords. Use this to stop the script interfering with other elements. Depending on your blog template, it might be something like "main-body" or "main" or something. The do... variables simply turn on/off their respective functions. Lastly, if you don't want the highlighting code to use the whole text of the contract name, you can define reN as your own custom regular expression. (In my case, I only wanted to use the last word of the contract name eg "Melbourne Demons".) Don't touch the launch code.

NB: If you don't already have the generic AddLoadEvent utility function defined, copy/paste the ten lines or so into your header too.

Next, in the body template of your blog, put this where you want to see the contract menu appear:

<p id="collective-wisdom"> ... fetching prices from CrowdIQ ... </p>

Change collective-wisdom to match the crowdNode variable above, if you don't like that. And you can use whatever loading message you like.

Finally, all the Collective Wisdom elements have a class associated with them, so you can make them spiffy with CSS. For starters, try putting this into your CSS file (or CSS block in your header):


/* ---( Collective Wisdom ) --- */

.CIQ-title
{
 font-size: 120%;
 text-align: center;
}

.CIQ-highlight
{
  border-bottom: black 1px dotted;
  font-weight:bold;
}

a.CIQ-highlight
{
  font-weight: normal;
  cursor: help;
  background: #e0e0e0;
}

While this is highly-experimental, it seems to work okay under IE (eventually ... *wince* ...) and FireFox. The highlighting function is a bit clunky in that ~~it does a search/replace on the entire document.body.innerHTML, causing a brief re-render at the end of the page load~~ - not ideal, so I'm open to suggestions for improvements. Update: Use scanNode (above) to restrict the search/replace to your blog's main content div. It will now only highlight the first instance of a match, to save repetition throughout the blog.

Also, if I were a bit smarter (or less lazy), I'd have figured out how to re-purpose the FreshTags code for displaying different types of lists, including clouds which would be neat.

Well done on sticking through to the end of this monster post. I hope that you're inspired to set about being the first to create a prediction market based around your blog's topic. Any suggestions, feedback etc welcome - along with ideas for a Freshblog market! "When will Blogger support categories?" would have been great, but that's closed out now ...

Filed in: crowdiq blogtech how-to feeds web2.0

Commenting between Blogger versions is fixed

2006-09-20T18:18:00.000-04:00

Imp reports that the bug preventing Beta users from commenting on regular ole' blogger blogs (like this one) has been fixed. The details are on Blogger Buzz, courtesy (as the post title suggests) of the Grogmaster himself. Arrr! Get that man a parrot...

...or maybe he already has one?

Filed in: google blogger blogtech webtech beta

"Digg It" Links for your Posts

2006-09-20T17:14:00.000-04:00

The Blogger Hacks Wiki continues to roll on, gather steam & justify our faith in the format. The latest addition, courtesy of Tom Thomas, is a method for adding a full-service Digg It button to your post footer. This hack suffers from the same chicken / egg issue that other efforts do....
Chicken: You need a published post to bookmark something to Digg.
Egg: You need the URL of the dugg story before you can add the button....

This, however, is not Tom's problem, and his workaround has the required outcome. Perhaps a little too much effort if you're looking to have every story dugg, but if you want to raise the profile of a few key posts, this is a workable option.

Update 9/23: As Ariel points out in the comments, there's a Feedburner Feedflare by Ross Belmont that will include "Digg It" links on your posts. For instructions on adding Feedflare to your blog instead of / as well as your feed, see Feedburner's quickstart.

Filed in: social-bookmarking blogtech digg wiki

Related Posts

Haloscan for Blogger Beta

2006-09-19T13:46:00.000-04:00

Haloscan trackback / commenting is another feature / function that needs to be wrapped in a widget and edited before it will play effectively on Beta. Logical Philosopher has written a how-to for making Haloscan comments beta-friendly. Any thoughts out there on deploying the trackback feature in beta?

Update10/11: The wait is over. See today's post for pointers to code that is beta-friendly.

Filed in: haloscan trackback blogtech webtech beta

FreshTags for Blogger Beta

2006-09-18T03:46:00.000-04:00

FreshTags users who jumped ship early to the new Blogger platform have cause to rejoice: Singpolyma has coded up a version that supports the new environment! (Instructions and explanation on his post.) Kudos and praise to Singpolyma for this important breakthrough.

The new release is based on his earlier FreshTags version and integrates the tags and posts as sidebar widgets. The focus is on supporting the long-standing technique of tag passing between blogs. This is where readers select tags on one blog, follow a link to another and find that the same tag is already selected on this new page.

Singpolyma has also finally achieved what so many have clamoured for, but none has seen in Blogger: full text of tagged posts on a single page. That is, when a reader selects a tag (say, "folksonomy"), all posts with that tag are listed in full on the same page. There have been various work-arounds whereby summary text is provided using a page from the distant past, but this uses the new label search feature in Blogger Beta. As long as your tags in Delicious sync with your Blogger labels, the trick is flawless.

Under the hood, we're also seeing the first instantiation of important changes to the way FreshTags variants store, access and share configuration information. This new standard will be further developed and support a wider-range of future applications, particularly around multiple FreshTags-enabled widgets on the page.

With Singpolyma's recent development of Beta-friendly "FreshRolls" (a "tag-aware" extension to Singpolyma's Wrinks blogroll/blogring app), we're seeing a distinct ramp-up in FreshTags development. To keep that momentum going, if you're a FreshTags user still on Blogger Classic and keen to help try out some new presentation styles (eg asynchronous tag clouds and nested post titles), please leave a note and I'll see what we can do.

Filed in: freshtags, singpolyma, wrink, webtech

Google Personal's Page Tabs

2006-09-17T15:09:00.000-04:00

Google have added tabs to their personal page, allowing you to keep track of many more sources of information and to organise them by topic. As the comments at Paul Stamatiou note, though, how useful are tabs when compared to an RSS reader?

via Google Operating System

Filed in: google blogtech webtech feeds readers

Blogger Beta Hack Round Up

2006-09-13T22:07:00.000-04:00

As expected, Blogger Beta has kicked up a storm of blog hacking activity. It's appropriate to start the round up with the irrepressible Ramani at Hackosphere. Buoyed by being listed as a Blog Of Note, he's been burning the candle at both ends, calling in sick and leaving the phone off the hook in his efforts to roll out hack after hack.

First off is the multi-style label widget. This button lets your readers choose how your labels are presented to them - list, drop-down or cloud. It doesn't get much more flexible than that!

If you like clouds for your label, you might want to check out the Blogger Beta implementation of clouds at Phydeaux3. This is a great looking hack and while it takes a bit pfaffing about the end-result looks pretty sweet.

Not satisfied with that? How about using your labels as tabs. That's right, tabs running across the top of your blog that let your readers select content. Hoctro has the write up (via Hackosphere). I've just discovered Hoctro's blog - causing quite a bit of buzz amongst the blogoscenti - where there's also a post on re-conceiving your labels as a breadcrumb trail. That's two fresh takes on labels. Hence the buzz. Check it out.

Ramani's also been a busy boy with the post content too. He has an article on how to show only post titles (expandable with a single click of +/- button), or show only post summaries (linking to the full content with a read more ... link). Or, both at once. This packs a lot more information per page on both the main/archive pages and the label results pages.

Lastly, if you're still struggling to corral those pesky comment feeds into your sidebar widget, take a page out of 失踪's book and employ Dapper to scrape your comments for you and turn them into an sidebar-ready RSS feed. Neat.

We know this is just a taste of some of the work going on out there - if you've got hackage to share, we'd love to hear about it so please leave a link below.

Filed in: blogger blogger-hacks blogtech beta

Dapper: Content Integration For Everyone

2006-09-07T02:08:00.000-04:00

It's not often that we get to see disruptive technologies emerge. The new Dapper service (from Dappit) is firmly in that category. Billed as a mashup tool, it allows you to grab content simply from static or dynamic web pages and integrate it in a mind-boggling range of ways. Services like this will further breakdown the distinction between content providers and consumers and force an overhaul of existing customs and business models around web content.

What Does Dapper Do?

Similar to Ning, it's a managed service to let people create and host their own applications, or clone and edit others'. At its heart, the service is an online web scraper; it lets you extract content and shunt it around. You nominate elements on the target page you'd like, and it will go and fetch them for you.

In principle, all you ever needed to do this was the good old Unix utilities wget and grep (this is how FreshTags started, in the days before JSON). Oh, but you'll also need a net-connected, secure machine. And the ability to write hairy regular expressions. Plus a lot of patience. And if you were thinking of actually doing anything with the results, then you'd need something like a PHP server and working knowledge of Perl, with various libraries for handling outputs and transformations. Not to mention a managed website to publish it all through. Yeah, it's sounding like one big headache, isn't it?

With Dapper, you simply create a "Dapplication". It's a very straight-forward, step-by-step process, with the requisite Web 2.0 flavour. You submit some examples of your target page and use a simple "point and click" interface to nominate the elements you wish to extract. These elements could be tabular data, links, text and so on. The Dapper system guesses (and is, in turn, corrected by you) to figure out the underlying structure of the page. You assign some names to these fields and (optionally) group them. That's it - your Dapp is done.

A really neat feature of the system is the way you can specify inputs for the target page (you rarely want to scrape exactly the same page each time). If your target page uses URL parameters, you can instruct Dapper to pass those in for you using curly brackets eg

http://somewhere.com/action?display=printer&mo={month}&da={day}&range=allusers

This will cause Dapper to prompt users for month and day variables. Or, you can nominate the existing input fields on the target page for data insertion in the same way. It's really very simple and intuitive.

Once it's up and running, there is a truly dizzying array of options for getting the data out: the usual vegetable soup of web standards (XML, HTML, JSON, YAML, RSS), plus some novel ones (email, image loop, Google Gadget and an alert mechanism). What's more, Dapper's not shy about accepting requests. The service was lacking callbacks for the JSON feed, which make it easy for lightweights like me to play with the data. I emailed the developer, Jon Aizen, and within a couple of hours it was done! Thanks, Jon!

Case Study

To test out the service, I built a Dapp in a few minutes to extract tabular data from a particular website (I'm currently negotiating an informal content and link-sharing agreement with a website related to Speccy, so I'm afraid I'll have to keep a bit vague). One of the roadblocks on negotiation is that some data I want from the other site is locked up in their SQL database, only served up as an HTML table by PHP. It would be very difficult for me to get at this. With Dapper, I was able to nominate the fields and extract the data I wanted, lowering the hassle involved and improving the chances of concluding a mutually-beneficial deal.

Dapper has two mechanisms to let you fine-tune your content selection: a slider that selects how "restrictive" it is in guessing what you're after, and a container that limits the grab to certain elements. Unfortunately, in my case, it wasn't too successful with either and I was getting unwanted extra content. I tried some other pages and both mechanisms worked as advertised; I must have been dealing with a pathological site. In the end, I opted to "over extend", grabbing more content than required, and knocked together some regular expressions to parse out the bits I wanted. It works beautifully: I can enter the parameters and Dapper builds the appropriate URL (with parameters inserted into the query string), fetches the pages, strips out the data I want (plus a bit more) and hands it back to me a JSON object - with a callback function!

With a bit of confidence and some practice, I'm sure that anyone can extract content from a page of interest and display it on their own page (perhaps as an iframe element or an image loop, for simplicity). Blogger Beta's new RSS display widget really open things up. This, I believe, is the disruptive element of the technology.

Implications For The Web

Many of us involved in blog hacking are comfortable with content being passed around like this; we provide RSS and Atom versions of our content (plus social bookmarking of titles and summaries) and actively encourage others to pick it up. We also have an informal code for link sharing ("link love") that defines norms and governs behaviour. Dapper knocks all that on its head, and provides new challenges for content production and consumption.

For starters, web feeds are a push technology; publishers elect to syndicate their content in this way. By contrast, Dapper is a pull approach, whereby others suck content out of your site without your permission or knowledge.

Despite what the odd (and I mean weird) lawyer might believe, no one can control who you link to on the web. But extracting slabs of content ... that's different. Clearly, new customs and practices - not laws - will have to emerge to deal with this. (I believe existing intellectual "property" laws are simply not up to it, being too clumsy and blunt.) Dapper has gone some way to facilitate this, with its "empowering content providers" (ie site-based access restriction) form. Hopefully, more content providers will see the benefits of their users figuring out new and powerful uses of their content rather than just blocking requests from the dappit.com domain.

(For what it's worth, in my case, I'm not using the tech as an excuse to barge in and pillage the target site. Instead, I see it as a means for lowering the barriers to exchange and thus (hopefully) allowing a fruitful partnership to develop where it might not have been possible before.)

Of course, content-sharing issues don't arise if you scrape your own stuff. You could create Dapps to parse out interesting bits and pieces from your blog and offer them as emails, alerts, feeds, looped images and the like. Nearly all blogs - and wikis for that matter - employ templating of some kind. This means that you can be more-or-less guaranteed that the Dapper will have a good shot at easily parsing the underlying structure. Headings, profiles, post titles, dates, leading paragraphs, links, quotes, tags, authors, comments, timestamps ... all that static content (ie not generated by JavaScript) is ripe for extraction and syndication.

Another suggestion is to look for stuff with RSS or Atom feeds. Chances are, if the publisher is happy pushing out content in this way, they'll also be cool with you grabbing it with a Dapp. Ditto for content released under (some) Creative Commons licences. And, hey, you can always ask: I'd love to know if someone's built a Dapp to do something novel with my content! I'm sure that proper attribution, link back, notification and being respectful of server/bandwidth load will all be part of the basis of an emerging Dapper netiquette.

If this post has piqued your interest, please go ahead and check out the growing list of Dapps already available, read the Dapper blog or just dive right in and create your own Dapp. I'm sure that within five minutes you'll grok the disruptive nature of this service and get a glimpse of the jaw-dropping possibilities.

Filed in: dapper, web2.0, feeds, webtech, syndication

Social Bookmarking Icons for your Beta Blog

2006-09-05T10:48:00.000-04:00

Vivek Sanghi has built on Ramani's social bookmarking syntax for beta & published the code to add 6 social-bookmarking icons to your post-footer. These include Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl, Spurl, Simpy & My Yahoo. There are 11 others Vivek's post footer too. Fine work, Vivek! Great to see existing hacks being re-engineered for beta, & new contributors....

Filed in: blogtech social-bookmarking blogger-hacks beta

Beta Label URL's now Microformat Compliant

2006-09-03T20:06:00.000-04:00

More great stuff at Hackosphere.... this time a couple of posts that note a change in the structure of Beta's label URL's so that they follow the rel-tag microformat

As rolled out w/ the beta, the format was:

http://yourblog.blogspot.com/search?label=xxx

which has now been amended to:

http://yourblog.blogspot.com/search/label/xxx

making the tagword the end of the URL, and the whole thing kosher as related to the specifications for tags. Methinks that having the query part of the URL back in play will open up some modification possibilities that had previously been closed off too.....

Filed in: blogger blogger-hacks blogtech beta

Blogger Help Gets Juicy

2006-09-02T10:17:00.000-04:00

The Blogger Help pages with the meat of the new template language are live. These include Widget Tags for Layouts and the mind-bendingly expansive full list of layout data tags.

Let the widget-authoring commence!

Some great posts that will help you get started include:

Hans from Beautiful Beta on adding a third column to a default beta template, and on page layout basics.
Ecmanaut on Blogger Beta Templates

Filed in: blogger blogger-hacks blogtech beta

Formatting Labels in Beta

2006-09-01T09:35:00.000-04:00

Ramani at Hackosphere has spent some time immersed in the new HTML interface, and has developed a method for formatting Blogger's default list of labels as a drop-down menu. In addition, he's also restructured the label results display so that it only shows permalinked post titles (rather than the default whole posts), which will be a much more user-friendly output style once we all end up with a large collection of labelled content. All good stuff...

Filed in: blogger blogger-hacks blogtech beta

Beta HTML Template Editor is Live

2006-08-31T09:05:00.000-04:00

& within days, as promised... excellent. I noticed a couple of new help files this morning, and then the editor itself...

There's plenty of discussion and help out there already. The big change seems to be as expected, that your hand-coding will have to be layouts compliant and that each new element of the page will have to be defined by its own widget. See the new and growing help pages.

For more, see

Update: As he points out in the comments, Scott at Banana Stew has authored a template walkthrough that provides a great launch point as we all embark on learning this new template language. Great work, Scott!

Filed in: blogger blogger-hacks blogtech search google beta

Moods for Your Blog w/ Pic2Color

2006-08-31T08:44:00.000-04:00

Just got wind of an interesting new way to give your blog multiple colorschemes or "moods" without going to tons of effort to select colors that match. Pic2Color is a service that will derive a colorscheme from an image that you specify, and apply it to your blog. You could have multiple images in a menu for users to select, as you see on the Pic2Color demo page, or even set up an input box & allow users to submit their own pics in .jpg, .png or .gif format. This is an interesting complement to Aditya's stylesheet switcher for blogger, & will allow users to quickly choose their favorite colorscheme for your content, & package your goodies to reflect their mood.

To signup as an alpha tester, e-mail the Pic2Color folks. To input your e-mail to be on the waitlist for the beta, head to the signup page.

Pic2Color also announced yesterday that they now offer their first downloadable wordpress template.

Filed in: images pic2color blogtech webtech

HTML in your Gmail Footer?

2006-08-30T09:45:00.000-04:00

A quickie. Amit at Digital Inspiration points out that you can drag & drop images and such into the compose window of GMail, even though you can't add the raw HTML to the signature field in "settings." I might be able to get my Feedburner Headline Animator in there after all... as long as I can keep it handy on the web somewhere for drag & drop purposes!

Filed in: google, gmail, feedburner, webtech, e-mail, feeds

Experiments With TagPie

2006-08-25T00:44:00.000-04:00

It occurred to me that we haven't seen much innovation on the tag-display front since the heady days of tagclouds. Acting on a whim, I thought I try out a new approach ... TagPie!

Now, pie charts aren't particularly a good fit for this task. Firstly, tag counts rarely "add up to 100%" since there's a huge amount of overlap. Secondly, JavaScript does not lend itself to rendering graphs of any kind - but especially pie charts. Still, I found a free piechart provider (they use a PHP back-end to produce an image) in Gheos for proof-of-concept purposes.

So, it's not clickable, and isn't that flexible. But the concept is there - worth pursuing?

Filed in: blogtech, tags, graphics, del.icio.us

Raise the Profile of the Beta Search Box

2006-08-24T09:30:00.000-04:00

Michael's been at it again... This time extracting the search box from the navbar in Blogger Beta and allowing you to reposition it on your blog. His latest how-to [link updated] is a four-part tutorial in which you'll learn to:

1. Hide the navbar.

2. Construct the search box, and reposition it.

3. Resize the search box.

4. Change the appearance of the search button.

Grand! All sorts of goodies start to break through. Shora also has a new "especially for beta" hack for hiding the navbar, which is en espanol. Now, the "legality" of hacking the navbar has never been quite clear, & the new Terms of Service (if, indeed, these were the new Terms of Service) don't seem to clear things up. Section 10 is still Section 10, & modifying the navbar is probably still a violation of the Blogger TOS....

Important to note that in beta the navbar is a little less cluttered, and contains (at least for the moment) an interface to let you directly access features to edit your blog if you're already signed in.... so there are some tools that you'll lose if you tell the navbar goodbye.

Other pre-beta Navbar hacks were discussed here last Fall.

Update: Perhaps in response to TOS concerns, Michael's post now also contains information about how to reposition the navbar.

Filed in: blogger blogger-hacks blogtech search google beta

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New Delicious JSON Feeds

2006-08-22T23:58:00.000-04:00

The Del.icio.us Blog brings news of two new JSON feeds in addition to the existing tag and bookmark feeds. Now you can access your network and your fans in this format. The JSON help has also had an upgrade.

Getting a list of your network (and fans) should be straightforward. A bit more work and you can have featured tags and posts from those sources displayed too. Taking it a step further, Michael Schieben created the Delicious Network Explorer using this new tech. (Warning, Java Applet may take some time to load.)

This could also be the basis for new blogrolling or webring applications. The duality of network/fan lists means you'd get automatic link reciprocity: blogrolling me (ie add me to your network) automatically sees you blogrolled too (ie added to my fans). That's the sort of mechanism that could see networks really take off ... and "fan spam" (fam? Infamy?) too. Since you have no control over who adds you to their network (and hence becomes a fan of yours), it's prone to abuse.

What other possibilities and pitfalls do these new feeds present? Where might this new data go, and what might it do when it gets there? Thoughts in the comments please!

In other Del.icio.us news: Private feeds (in John's case the feed from links for you, specifically) have been placed behind an additional layer of security, and will need to be resubscribed.

Filed in: blogtech, feeds, webtech, readers, del.icio.us

Blogger Beta Feed URL's

2006-08-22T08:35:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Scott from Banana Stew for laying out the new beta feed URL's in a comment here. This belongs front & center... The url's are laid out as follows:

The URL for the post feed is:

http://beta.blogger.com/feeds/blogID#/posts/full

The URL of the comment feed is:

http://beta.blogger.com/feeds/blogID#/comments/full

The URL of the per-post comment feed is:

http://beta.blogger.com/feeds/blogID#/postID#/comments/full

The URL for the short form of each feed is at the same URL, but ends with /summary rather than /full.
I would imagine that these feeds can still be run through Feedburner to gather & report accurate subscriber stats.
To access these feeds in RSS 2.0 rather than Atom 1.0 format, append &alt=rss to the end of the URL, as described in Blogger Help.
To find out your blogID, sign in to Blogger beta, then head to new post, or to manage posts, settings, or layout. In each case the end of the destination page URL will be your blog ID.
To find out a post ID, head to a Beta post page, & select the "post a comment" link. The end of the "post a comment" URL is the post ID.

As discussed in the comments at The Last Word, the link to the whole blog comment feed seems to be awol for a significant number of users (me, Ramani, & Adi, at least), but the URL above holds up, & let me make a sidebar widget....

With this info in hand, I've road-tested Ramani's "recent comments in the sidebar" method on FreshblogBeta. To get this to work, log in to beta and select "layouts." Add a sidebar page element, & select "feed" from the list of options. Enter the feed URL (your beta blog's comment URL, for example) in the pop-up window, and an options window will appear.

This will give you the opportunity to change the title of the sidebar box, as well as to add dates & authors to the content titles. This means that you can add summaries of recent posts on related blogs, (as well as a quick & easy recent comments section) to your sidebar. Excellent.

One other feed-related issue. As Philipp points out in the update to his announcement, having the new feeds be beta URL's could later present a problem after everyone has migrated and the system isn't in beta anymore.

While we're walking through the beta, here's a round-up of recent discussion:

Improbulus explores the detection of labels as tags by Technorati & not by Icerocket
Julie walks through the current state of play for anyone who has the option to migrate & isn't sure whether to make the move. The comments on Julie's post also point up an anonymity issue. If your GMail account has your real (and / or whole) name, & your anonymity is valuable to you as a blogger, don't use that account to migrate with.
Imp (again) has the scoop on updating your tagger userscripts so that they'll work in the beta. This fix points scripts to the new beta pages, and will work as long as the underlying functions are still possible, & only the locations of the pages that you want to modify have changed.
Peter @ Blogger Tips & Tricks walks through the greatly simplified process of adding advertisements and affiliate content to your beta blog using layouts, which seems to have been a significant target of the upgrade.

Nice to breathe out, relax, & start to see the lay of the new beta land a little.

Filed in: google blogger blogtech webtech beta

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Scripted Re-Mark: Batch Editing Your Bookmarks

2006-08-21T11:17:00.000-04:00

Many bloggers like to bookmark their posts in del.icio.us, whether for their own reference, categories or just getting their links out there. Dealing with a large of collection of bookmarks can be quite unwieldy, especially if you're used to modern niceties likes search-and-replace, macros, wildcards and other "luxuries". Picking out and treating your bookmarks one at a time can be dispiriting. This post introduces a new service I knocked together over the weekend that makes it easy to update and edit your bookmarks wholesale.

The service is dubbed Scripted Re-Mark, since you use a script to "re-mark" your bookmarks. It grew out of my earlier experiments with automatic tagging and frustrations with migrating a blog.

*** Update ***
(There's a new release for Scripted Re-Mark that features zippier updates and functions-as-parameters.)

To use the service, you visit the page, play around with some search/replace rules and then copy/paste a code snippet into another window, opened up to your del.icio.us account. The code snippet zips through the bookmarks, making changes and saving the result.

You can search/replace on the Title, URL, Notes and Tags of your bookmarks, using as many rules as you like. (And, yes, you can use full regular expressions!) You can also set the sharing (public/private) properties. The service deals with the del.icio.us "rate limiter" for you, ensuring that you don't get locked out of your account for thrashing their servers.

Some possible uses:

Site Migration: Change the domain name in the URLs of a bunch of bookmarks.

Spelling Correction: As a favour, why not fix all the different flavours of spelling, without too much labour?

Tag Migration: Delete, merge and rename tags in one hit. Or, add a common tag across a subset of your bookmarks to help with grouping.

Share your Imports: By default, imported bookmarks are private; set them all free with a mass "tag and release program".

If you've got more ideas, please share them in the comments, including any regular expressions you come up with.

I've tested it under FireFox and Internet Explorer (I wept tears getting it to work in IE ...) but not Safari or Opera. If someone could let me know how it travels, that'd be great. Still, this is "beta" (not like Google - I mean beta) so please backup your bookmarks before committing anything.

The code is released under a Creative Common licence so feel free to "extend and embrace". Future ideas include allowing generic functions in the replace string, rolling in the auto-tagger for suggestions, deletion and, well, you tell me!

Filed in: blogtech, tags, bookmarklets, bookmarks, del.icio.us

Get Blogger Beta Labels without Layouts!

2006-08-21T07:53:00.000-04:00

Michael at Basang Panganip has figured out a way to add labels to your Blogger Beta blog, even if you're running without the new layouts in classic template mode. The how-to is lengthy because it is specific, but the process doesn't appear to be difficult. It involves:

Temporarily selecting a new template
Labelling all of your posts & keeping a cut & paste list of your labels
Reverting to your "classic" template after you've labelled your posts
Writing a hand-coded sidebar list of search strings for your labels

IMPORTANT: If you want to do this, please work from the full how-to and not from the summary above!

As we suspected, it seems that the only part of the labels system that is truly layouts-dependent is the default sidebar menu... and Michael has the scoop on how to build a perfectly serviceable substitute. Once again, let's see what happens when the HTML editor goes live....

Filed in: google blogger blogtech webtech labels categories beta

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Blogger Beta for the Weekend

2006-08-19T08:36:00.000-04:00

The deeper you dig, the more treasure you find! Ramani at Hackosphere has taken beta for a decent test-drive and finds several new features that once were hacks. These include:

Next & Previous Post Links (here called newer & older)
In-Post Display of Navbar Search results
Manual selection of posting Dates & Times

Check out Ramani's post for the details, & see Aditya's expanding list o' features. Who knows what we'll find on Monday!

Filed in: google blogger blogtech webtech beta

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Hacks Wiki gets some Love

2006-08-18T13:50:00.000-04:00

As part of the content becomes obsolete due to built-in Beta Blogger goodness, the Blogger Hacks Wiki is getting a goodly slice of link love. The Download Squad give a positive review, and link to a March 6th, 2000 post documenting the arrival of permalinks to the platform. It would be interesting to compare the buzz re: the arrival of comments (or permalinks) w/. the buzz that has greeted the arrival of categories.

I added a section to the main page to suggest that the wiki will be overhauled as soon as the dust settles. I'm reluctant to delete content, but perhaps we could label certain pages as superceded by default offerings? Add your thoughts to the comments.

Blogger Beta Update, Incl. Template News

2006-08-18T08:46:00.000-04:00

The dust settles, some folks dig in & take a good look, and a 2nd round of reviews & user insights emerge.

Annie at BlogU made the switch, keeping the non-layouts "classic" template, and everything except Freshtags made the migration with her. We're investigating....
Aditya notes that few of the usual suspects have migrated. We haven't because we can't (team blog), but like many others I think we're waiting for the HTML template editor too, so that our widgets can come with us when we move! He's also opened a "peeking under the hood" thread, & promised to update frequently.... So send him the good stuff that you see.
Steve Rubel reports that the "public feeds on private blogs" bug that he exposed has now been resolved.
BlogHacker reports 8 new features and 8 new issues. To be fair, most of the issues will be resolved with time and the full rollout of Blogger beta features, but the post is a balanced look at the current state of play.
Turning up the geek factor to maximum, Bloggers Buzz points to the new Blogger API and suggests some of the promise thereof.
Instabloke counsels patience, testing, & waiting to play w/ the full suite of tools. Good call!
Avatar at Bloggeratto finds a good conspiracy theory in the phased rollout. Hmmmm! Elvis is alive and well and living in Mountain View.... right next to Han Solo frozen in Carbonite.

Plenty of discussion as this news has spread. Check out the T'rati graph of posts that contain the terms Blogger Beta over the last 7 days. The wave is growing, with more than 1000 posts Thursday & half that already today:

The critical next step would seem to be the introduction of the raw HTML edit window for layout-enabled templates. Blogger users will then be able to use the new labels but also add any additional widgets to their site. Blogger Buzz suggests that we can look for this in "days not weeks." Thanks, Jason!

As things stand now, you can either keep your template, in "classic" mode (dynamic serving but no layouts, and therefore no labels), you can use a new beta default template, or you can wait a while to migrate 'til the HTML editor goes live on the beta, & (hopefully) re-create your template as closely as possible w/ added "layouts". This will involve migrating individual customisations & widgets from current to beta... & testing each one to see whether they fall over. As Pete pointed out, though, there will be a "view classic template" option that will allow the cut & paste grabbing of the code you want to keep.

I'm optimistic that once the HTML editor goes live in beta, this will be a useful & interesting process, and that a second generation of mods will emerge that can live with (and even extend) the new platform.

Filed in: google blogger blogtech webtech beta

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Windows Live Writer and .Net Framework

2006-08-17T16:44:00.000-04:00

Julie and I have had identical experiences w/ the Windows Live Writer, and identical responses. I don't know what the .Net framework is, but I haven't needed it 'til now, & I'm not sure I want it.

Imagine, a Microsoft product that requires other Microsoft products before it will work. Who'da Thunk! For reviews and other good stuff, see the post that I wrote before I tried to install it!

Filed in: blogtech webtech windows_live_writer reviews

Auto-Tagger: Tag Suggestion for Delicious

2006-08-17T10:43:00.000-04:00

Rather than letting grievances fester, I'm all for rolling up the sleeves and making a contribution. I guess I'm just a positive person like that. Last week I complained about the limitations of the delicious interface when it comes to managing tags. This week, I've started poking around further in their interface, figuring out more "improvements". By way of proof of concept, I've integrated Knallgrau's tagthe.net automatic tagging webservice (see earlier experiments) with this Delicious.

First, a few words on the wisdom of doing this. Delicious actually does a reasonable job of prompting you for tags under their "full-screen edit" (albeit not in their inline edit mode). It's also not particularly useful to have people ("sheeple") copying tags wholesale - and even less so when those tags are machine generated. That said, this might be useful for those times when you have "tagger's block" or you've sourced a bunch of URLs and want to get some quick-and-dirty structure across them before refined tagging can begin.

In light of recent developments, I'm also expecting a rush of people retro-fitting tags to their content, so it's good to get some practice in with this. It's also a nice little learning project for me on hacking the delicious interface to handle the much-needed batch-mode. Finally, it's just plain cool watching all those empty text fields magically fill up with content!

Oh, and I doffs me hat to the folk at Knallgrau; the tags their baby generates aren't half bad in most cases. It errs on the side of verbosity (so do I!), but that's beneficial for this situation. Let's hope they stick at it and don't go the way of Tagyu.

The use of it is pretty straightforward: visit your delicious page and press "edit" on any bookmarks you wish to treat (as many as you like). The code is activated by clicking a bookmarklet on your browser. (Alternatively, you can just paste in the javascript for a one-off effort.) The bookmark's title and tags are automagically populated and you can make further changes before clicking save. It also works in the "full-screen edit" mode (where you have just one bookmark to edit and you get a list of your tags plus suggestions).

Installation is easy and takes just a moment. If you're running FireFox, you should be able to just drag the link below onto your links bar. If not (or your stuck with IE), just drag any old shortcut out of your Favourites folder and onto your links bar while holding down control (this makes it a copy). Then, right-click the link below and copy it (eg "copy shortcut"). You should now have the code on the clipboard. Finally, do a right-click and edit-properties on your cloned favourite. Make the name something like "Auto-Tagger" and then paste the code into the URL field (it should start "javascript: ... "). You may be prompted something about safety - just click OK.

That's it! Take it out for a test run and see what it makes of your existing tags.

As usual, feedback, troubleshooting and suggestions in the comments please.

Auto-Tagger (drag or copy this link)

Source Code

Oh - and sorry about the name "Auto-Tagger". I acknowledge it's unbearably lame but it's nearly 2am here and I'd be delighted to changed it to something suitably witty tomorrow.

Filed in: blogtech, tags, bookmarklets, tagthe.net, del.icio.us

10 Ways to Feature Crucial Posts

2006-08-17T08:45:00.000-04:00

Like many blogs, this is a two-pronged blog..... There are the "hey did you see?" posts that steer readers & subscribers to interesting content elsewhere in the blogosphere, & then there's the more substantial, meaty, original posts that we want you to read, inwardly digest, and act upon by adopting the suggested hack or exploring the reviewed service! So... how can bloggers (ourselves included) feature and draw attention to certain content within our blogs, & keep critical content alive once it falls off the front page? Some thoughts, in no particular order:

Exclusivity: Be the only person writing about your topic. If there are only a half-dozen posts that discuss Creamaid, for example, you'll be in great shape to have your content found and enjoyed.
Internal Links within Posts: String your own related posts together in a way that will make sense to your reader, and lead them to explore your content. Add "see also" links to your posts as you publish them, whether at the end of the post or in the body, in "as we discussed last week" style.
Categories: Use categories on your blog to organise your content. This will assist folks in following a content thread through your whole blog. Blogger Beta's new labels will make this a much more straightforward process. Maintain a "highlights" category or similar that prominently features the posts that you consider to be critical content.
Sidebar Menus: Use menus on your site to provide obvious and direct links to critical content. Hand code a series of links or a drop-down if that will work for you.
Prominent Site Search: Don't hide the blogger navbar... The search box can be your site's best friend. Add the Technorati site search box too.... Get the most out of site search with a version, such as Aditya's, that provides post previews within your template.
Community: If you're lucky enough to be active in a blogging community, e-mail your colleagues to alert them to the good stuff. Use the for: tag on Del.icio.us to (selectively) push your posts to members of your community who will be interested.
Comments and Trackback: Comment judiciously on related posts with a link to your own. Continue the dialog on your own blog in the comments, and take the opportunity to direct your readers to related critical content as the opportunity arises. Use trackbacks to your source posts to draw attention to your part in the conversation. If you don't trackback every post, be sure to trackback your critical posts. Offer a comment feed (easy w/ the new Blogger) so that readers can keep up with the ongoing discussion on older posts.
Prime your content to be shared virally: Bookmark posts in a shared bookmark manager so that they're ready to be discovered and cloned. Pre-populate social / distributed / voting type link services. Provide buttons for voting / sharing / cloning / storing and emailing your links. Use tags to draw attention to posts on your blog. If you don't tag everything, tag your critical posts.
Judicious branding of your blog. Take advantage of Technorati's blog tags service to advertise the content that readers can expect. Use sub-titles in your blog header to explain your focus.
Create a "hub-post" such as Blogger Hacks - The Series that will serve as an entry point and response point for multiple readers. Direct those readers to both internal and external content of a high quality and related topical focus.

How else do you draw attention to the critical content on your blog? Let us know!

Submitted to Darren Rowse's Group List-Writing Project, which is a hub-post, of course, and will be prominently featured on multiple blogs, I'm sure... especially since this time, submitting a post to the project carries with it the possibility of a hefty prize. (Mmmm, prizes!)

Filed in: blogging

Beta Comment Notifications

2006-08-16T17:20:00.000-04:00

Have you checked the comment notification e-mails for your beta blog? The information ID of the commenter and the title of the post that has been commented are now front and center.

This used to be somewhat buried in the footer of the mail. A small thing, to be sure, but an indication that this has been a comprehensive refit. Good call, Blogger! Now it is much easier to see where the discussion is happening, and (at least in the example above) to link to the Blogger profile of the commenter. I wonder what this will look like if the user is anonymous or is not on Blogger?

Filed in: google blogger blogtech webtech beta

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Beta Templates, Layouts, & Tags

2006-08-16T08:13:00.000-04:00

Pete leaves a comment clarifying some of the new tools, and the situation re: existing templates etc. I've reposted in full since this explains the labels, layouts and existing templates issue, which was on my "have to figure this out asap" list. Thanks once again, Pete, for the insights:

If you migrate your blog, your template will be preserved as-is. It's in what we call "Classic" template mode. It will be dynamically served, but you won't get the drag-and-drop customization. You also won't get labels.

New blogs have Layouts by default, but can switch to Classic mode (there's a button on the Edit HTML subtab page).

You will be able to upgrade from Classic to Layouts, but, as the Layouts template language is completely different (but significantly improved), you'll lose your prodigious customizations. We make a best effort to save straightforward changes (sidebar lists, for the most part) but your milege will decrease the further you have gone from the stock templates.

You can see that there's a "View Classic Template" button on the Edit page, which is there to make it easier to copy over anything that the upgrade missed. (I'm going to a have a fun time w/ my blog... might just take the opportunity to design a new one.)

I'm excited to see what folks will come up with when Layouts's Edit HTML is available. Dragging and dropping in the official templates is fun, but doing it with your own template design is even better.

Oh, and as for mass-labeling, there's no interface for that. You can, however, use the new Gdata API (based on Atom 1.0) support to change labels. Atom categories === Blogger labels.

It seems, then, that dynamic loading works w? your old template after migration, & that what we're looking if we want to access labels and drag & drop is the eventual need to re-create a template in the new format. No immeditate pressure to do so, though, which is grand, & methinks the labels will be worth it, esp. given that there's an existing layout insert for custom blocks of HTML / Scripts & a way to view your existing template to grab the goodies.

Filed in: google blogger blogtech webtech beta

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Under The Hood: Blogger's New Labels

2006-08-16T01:05:00.000-04:00

Being unable to help myself, I thought I'd have a quick peek at the label system.

The logical structure of the page (including "widgets" like archives, feeds etc) seem to be encoded in a strange markup and dumped in a giant string in the header. This string is the sole parameter of a function called "_WidgetManager._Init". This function is invoked on page load and is defined in this external script. At this point, my brain boggled and I needed a lie down.

The actual ~~tag~~label names and counts are not in the header object literals - they make an appearance via a plain old unordered list in the sidebar. In my view, this is not a good place to keep such crucial information. It should be out in the wider world, making itself useful and mingling with others of its ilk. (Perhaps this will be supported in Blogger's Atom API - but I don't see it.)

To that end, I knocked together a little fragment of (ugly, unsafe) code to extract the labels and counts into a JavaScript object and read it back to you:

javascript: var rexp=/search\?label=(\S+)/i; var cexp=/.*(\d).*/i; var labels={}; var links=document.links; for(var i=0; i<links.length;i++) if (l=rexp.exec(links[i].href)) if (!links[i].rel) labels[l[1]]=cexp.exec(links[i].nextSibling.nodeValue)[1]; for (var j in labels) alert(j+' ['+ labels[j]+']')

(load up a beta blog and copy/paste this code into your browser address bar to watch the magic unfold.)

Here's another code snippet to transform Google's labels into a form a little more familiar to delicious JSON feed users:

javascript: var rexp=/search\?label=(\S+)/i; var cexp=/.*(\d).*/i; var labels={}; var links=document.links; for(var i=0; i<links.length;i++) if (l=rexp.exec(links[i].href)) if (!links[i].rel) labels[l[1]]=cexp.exec(links[i].nextSibling.nodeValue)[1]; var str="if(typeof(Delicious) == 'undefined') Delicious = {}; Delicious.tags = {"; for (var j in labels)  str+='"'+j+'":'+labels[j]+','; str+="};"; document.write(str);

Does that get your creative juices flowing?

Filed in: blogtech, blogger, freshtags, blogger-hacks, del.icio.us beta

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Blogger Beta Explored

2006-08-15T08:30:00.000-04:00

In addition to the Freshblog intro, here's some great posts that walk through the new service. Interesting to see the subtle differences in who noticed what..... Go check out

Filed in: google blogger blogtech webtech beta

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Significant Blogger Upgrade

Windows Live Writer

2006-08-15T08:05:00.000-04:00

So I was eating lunch, or sleeping, or something, and Microsoft rolled out Windows Live Writer, a stand-alone desktop blog post writer and editor that is Blogger-compatible. I have downloaded it to mess with at my leisure, & in the meantime, permit me to link to some judicious reviews from elsewhere in the blogosphere to explain, critique and evaluate the tool:

Paul Stamatiou approves, and provides a full walkthrough with screenshots. Paul also requests a feature that would give icon designers a side project for weeks... See the end of the It is Still Beta section for the scoop.
Chris Garrett at Performancing has a review that starts to make comparisons between Performancing for Firefox and Microsoft's offering. I would love to see this thread developed. (Browser Extension vs. Stand Alone, Online vs. Offline etc)
Zoli points out the limitations of Live Writer as an offline blogging platform, and the seeming disconnect between Writer and Windows Live, which is supposed to be "all about the web..." He also highlights the absence of integrated tagging. A commenter there points to Tim Heuer's tagging plugin, which is not available yet, apparently, but is on the way.
Amit at Digital Inspiration has a couple of good articles too... One is an introduction, which emphasises the "offline preview" feature (your post is formatted in a downloaded copy of your template, & so the preview is a real preview!) as well as investigating the automatically posted & hard to delete first post for "style detection." The second is a look at how to integrate pinging, and customise the BlogIt feature to add default info to every post.
Windows Live Writer also has a blog on MSN Spaces.

As always.... plenty of good stuff in the comments of these articles too, as users respond and the discussion develops. Interesting to see the default online Blogger interface get some teeth as a new offline product comes to market. We're all authors now!

Filed in: blogtech webtech windows_live_writer reviews

Significant Blogger Upgrade

2006-08-14T18:53:00.000-04:00

Things are more exciting than even my previous post suggests! Thanks to Pete for pulling back the curtain & pointing out that signon integration is not even the start of the deal.... Long & short of it is that this appears to be the upgrade we've been waiting for. There are labels (categories) and WYSIWYG template editing, PsycHo style.

The new features are beta, and are not yet fully integrated with the existing system, but as the Blogger Help overview reveals, there is plenty of new stuff happening at Blogger. Some of the upgrades are "backroom" changes, and others will be visible to Blogger users and to your readers. There are five significant changes:

1. Dynamic Serving: Dynamic "on the fly" serving of blog content for Blogspot hosted blogs. No more lengthy republishing process or building of multiple static pages. "Dynamic Serving" means that your edits are instantly saved in a database, and the page that the edits appear on isn't built until someone tries to look at it. Think of that! Make changes across your whole site as quick as a click.

2. Private Blogs: Blogger's new Access Control Settings will enable you to keep a private blog, viewable only by selected Google account holders that you've approved.

Folks who you invite by e-mail will be able to view your blog whenever they're logged into their Google account. Failing that, they'll be able to get hooked on your blog by viewing it as a guest for 2 weeks (from a link in your e-mail). The author of a private blog will be able to delete readers off the list of approved accounts.

3. Categories / Labels: We've asked for categories pretty consistently, and developed 30+ variations on methods for working around the omission. Well... Someone was listening, because Blogger Beta has Labels, which I guess puts us out of a job, kids!

You add comma separated labels to a special field in the footer of the create post page, and those labels are published with the post. When a label is selected on your blog, all posts with that label are displayed. Even the sidebar menu has some teeth. You'll be able to sort your labels either alphabetically or by frequency.

4. Drag & Drop Page Editing: Labels will require the use of Layouts, which is the new drag & drop WYSIWYG template editor. This will probably open up a world of custom template fun, but currently requires you to select a default template.

For more, check out the Layout Guide, & the guide to Fonts & Colors

5. Choice of Feeds: This new version of Blogger also offers a much richer set of options for syndication and feeds. You'll be able to choose between Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0, or make use of an advanced feed mode. What's so advanced? That would be comment feeds!
Blogger are now offering an integrated comment feed, as well as the option to toggle the comment feed on & off on a per post basis. These new feed options can be offered in your sidebar by default using new feed tags.

In addition, there's a redesigned dashboard:

It appears that the navbar will find a purpose, and double as an admin console when you're logged in:

There's also the promise of much more to come..... Not that it's all fluffy clouds and such. There are some known issues, the most significant of which is an incompatibility of old accounts with new blogs for comments:

Users who have not switched to Blogger in beta will not be able to login to comment on blogs that have been switched. Commenting using the "anonymous" or "other" options will still work.

To see whether you can take the blue pill and go down the rabbit hole. See Blogger Help once again. If you have the option to signon to Blogger w/ a Gmail account, do so. After you're signed in, Select the "switch now" link in the top right of the page to jump to Blogger beta. Look for the "switch in two steps" box.

If you're able to get to the goodies, you'll see step 2 and your account will roll over to a Google account, you'll accept the new TOS, and your new start URL will be beta.blogger.com. If not, you'll be cruelly shut down & cut off in your prime, as I was. (weeps softly...) Freshblog isn't eligible to migrate in the first wave because we're a team blog.

Does that mean we can't play? No... See Pete in the comments again. There's nothing to stop you from creating a new blog in the beta to go with your gmail account, and then integrating it back into a single Blogger account at a later point. For more on the integration of accounts, see the pre-emptive Blogger Help FAQ. Not hosted on Blogspot? This may be an incentive to switch.

Have fun, & please leave a ton of comments documenting your reactions and experiences with the upgrade.

Update 8/15: Check this out on Slashdot, or Digg It

Filed in: google blogger blogtech webtech beta

Blogger Accepts Google Accounts for Signon

2006-08-14T18:08:00.001-04:00

Logged in to Blogger tonight & saw a significant change on the signon page. Blogger is now accepting Google accounts as valid user ID's, perhaps as a consequence of the server migration noted by Phydeaux3 a week or so ago. As you can see, I was able to sign on with my GMail ID.

Integration, & perhaps an indication of Blogger being given some priority, as suggested by Aditya and Avatar? I wonder if we'll reach a point at which we're encouraged to consolidate our ID's?

Update: This was the tip of the iceberg, as pointed out by Pete in the comments. See my more recent post for much more....

Filed in: google blogger blogtech webtech

On the Reach of Feeds

2006-08-14T08:40:00.000-04:00

Without sharing (yet) the underlying thought that prompted him to ask the question, Jeremy Zawodny wonders what share of your subscriber base access your content through bloglines.

Freshblog reports 224 bloglines users, for a 24% share of our just-shy-of-1000 subscriber base. Kevin Burton reports a similar share on a similar subscriber base, though with very different numbers reported for other readers, perhaps influenced by the prominent Rojo and Newsgator chicklets at the top of each page, & the absence of an e-mail sub option?

I frame the discussion this way because the statistic I'm most interested in is the number of subscribers who are provided with Freshblog's content via R-Mail. 347 subscribers, or 37%, get their Freshblog fix this way, and that's a much higher number than I would have expected. My sense of e-mail subscription has always been that it is the tool of choice for folks who are just getting their feet wet w/ RSS and who aren't ready to grapple with a reader just yet, but the statistics are poking holes in my supposition!

In fact Randy reports that a number of R-Mail users are choosing to use R-Mail to subscribe to many and multiple feeds, and that users are leveraging the tagging, sorting and display features of G-mail to create a "lite" reader. R-Mail messages are delivered with the name of the source blog in the "From" line, making the filtering of the posts into folders pretty straightforward. You can, of course, filter the content from multiple topically similar blogs, apply a single consistent label and sort your content that way. If this sounds like your sort of project, read Randy's post for the detailed scoop.

So... some questions for readers and publishers... you should feel free to answer as few or as many of these as you like, of course, I'm just thinking of stuff that I'd like to know!

For Readers: If you access Freshblog through R-Mail.... How many other blogs do you read that way? What prompted your choice to read blogs through e-mail? What e-mail program do you use, & have you crafted filters and such to help to sort the incoming content? Was the prominence of the R-Mail widget here a factor in your decision? Are you "new" to RSS? Tell me about the experience of reading blogs through e-mail.....

For Publishers: What percentage of users access your content via e-mail? What do you think explains and accounts for that percentage? What e-mail subscription service do you use? Do you have an e-mail subscription widget on your blog? Is it prominent & tempting?

Oh, and what do you think is Jeremy's theory of Bloglines reach & depth? I'd be interested to know!

Filed in: feeds readers blogtech

Alternate Inline Comment Form Hack

2006-08-11T08:35:00.000-04:00

Avi writes to let us know about his inline comment form, which requires an externally hosted script, some code in your template head, and a modification to the post footer to replace the "post a comment" link. Avi's post documents a number of variables that you can add to the script in the head of your template to customise the look & feel of the form for your blog.

This is a great hack, including bold, italic, link and blockquote buttons, as well as multiple comment signing options. If you're looking for an inline comment form, check out Avi's version. You can see alternate versions, which each have something to recommend them, listed in the wiki.

Filed in: blogtech, webtech, blogger-hacks

Blogger Hacks Wrink

2006-08-10T08:37:00.000-04:00

Ah, yes, but what's a wrink? Well, this wrink is a webring, blogroll, linkroll and blogring mashup administered by Singpolyma, designed to tie together the blogger-hacks microsphere. From the wrink homepage on Ning you can grab the code to deploy this either as a blogroll or a blogring, as well as submitting your blog for inclusion. The tool will offer stats, as well as the opportunity to affiliate your blogger-hacks blog closely with other bloggers who share your interests.

Update: See the wrink in the sidebar at Freshblog, just ahead of the blogroll, & please visit the wrink page on Ning to submit your blog for inclusion.

Filed In:

Default Markup for Post Contents, Anyone?

2006-08-10T08:09:00.000-04:00

Turns out that the barrier keeping Adi's ajax-powered backlink previews from working across blogging platforms is the lack of a consistent markup for post content. So here's a request for all platform administrators, blogging software designers and template designers. Let's wrap your platform's version of the <$blogitembody$> tag in a unique class to make it easy to find. A quick survey of the folks in the know (Stephen) indicates that the required class would be

class="entry-content"

If all of the <$blogitembody$> tags in Blogger, as well as equivalent tags in Moveable Type, Live Journal, Typepad, Wordpress etc were defined by this class, then the ajax preview of backlinks would be able to grab the data that is required, and previews would be available for backlinks from multiple sources. This modification strikes me as an excellent example of the need for interoperability and consistency between platforms. Let's see whether we can effect a change!

See Also: Ajaxified Display of Internal Backlinks

Filed in: webtech, blogtech, blogging

10 Reasons Readers Don't Comment

2006-08-09T09:06:00.000-04:00

Liz Strauss lists out the reasons why your comment count may not be reaching double figures..... Hopefully Freshblog isn't a number 6, Liz? (OK, we are...)
6. Your blog has geeky attitude and I’m not geeky enough to keep up.
There's a mnemonically elegant conclusion to the post that suggests the promise of community creation, effective participation, traffic-building and all of that good stuff. "Compelling content causes comments...." I'll second that. Compelling content will, of course, bring with it a myriad of other goodies....

While you're over there checking out the other 9 reasons for limited comment numbers, check out Liz's links to both official and unofficial Blogger Help resources.

Filed in: blogging blogger

Dynamic Related Posts Service

2006-08-09T06:41:00.000-04:00

Serial hacker Ramani (from Hackosphere) has released another ingenious feature for the blogging public: related posts from the blogosphere.

You just drop a bit of code into the footer (or elsewhere) of your posts, and it picks up the permalink URL and sends it off to Ramani's magical PHP server. There, the URL is stripped back to a few keywords from your post title which are then run through Google's Blogsearch. The results are parsed and displayed nicely on your page.

Once neat feature is that you can just grab the invoking URL and append any of your own permalinks to it to see what the service returns. This openness means that I'm sure we'll see tool this cropping up in a range of other hacks.

On the plus side, the lack of use of tags (relying only on title keywords) means that it's robust and will work on just about anything. You also get back an eclectic mix of posts that you might not otherwise associate with your original post.

On the down side, the lack of use of tags means that it regularly turns up a whole bunch of unrelated content. Also, there's no way (that I can see) of tweaking the layout, in terms of what gets displayed, how much, style info and so.

If you tend to write lengthy and specific titles for your posts and want to constantly delight your readers with novelty, this would make a great addition to your blog!

If you'd like to test out the service on a few of your pages, here's a javascript bookmarklet to try out. Just create a temporary bookmark, then swap in the new code (below) into the URL field. Then drag the bookmark onto your toolbar. Visit the pages of interest, click the button, and you'll see which related posts from the blogosphere the systems returns.

javascript: window.location.href = 'http://www.anniyalogam.com/scripts/bookmarklet.php?url=' + window.location.href;

Filed In: blogger-hacks blogsearch blogs blogosphere

Google Backlinks: What? Why? How?

2006-08-08T08:46:00.000-04:00

As a companion post to my recent walkthrough of Haloscan trackback, and a contribution to the recently-launched "What is this and what does it do?" content thread here at Freshblog, here's a peek at Google Backlinks, & at the ways to add them to your blog.

What are Google Backlinks?

The first big post-footer gotta-have, in the heady days before social bookmarking caught on, was the "who links to this post" inbound link checker. The Technorati Cosmos checker for your post footer was everywhere, & was pretty much the only game in town for finding inbound links to single posts. Then came a number of other blog search services, including Talkdigger, & the emergence of Google's Backlinks service as an extension of their blogsearch. Where backlinks has the edge is that "backlinks" to referring posts appear right in your post footer, & not on an offsite 3rd party search results page. The only potential downside is that Google Blogsearch may not see all of the inbound links to a post, & so the listed backlinks may not be all of the inbounds for a given post.

Why do I need Google Backlinks?

Backlinks displays inbound links to a post within that post, right in your template, without you or your readers having to go off & chase down the related posts. The other significant feature is that you don't need to bookmark your posts anywhere. Since Google is finding the links through their Blogsearch tool, no bookmarking is required. Very useful. It's also pretty darn easy to install, all things being equal, as long as your blog hasn't been hacked about too much.

How do I get Backlinks?

If you've got a newer blogger template and you haven't messed with it to any great degree, you should just be able to turn on the backlinks. To do this, log in to blogger, and head to settings > comments. Set the backlinks radio button to "show," & make sure that the "backlinks default for posts" is set to "new posts have backlinks."

For more on this see Digital Inspiration and Blogger's Backlinks help article.

Older Blogger template? Custom template? To get into the code of the backlinks, see Blogger Help's Backlink Tag walkthrough. It is a pretty straightforward layout of the 2 blocks of code that you'll need to get default backlinks to work for you, with clear instructions about what to wrap the blocks in etc. It has to be said, though, that if you're a candidate for cutting and pasting, there are some great "Backlinks-Plus" user authored versions of this functionality that you might want to consider.

User-Authored versions, you say?

Why yes! There are four excellent user-enhanced implementations of backlinks that I know about, each of which will do a little something above and beyond the default version, and a little something different from the others:

Jasper's Custom Backlinks hack will work if your template is not an off-the-peg Blogger template, & if you have difficulty with the default code provided by Blogger.
Stephen's Backlinks will pop-up / expand & appear on the main page in response to a click on the Backlinks link in the footer of any post.
Greg's Recursive Backlinks shows backlinks for multiple linked posts on the post that you're reading. Drill down following the ~> to track backlinks across multiple posts.
Aditya's Asynch Internal Backlinks will load a preview of any internally-linked posts in an Ajax window on the post that you're viewing. If you link to yourself a lot, this is worth investigating.

If you know of other custom versions of backlinks, please leave a comment or trackback from the write-up on this post, and for more information, check out backlinks on the wiki. Aditya's hack isn't in there yet, but it is on the way....

What else can I do with Backlinks?

You can turn them on & off on individual posts, for one, by using the Allow New Backlinks on this Post option under "post & comment options" in the footer of the create post window.

If you have a Blogger account, you can use the "Create a Link" link in the backlinks section of a post that you're reading to launch Blogger's BlogThis! window, and write about what you're reading as soon as you see it.

As they say in the Google help article, you can subscribe to the feed of Google Blogsearch results for a search that includes the link operator, as follows: link:http://yourbloghere.com/ to get notification of new links.

Backlinks are a great way to start to see the connections between your blog & the wider blogosphere, & to present those links to your readers. Try them out!

For other What? Why? How? goodness, see:

Filed in: google backlinks blogtech webtech what_why_how

State of the Blogosphere

2006-08-07T17:14:00.000-04:00

Dave Sifry lays out the statistics once again, as usual supported by some interesting charts, & this time using boldface type to offset the critical insights. Here's the summary:

Technorati is now tracking over 50 Million Blogs.
The Blogosphere is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.
Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months.
From January 2004 until July 2006, the number of blogs that Technorati tracks has continued to double every 5-7 months.
About 175,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there are more than 2 blogs created each second of each day.
About 8% of new blogs get past Technorati's filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.
About 70% of the pings Technorati receives are from known spam sources, but we drop them before we have to send out a spider to go and index the splog.
Total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 Million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second.
This is about double the volume of about a year ago.
The most prevalent times for English-language posting is between the hours of 10AM and 2PM Pacific time, with an additional spike at around 5PM Pacific time

Several interesting things here... including of course the continuing rate of growth, and the significant percentage of pings that are spam. Read the whole thing & groove on the charts!

Update: Kevin Burton checks the math & comes to some interesting conclusions re: index size and active blogs etc.

Filed In: technorati search blogs blogging,

Blogger Migration for Delicious and FreshTags

2006-08-07T10:34:00.001-04:00

Last weekend, my capacity to spew forth vitriol exceeded my ISP's ability to host it: I'd used up all ten of megabytes allocated to me! So, I set about on a reverse blog migration project, from self-hosting to Blogger's Blog*Spot (where else to get free unlimited blog hosting?). Naturally, my bookmarks on delicious would no longer point to the right place, breaking my blog categories solution (FreshTags). This post explores some of the issues I encountered along the way, plus tips and working code to smooth the transition.

*** UPDATE ***

Please note the methods and code discussed here have been superseded by the Scripted Re-Mark batch editing tool.

First off, the transition on Blogger's end was surprisingly easy: change the settings on the Publish page, nominate a new blog address and re-publish. Easy-peasy. (OK, there was a slight hitch with the baffling failure to re-publish initially when Blogger informed me 004 dk.eos.net.FtpError: Login incorrect.. A spot of googling turned up the explanation and very simple fix.)

Next, I needed to ensure my delicious bookmarks pointed at my shiny new Blog*Spot domain. "Why", I thought to myself, "delicious is the premiere bookmark manager - surely updating several hundred links will be a hassle-free pleasure". Hardly. Maybe it's just that I'm an idiot, maybe I just had too big a weekend but, darn it, I couldn't for the life of me figure out how I could effect such a change!

The solution I came up with was to export my bookmarks (as an HTML file), make the simple changes to the URLs of bookmark posts (including archives) via the search-and-replace feature of my text editor (no regular expressions required) and finally re-import them back into my account.

Not bad, I guess. Clumsy, but feasible. I'd give it a C. Then I hit the first hitch.

Hitch #1. Delicious does not support batch delete.

Before I re-import the updated bookmarks, I thought I should delete the old ones. (Delicious can't overwrite them, since it uses the URL - which would have changed - to identify the bookmarks. I would have ended up with both sets, making my job even harder!) I googled around, checked out the API (which needed URLs) and looked at third-party libraries without joy. I resigned myself to clicking the delete button (plus confirmation) several hundred times.

Hitch #2. Delicious will block you if you generate requests too quickly.

Using my patented whirlwind mouse techniques, I was deleting posts off the page at a rate of one or two a second. Delicious does not like this. It will cut you off and lock you out for some ten or fifteen minutes. Apparently, you need to use a delay of ten seconds or more. OK, I could accept five minutes of furious clicking, but counting "one cat-and-dog, two cat-and-dog ... ten cat-and-dog" between clicks would take ages. Not cool.

Peering into the delicious page, I thought I could automate the whole painful process with a bit of javascript (see Code #1 at the end of this post). The idea is to grab all the "delete" links on the page and open them (with a suitable delay) in new windows. Sure, it coud be nicer (perhaps removing the popups), but it works. Just paste the code into your browser bar and press enter. Be warned: it will delete every post on the page, so make sure you are looking only at posts you want to have disappear. (Tip: make sure your browser allows popups on this page!)

Moving along now, I began the import process. Strangely, this takes up to half an hour after you upload the file. Goodness knows why. But, it worked as advertised, retaining tags, notes, dates and even my bundles. Except ...

Hitch #3. Delicious imports are compulsorily marked "not shared".

This means that no one else can see them - and presumably you can't use them to categorise your blog! Again, I couldn't see any mechanism to turn them all off in one hit (and yes, I don't "allow private saves" in my options). This time, I had to have a closer peek at the Ajaxy goodness in the delicious page and, after butchering one of their functions, managed to figure it out. (Please check out Code #2 below.) Paste this code into your browser bar and it will go through the current page, systematically triggering the "shared" option for each post (waiting politely in between).

Finally, it all worked. I was able to get away with a delay of as little as five seconds in both scripts, but I suggest you try it yourself. Even still, allowing for pagination and the various steps, the whole thing took an hour to process some 200+ posts and 40 archive pages, albeit mostly not requiring my attention.

And, yes, if I'd known what was involved I probably would have knocked together a variant on Code #2 to use the post edit function to sequentially edit the URL of each post on the page ... ahhh, the wisdom of hindsight.

So, at the end of this arduous task, I'm left in some doubts as to delicious' claim to be a bookmark manager (as opposed to repository) given the lack of support for basic batch-mode updating, deleting and reloading functions.

Does anyone have some pointers to share on this topic? Is there a secret batch-mode facility available? Has someone knocked together a web-app for doing this? It'd be great to save others the pain of doing this.

Code #1. For deleting (via popups) your delicious posts.

javascript:var delay=10000; var l=new Array(); var a=document.links; for(var i=0; i<a.length; i++) if(a[i].href.search('delete')>0)  l.push(a[i].href); alert(l.length); count=0; doPopDel(); function doPopDel(){ window.open(l[count],count,''); count++; if(count<=l.length) setTimeout(doPopDel, delay);}

Code #2. For sharing (via AJAX) your delicious posts.

javascript:var delay=10000; var l=new Array(); var a=document.links; for (var i=0; i<a.length; i++) if(a[i].className.search("share")==0) l.push(a[i]); alert(l.length); count=0; doShareDel(); function doShareDel(){ sharePostYes(l[count].parentNode); count++; if (count<l.length) setTimeout(doShareDel, delay);}  function sharePostYes(confirm){ commands = nextElement(confirm), post = confirm.parentNode, share = $('.share', post)[0]; remove(share.previousSibling, share, confirm, $('.private', post)[0]); commands.style.display = 'inline'; var data = getPostData(post); var postBody = 'jump=no&format=none&private=0'; var fields = { description: data.desc, url: data.url, oldurl: data.url, date: data.isoDate, notes: data.notes, tags: data.tags, key: data.key}; for(var i in fields) postBody += '&' + i + '=' + encodeURIComponent(fields[i]); var url = 'http://' + location.host + '/' + Delicious.cuser; new Ajax({url: url, method: 'post', postBody: postBody });}

In both cases, copy and paste the code into the address bar of your browser when you have loaded the appropriate delicious page. Set "delay" to be the duration (in milliseconds) to wait between requests (5-15 seconds should do it). The first alert box is the number of posts it's found. Good luck!

Filed in: blogtech del.icio.us, tagging, blogspot, freshtags, how-to

Ajaxified Display of Internal Backlinks

2006-08-07T08:21:00.000-04:00

Aditya's latest hack is an interesting one, both because of what it does, and as an illustration of the limits of user-authored modifications. Aditya's asynchronous backlinks hack works on the list of backlinks in your post footer, and will open a great-looking ajax window containing the contents of the backlinking post in response to a single click. A double click will do what it usually does, & load the whole post.

To see this in action, load Aditya's Native Blog Search post, & single-click any of the internal links. These are:

Asynchronous Backlinks! (well, most of them)
100th Post!
Static Vs. Dynamic

Now you can see the whole thread of related "Last Word" content on a single page. Grand.

Note that this won't load samples of external posts, because apparently Ajax can only fetch content from the same domain as the request, but even as an internal tool this is a huge step forward in consolidating content and presenting a coherent set of information, especially if your blog is a series of interlinked and evolving posts that build on one another.

Update: Looks like Adi has enhanced the way that the backlinks display, so that they write out an author name as well as the post title. This makes it much easier to tell which ones are internal links, and looks pretty darn cool. Good call!

Filed in: blogtech blogger-hacks, backlinks

Singpolyma Interviewed on Ning

2006-08-06T01:36:00.000-04:00

Many of us know Singpolyma (aka Stephen Paul Weber) as one the Wunderkinder of the bloghacking scene. An area that receives a lot of his attention is creating social apps with Ning, including his Recent Comments app and his pivotal XOXO conversion app - the basis for any number of other bloghacks.

A regular participant and collaborator on Freshblog, now Singpolyma's talents are being recognised and appreciated by a larger audience: he's been interviewed on the Ning Blog and provided a guest post on their tech blog.

Click over and check it out; he's writing about parsing feeds. And Singpolyma, as you begin your meteoric rise to hacker fame, don't forget the little people!

Filed in: blogtech webtech friends singpolyma Ning

Time for Del.icio.us to go Mainstream?

2006-08-04T08:57:00.000-04:00

Michael at Techcrunch speculates on declining Del.icio.us user stats

Has del.icio.us tapped out its userbase of early adopters? Will social bookmarking fail to go mainstream?
I think mainstream users will want to use del.icio.us,...Some users call for a redesign…something flashier and bolder. I don’t think that’s the answer. Easier bookmarking and better tools for sharing seem like the right direction to me....

Better tools for sharing? How about a whole new layer of tag-o-spheric interactivity like the ability to pass tags between blogs, Freshtags style! Michael's right. The solution here isn't a flashier site, it is a continued migration of the features and functions off the site and into our links bars & sidebars. Most of the recent innovations (tagroll, linkroll, Firefox extension) have done that....

There have been a number of recent discussions about what it would take to de-geek Del.icio.us, and to see the recent bookmark list be as much about dog grooming as it is about programming. Let's also note, though, that Del.icio.us was the only game in town (or at least the stand-out choice) for social bookmarking as recently as 18 months ago when I started to tag my posts for categories. Now 3Spots lists more than 100 social bookmarking sites, with every imaginable topical and geographic focus. The middle and late-comers to social bookmarking have their pick of services, & will choose features that are important to them.

More generally... What is the next evolution in social bookmarking? My thought is that for this to catch on, online content has to become more important to more people, & that Aunty Sue has to choose to bookmark that cookie recipe at home & then visit the site again at grandma's, rather than writing it down or printing it & stuffing it in her purse... What do you think?
______

Related Update: Pete Cashmore at Mashable reports that Del.icio.us now has a sidebar widget like the "favorite me on Technorati" widget, that invites readers to add you to their network, and that they've also added the ability to see a list of "most active users" for individual tags, thereby allowing the casual user to see who is interested (& presumably authoritative) in a given area.

The sidebar widget is known as a Network Badge. It is customiseable in the same way as the tagroll, via a very clean interface that has a preview at the right. In addition to the default "add me to your network" link (which is the point,after all) the badge has custom options to show username, network count, fan count, & the option to choose no icon, or either a large or small icon. If your network or fan counts are 0, that element will not display. See what a network badge looks like in the preview column below:

Once again, Del.icio.us are getting people off the site, & getting the features & functions into your everyday browsing experience.... This tool also follows up the division of the inbox into inbox & network by amplifying the "social" components of the site.

Filed in: del.icio.us webtech social_bookmarking

Asynch & Ajax Javascript Categories

2006-08-04T08:40:00.000-04:00

The category hacks keep comin', and here's another great Javascript hack for categories that was added direct to the Blogger Hacks Wiki by Eslam, the hack author. This category method, which loads asynchronously in the sidebar of your blog, produces an ajax menu. Post titles load underneath individual tags when you click the tags. This method also allows multiple category labels per post. Most excellent.

Multiple template edits are required, but the instructions are clear. My one question involves the use of atom to provide the category tags. The script queries your feed to find labels, & since this uses atom, can it still see older posts after they fall out of your feed, or does it only categorise the new stuff on your site?

Filed in: blogtech webtech categories blogger-hacks wiki

Creamaid: Teaser-Free Intro

2006-08-03T08:35:00.000-04:00

Having buzzed Creamaid without pulling back the curtain earlier in the week, the time has come to explore the service in more detail. As you can tell, I'm into the idea...

Here's why. At it's most abstract, Creamaid is a bridge between the static web and the dynamic web, a link between websites and blogs, and a way to integrate the two. It is a tool designed to allow corporations and organisations to "seed" conversations in the blogosphere, and then keep track of the freedback. How, I hear you cry, & what does this have to do with Plugaid?

Well, Creamaid widgets are from the same company, & are super-charged Plugaid widgets. A company or conversation initiator with a viral advertising budget creates a widget for themselves with Creamaid, and installs the widget on the page that will be the hub of the conversation. What's new here is that this can be a "regular website" & not only a blog. Joe's Hardware could widget their fall sale, or International Soda Pop could widget their new "atomic bubblegum" soda. Next step, bloggers find the widget. As the Creamaid folks say:

There are three ways a blogger can discover a conversation:
In the wild: On a website that contains the conversation
Virally: From another blogger's post
Browsing: From the updated list on CREAMaid's main page

Bloggers who have found the widget and are in the mood to dish out a good freedbacking then author relevant & responsive posts that critique, boost or otherwise discuss the content on the source page. When the post is published, the author includes the CreamAid embed, and this duplicates the widget on their post. Blogger Tip: Blogger seems to require the manual addition of a closing embed tag such as this </embed> to the cut 'n paste code that is provided by the service. After you paste in the embed, manually append the closing tag, & don't click back to the compose side of the window or your tag will go awol.

Posts are approved before being included in the conversation / listed on the widget, and the author of each approved post is financially rewarded 30 days later, currently via Paypal. You'll note that my previous teaser post has been approved & is now listed on the widget. (There's no budget for this conversation, though, so no payment )

So... viral advertising that crosses over between blogs and websites. Curious that you're only paid if you're included, & that the person who initiated the conversation is the one approving the posts. I guess there's a chance that you won't get paid if your review of Atomic Bubblegum soda suggests that it tastes like motor oil.... Since this particular widget is set to support 1000 posts, it is also reasonable to assume that your post will eventually fall off the top of the list and spend some time in scroll-bar purgatory. I wonder what it would take to add an "authority" sort to the widget as well as a "most recently approved" sort. In a genuine business review situation, I might be interested in cutting to the chase & seeing what a "big" blogger had to say.... That said, I'm all for efforts to energize the static web and to tie the blogosphere to happenings in the real world, & the idea of a viral advertising tool that can compensate readers is v. cool.

One other question from the conversation-starter's end. Let's say I seed a conversation, and specify a budget of $1000... If only 2 posts respond to the widget, do I give them $500 each (big incentive to pick up the widget) or do they only get the $1 per post that the 1000-post widget would support if it was filled w/ freedback?

Read more on the Creamaid site, & if you want to spin off this post & discuss Creamaid on your own blog, by all means click the header of the attached widget and then the "participate" button in the lower right to submit your post to Trent @ Creamaid for widgetization... Check out the widget to see other Creamaid related posts & to see an example of a widget-tracked conversation which, now that it includes some "real" content, demonstrates the power of the tool by linking to Snipperoo, and from there Postbubble, showing me another discussion thread on this that I would otherwise not have found. See Alice @ Tiara.org for another review of the service.

Filed in: blogging blogtech creamaid plugaid

Blogging Services Survey Plus Intros

2006-08-02T10:14:00.000-04:00

Alright.... Embarking from platform 4, a blog services survey with a difference. We've all seen surveys that ask you to name the tools that are critical to your blogging. I'm asking that too, but with a Freshblog spin. What are the tools that are critical to your blogging and how do they work?

I'm looking for the names of your favorite search services, tagging tools, social bookmarking engines, photo-managers, traffic counters, firefox extensions, browsers, cocktails... whatever those tools are that make your blogging easier. With the core Freshblog audience of blog developers and extenders in mind, though, I'd like to see how-to's, intro posts, and walkthroughs to go with your recommendations. If you've written a post like that yourself, by all means link to it. If you want to recommend a great intro by someone else, that's great too. If you're feeling remarkably gung-ho & want to take on & compare a set of similar tools (or if you already did that), then please give me a heads-up.

My goal is to develop a set of links to quality intro materials for the best & most frequently used blogging tools, so that a single post can serve as a launch point for all those "What does **** do?" questions.

To start the ball rolling, here's the Freshblog take on a couple of services, as well as some other information introducing some of the most frequently discussed services:

Blogging - Introduced and explained at codex.wordpress.org
CoComment - reviewed by the Blog Herald
Del.icio.us - broken down by Beelerspace, explored w/ screencaps by Andreas Solberg
Desktop Blog Editors - introduced by Problogger and Lifehacker
Feedburner - Evaluated and found to be Slightly Remarkable
Greasemonkey - by Mark Pilgrim on the O'Reilly Network
Haloscan Trackback - by Freshblog
Haloscan Commenting and Trackback - by Improbulus
How to Flickr - by Ben Bishop
RSS - explored and explained, w/ some recommended feed readers, by Paul Stamatiou
Sitemeter - Installation & setup explained by Sheila Coggins. Other counters are also listed at About.com
Technorati Tags - by Improbulus
Ten Technorati Hacks - from Micro Persuasion

If you find other great explanatory posts, leave a comment with a link. What do these services do for you? Which ones can't you live without?

Filed In: blogging blogtech webtech

Blogger Server Switch?

2006-08-02T09:56:00.000-04:00

"Tell me what you saw, Jim, and what you think it means..." Phydeaux3 notes that there appears to be a migration of content occurring, w/ Blogger stuff getting housed in Google boxes. As the comments over there explore, this may mean nothing, but may mean something, & perhaps something significant....

Filed In: google blogger blogtech

Expand - Collapse Categories with Javascript

2006-08-01T09:51:00.000-04:00

Another great javascript category hack comes our way from Caramuel. This method involves multiple template edits & the addition of "labels" to each post that you publish. The details and code are laid out in Caramuel's intro post at categorize.blogspot.com.

This category method is best explored and tested on Caramuel's Biominds blog. Select a category from the green box at the top of the biominds sidebar, & the page loads every post in that category in the main column. The posts are pre-expanded, but have the option of being collapsed. I'm curious to know if this setting can be flipped as more posts are put in each category and the content loading in the main page grows. having the posts collapsed as the default would make more space on the page.

Using one hack for multiple purposes, Caramuel has also leveraged his category hack to force a sticky post (effectively the only page in the "quick guide" category) to appear each time the main page is loaded. Looks like an interesting and multi-purpose method!

Filed in: blogtech webtech categories blogger-hacks

Ultimate Traffic Tip: Time

2006-07-31T09:02:00.000-04:00

Not one to (often) use a teaser in the title, I'm blowing the surprise up front. Anyway, 7cMarketing links to John at FindingTheMoney, and John provides the ultimate traffic tip for bloggers both pro and am. The whole thing takes time, regardless of effort:

Time to get indexed. Time to get out of the Google sandbox. Time for the algorithms to do their thing with your rankings. Time to become like an old reference book to a few web surfers. It all happens in time.

John also suggests that you'll need some time to find your voice & build your community, & he's right, of course. Let's call this a late submission to Darren Rowse's "If I Had To Start My Blog All Over Again" series, which now consists of eighty insights into the evolution and development of the blogs of multiple authors, including a discussion of the time it takes to write a blog. As for building the site, If I had to start my blog all over again I'd know that it takes some time to get off the ground.

Filed in: blogging blogosphere microspheres

Creamaid: Plugaid jumps the Blogosphere

2006-07-31T08:46:00.000-04:00

In a very cool viral marketing campaign which ought to pay off big-style, the folks at Plugaid have rolled out a version of the service with a slightly different (and freedback related) purpose. They're calling it CreamAid, & I can't decide whether to tell you what it does, or let the marketing do the work! Perhaps I'll update the post in 24hrs & we can discuss the idea in response to comments etc?

As my post title suggests, what interests me here is the idea of a bridge between blogs and "regular" websites!

Filed in: blogging blogtech creamaid plugaid

Technorati for Categories Implementation

2006-07-29T16:17:00.000-04:00

As regular readers will recall, a while back Technorati introduced the ability to limit tag search results to posts from a single user account. There was much rejoicing in this little corner of the blogosphere (do spheres have corners?) as JohnT, Imp, Nathan and myself put shoulders to the wheel to turn this into a viable method for tagging and categorising content.

All of which is a roundabout way of highlighting the implementation of said category hack by Carolyn at Field to Feast. Not only are the categories slick (esp. w/ Technorati's recent makeover) but the recipes are delicious (no pun intended.... really... well, alright, maybe a little......)

If you're looking for categories without the hassle of bookmarking your content, consider Technorati tags!

Update: Phydeaux3 points out that the tag-tool that's being used here is the Magical Sheep Technorati Tagger Greasemonkey Script. Greasemonkey once again enables the most integrated and seamless solution to the issue.

Filed in: technorati technorategories blogtech webtech categories blogger-hacks tags tagging

Posting from the Future, or the Past

2006-07-29T15:43:00.000-04:00

Bloggeratto reports on the latest Phydeaux3 greasemonkey script, and 'tis a doozie. We're waiting, as you know, for the ability to write a post in Blogger, save it on a Sunday, and tell it to publish itself on a Wednesday. We're not there yet, but Phydeaux has boosted one of the existing solutions (to manually change the date on the post when you publish) by extending the range of available dates via Greasemonkey to be infinite! Now you can pick any 4-digit year that floats your boat, & publish from there. A highly specific niche, to be sure, but an interesting tweak too. Cool.

The mainstream solution for automatically post-dated publication comes from Improbulus, and uses EMailSchedule to time the posting of content via mail. I wonder if you can tell it to send you an e-mail from 1947?

Filed in: blogtech, webtech, blogger-hacks, blogger

Horizontal Menu with CSS

2006-07-25T15:21:00.000-04:00

Highlighting some of the truly innovative stuff here on Freshblog, and road-testing a new hack at the same time, I've added in a horizontal menu underneath the page header. I looked at a couple of these, in an effort to help Chaim get one off the ground at Life of Rubin. We ran into an MSIE compatibility error with the first effort, but the menu at Alsacreations seems to be browser-proof and was pretty easy to install & customise. Chaim's implementation turned out even slicker than the implementation here, I think!

The installation is pretty straightforward. There's a pre-formed stylesheet for your template head, and a chunk of HTML that goes where you want the buttons to appear. I ran into an issue with my existing CSS, and had to make some changes to the code as provided. It took some work w/ the CSS at Freshblog to make sure that the formatting only applied to the buttons under the header, and not to all of the lists on the page, but formatting the list in its own class seems to work, and we're good to go. Check out the basic code at Alsacreations, and see whether it will work for you!

Filed In:

Feedburner Stats

2006-07-24T20:27:00.000-04:00

Is there a Feedreader hiding their stats under a bushel? We dropped from 832 readers to 554 on Sun, & have yet to recover...

Filed in: blogtech webtech feeds

Doc to PDF

2006-07-24T17:51:00.000-04:00

Had cause to make a PDF this weekend, wanting to create an electronic document that would retain formatting and look the way that I wanted it to for all eternity (bwahahahahah!) I used PDFOnline.com and was more than happy with the result. You upload your doc, specify a filename, and enter an e-mail address for delivery of the PDF. Pretty soon, the thing is in your e-mail as an attachment and can be downloaded to your desktop. Easy and quick. There's a 2mb file size limit, so that transcription of War & Peace that you're working on won't fly, but otherwise you should be in good shape. Give it a whirl if you're looking to convert a document to a PDF on the fly.

Filed in: PDF webtech

Google's Blogsearch Crippled?

2006-07-21T22:41:00.000-04:00

I've noticed that Google's Blogsearch seems to have been crippled for at least 24 hours now. When you restrict the scope of the search to a single blog using blogurl: it will return only one result.

Check it out:

Search all blogs for FreshTags (no problems)

Search Freshblog for FreshTags (only one hit - should be dozens!)

It seems to apply to self-hosted, non-BlogSpot blogs too, as well as across different time periods (12 hours, day, week etc) and the RSS/Atom search feeds.

Even using a different option (eg "Freshblog in the title") seems to produce the same (solitary) result.

Of course, this means the Blogger Navbar is broken too. Not to mention Aditya's Native Blogsearch.

I haven't turned up any buzz on the interweb about it yet ... is it restricted to just a few blogs?

Anyone got any theories? It can't be the indexing, since the pages show up in a universal search; things just go awry on the restricted ones.

What blog search engines do people like to use instead? Personally, I've never had a satisfying experience using technorati ... there's gotta be something better out there.

* Update *

It seems blogsearch is back!

I'm getting normal behaviour now with all the variants (RSS, Atom), and for all the add-ons (NavBar, native search).

I wonder what was going on?

Filed In: google blogger search blogtech blogsearch

Keotag Tagging Tool

2006-07-20T14:06:00.000-04:00

As part of a useful walkthrough of what Technorati can do for you, Kyle's Cove features Keotag, a tag generator that allows you to customise URL's for either Technorati, Del.icio.us, or Icerocket. They also offer a tag search, and a social bookmarking link generator for static URL's. The tag generator is an alternative to other online tagmakers, and is well worth a look if you want to add tag code occasionally and don't have access to a customiseable browser.

Filed in: technorati tags tagging blogtech

Freshblog

Fun with 2D Barcodes on Your Phone

Embiggen Those TinyURLs

Blog Update Feed and Sidebar Display

BuzzFlux: Recent Search Queries

Should I Do This?

How Does BuzzFlux Work?

How Do I Install BuzzFlux?

Where To Next?

Google offers free wireless broadband to your home

Solution for the last hundred yards

Pipes, JSON, and code for your website

Code for your site

Stem the flow but find what you need

How to watch for Diggs to your site

Post every 90 seconds

Mashups for the rest of us

Forced Migration

Re: Scripted Re-Mark Re-Released

Hacks Wiki Update

Pressure to make the Beta Switch

New Hub for Hacks

Widgets on Main / Archive / Label Pages

When is a Draft Not a Draft?

Blogger Beta Feed Tips

Blogger Beta now fully loaded

ClipClip revives Clipmarks Debate

Social Searching with URL.com

BloggerHacks Wiki Hack Requests

Blogger Beta Hack Round-Up 2

Integrate Google Reader with GMail

E-Mail for Feedreading

Trackback Works in Blogger Beta

Lurkers and Blog Participation

Technorati Link Counts

Agitate for Full Feeds

Moving a Blog to a different account....

Javascript in Blogger Posts

Matt Cutts on Pagerank

Netflix Recommendation Engine Contest

Beta Feeds and Your Subscribers

The Challenge of Blog-Community Participation

Recent Posts & Comments on Main Page Only

Sharing Code in Beta

Comment Count in Beta

Digg Traffic vs. Del.icio.us Traffic

Label Feed Addresses

Collective Wisdom: From Polls to Markets

The Prediction Market Concept

Prediction Markets as Polls

Implementing Prediction Markets

Collective Wisdom - Prediction Market Blog Integration

The Getting of Wisdom

Commenting between Blogger versions is fixed

"Digg It" Links for your Posts

Haloscan for Blogger Beta

FreshTags for Blogger Beta

Google Personal's Page Tabs

Blogger Beta Hack Round Up

Dapper: Content Integration For Everyone

What Does Dapper Do?

Case Study

Implications For The Web

Social Bookmarking Icons for your Beta Blog

Beta Label URL's now Microformat Compliant

Blogger Help Gets Juicy

Formatting Labels in Beta

Beta HTML Template Editor is Live

Moods for Your Blog w/ Pic2Color

HTML in your Gmail Footer?

Experiments With TagPie

Raise the Profile of the Beta Search Box

New Delicious JSON Feeds

Blogger Beta Feed URL's

Scripted Re-Mark: Batch Editing Your Bookmarks

Get Blogger Beta Labels without Layouts!

Blogger Beta for the Weekend

Hacks Wiki gets some Love

Blogger Beta Update, Incl. Template News

Windows Live Writer and .Net Framework

* Update *