I’m on cloud number 0.9!
well not really! I just turned on RSSCloud support on this blog’s feed. RSSCloud allows the feedreader subscribing to you, to setup a callback address, which your blog will call whenever you publish something. If every blog does the same, it could account for several thousand, if not million CPU cycles due to lesser polling. It is the brain-child of Dave Winer, the man who invented RSS, the author of the ever-popular scriptingnews blog. (If you had started blog back in 1994, you could’ve got a domain as kewl as his!)
This blog is neither major (by a long shot) nor complete tech, but it does feel good to be a tiny part of reducing the incessant polling on the web.
If you want to do your part and have a self-hosted wordpress blog, just download the RSSCloud plugin by Joseph Scott (Thank you, my man) and get the engines started.
‘nuf said.
06.27.08Friendfeed comments for wordpress
Conversations on the web have evolved quite a bit, in the last 4/5 years. During the late 90s, conversations on the web, was pretty much non-existant, except for a few, who used their websites to engage in conversations. The advent of the blog, made available tools to start and continue conversations.
In the last couple of years, there has been several attempts to normalize comments, across the blogging ecosystem, and several ways have been tried. Disqus, is a company, that is in the business of aggregating comments for your blog. Seesmic, a video communications startup, has partnered with them to integrate video comments. Even after all of these innovations, getting people to comment on a blog, is still pretty difficult.
You need,
- an engaged audience (the kind that wants to comment)
- access to a critical mass of such people.
- regular compelling content, to keep your masses.
- friends who are A-listers, willing to quote or refer you to their audiences.
Now, with Friendfeed, I see a break away from these restrictions. All you need, is the willingness to be read and comment on a lot of people’s content, which will enable a lot of people to follow you, which means you have their attention (one might argue the attention span is very less, but nonetheless, you have a chance).
Once you have a sizable following, all you need to do, is write that compelling content, that interests your followers (which should come by, as you comment more and more). Until now, to get people to visit your blog, your content has to compelling enough for them to leave the tool they used to discover your blog, and visit it, and then want to comment. Installing the worpdress plugin for friendfeed comments removes that barrier too.
That is exactly what I have done. So, from now on, anyone who follows me in friendfeed, can leave a comment in FF, and it will be autmatically part of my comment stream (although, it is not fully integrated into my comment feed etc)
How kewl is that?!
| Posted in Short updates | Comments
Twitter digests
A few weeks back, I installed Alex King’s Twitter Tools for wordpress. Running it for a few weeks, I found that by lack of posting to my blog, became more apparent that earlier. There are now more “twitter” posts than the number of posts that I have written myself in the last year or so. How pathetic is that?!
Looks like I have almost lost the need to say something (about anything) and it is about time to shut down this blog. However, I intend to give it another shot (one last time), before I stop hosting my own blog, and move to life-streaming instead (You can already find my at shiva.tumblr.com).
There are few projects that I have started working on (in my off-time ofcourse).
1. Read-later
This is a clone of instapaper, written primarily for my own use and to learn django (as I find instapaper, rather limiting). Some features I intend to add include, cross-posting to twitter or del.icio.us, full-feed RSS to enable reading in Google reader. This isn’t as yet, production ready, in fact it is in its early stages.
2. Un-named java app framework
A framework for running high-throughput java based servers, allowing staged-processing of actions. The framework also provides resilency to failures, low-impact live logging and debugging.
3. Ex-SideRSS
An extension of sideRSS, that allows for displaying and customising RSS feeds for displaying in your wordpress sidebar.
Do check back atleast every week and hopefully, I will be able to find time to add more coding related posts. The plan is to post stuff that I learn about C/C++ development on unix based systems.
01.15.08Ipod touch/Iphone support
This website, now supports a special interface for viewing using ipod touch/iphone. I’m using the iWPhone plugin at contentrobot.com
| Posted in Short updates, Tech | Comments