Stopped using Google Friend Connect for comments

April 14, 2009 on 4:59 am | In Computer, Blogging | Comments Off

I have stopped using Google Friend Connect  for blog comments.  There are several things that Google could add to make this more usuable

  1. It should be possible to specify a home page when submitting an anonymous comment
  2. It should be possible to configure the wall to not truncate the messages
  3. It should be possible for the user to configure the what happens when a user clicks on their urls for their authenticated comment (link to Google Friend Connect profile, or blog)
  4. Google should, and maybe already do, process the javascript and index the page using the content of the comments.  There could be a unique comment that someone leaves, and if Google doesn't index it, people will not be able to find the comment.

Comments switched to Google Friend Connect

April 12, 2009 on 9:08 am | In Computer, Blogging | Comments Off
As I was thinking about before, I have disabled comments on this blog, and enabled Google Friend Connect for comments.  I am interested in finding out how well this will work.  I am still not requiring authentication for adding comments, in the hope that Google will still do spam filtering.

Posting daily activity

August 21, 2008 on 8:29 am | In Computer, Blogging | Comments Off

A while ago, I configured del.icio.us to post the list of bookmarks from that day on my blocg.  For some reason this stopped working for me.  I like these type of automatic posts, as it makes it easy to share various pages.

I decided to write a plugin for LifeType that will import a rss feed, and then "summarize" the rss items and create a post with this text.  I probably could have gotten the del.icio.us blog posting to work, but If I created the plugin, this woud allow me to include Google Reader shared items, or Twitter tweets in the post.

Google Reader does have the ability to share a list of items, but  unfortunately, the only way to get this list is with some javascript.  The problem that I have with this is that it is not possible to have the contents of the list remain static once posted.  For example, if I look at a post from a year ago, I want to see the list of shared items that were shared a year ago. What happens now is that the latest shared items will always be shown, even for old posts that include the javascript.

Once I installed the plugin (I will create a wiki page for this plugin), the next tricky part was to get the feed to only contain items from th last 24 hours.  del.icio.us doesn't have a way to limit the items in the feed by date, but I found this Yahoo Pipe that can do that.

The next thing that I want to do is include the items that I share in Google Reader.  One thing that doesn't make this as easy as I would have liked is that there isn't a way to determine the items that were shared in the last 24 hours.  Unlike the del.icio.us feed, the entries in the rss feed aren't dated with the date of when the item was shared.  Instead, the date is the original publish date of the article.

I think that have a solution for this, and will write about this when I test it some more.

AddThis

July 12, 2008 on 10:29 am | In Computer, Blogging | Comments Off

This tweet mentioned AddThis, and I went to check it out.  AddThis is a serivce that will generate buttons for web pages or blogs, where readers can use them to bookmark or share links. 

I have been using my port of Sociable for LifeType, but AddThis looked interesting enough that I created a LifeType plugin for it.  I will try it out for a while.  One concern that I have about AddThis over Sociable is that the javascript needs to be loaded from their servers.  So if there servers are loaded, this could affect my page load.

I will post a link to the wiki page for the LifeType plugin, once I create it.

Xbox and Windows Home Server

June 1, 2008 on 9:32 am | In Blogging | Comments Off

This is a pretty good article that describes how to serve up your content from your Windows Home Server to your Xbox.  It is working perfectly for me.

The one thing that I want to figure out is to have the video transcoded to play on the Xbox.  The Xbox only supports a relatively small subset of video formats.

[via MS Windows Home Server blog]

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