Controlling Your Privacy

April 03, 2008 –

Privacy and Rights

Today I tried out a new service by one of the smartest guys I know, Michael Geist. It’s called iOptOut and it’s a gateway for Canadians to voluntarily put themselves on do-not-call lists *before* the company contacts you, as well as giving you a legal recourse for when they call you anyways (those bastards). Within hours of signing up for the service I got 8 calls from 1-480-543-1171. Spooky coincidence.

Customer service representative indicated they worked for Fido. Trying to acquire different identification information, such as passport, drivers license, citizenship number, SIN number. Agent was rude the whole time and started asking if any of the information was fake.

They had the nerve to call us back again. Fido has confirmed they are not legitimate for selling Fido phone service. Ottawa Police (Canada) are now launching a fraud investigation. – Jeremy

(1-800 Notes is a great site for looking up the telemarketers before you give them any information — I’m glad I did)

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By engtech | Posted in Online Privacy and Reputation Management, Technology | Tagged , , , , | Comments (7)

Presenting: Livejournal Theme for WordPress

April 01, 2008 –

WordPress Tips and Tricks

You know the story. You’ve been using LiveJournal since 1999. It’s your home. You’re familiar with it. You’re on the list of notable LiveJournal users. But times they be a changin’. You’re friends are all leaving LiveJournal for WordPress because it’s a better C-M-S (whatever that is). You’ve switched to WordPress, but everything looks strange and confusing.

Don’t worry, as usual engtech has your back.

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By engtech | Posted in CSS and Web Design, Technology, WordPress | Tagged , | Comments (3)

How to Get an RSS Feed for your XBOX 360 Gamertag

March 31, 2008 –

Hacking RSS with Yahoo Pipes

My geek want of the day is getting an RSS feed of my Xbox 360 game activity so that I can use it with lifestreaming services. For once I’m not the only person who feels this need. There’s at least two of us! :)

badger-tweet.png

I’m not sure why Microsoft doesn’t make an RSS feed of your Xbox Live activity available. The information is all there, they publish it as a gamercard. But they don’t give you access to the raw data to do with as you please unless you’re a member of the Xbox Community Developers Program. Here are the various ways you can access your Xbox 360 Gamercard to use with other websites.

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By engtech | Posted in Games, IDT Labs Software Development, Microsoft Windows XP and Vista, Yahoo Pipes | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (22)

Delicious Links - 20 links - friendfeed, blogging, javascript, psychology, startup

March 29, 2008 –

Weekly Links

This is my weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet. You can see me add them in real time on Friend Feed.

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By engtech | Posted in Best of Feeds | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Greasemonkey Scripts: Friend Feed Auto-Pagerization, Resharing Links and Even More

March 28, 2008 –

Web Browser Tips & Tricks

It’s the last day of my week of Friend Feed and I have 5 more Greasemonkey scripts for you (for a total of 8). I think I’m done writing scripts for Friend Feed for the next little while. I might put together something for importing your Twitter contacts as friends (update: here it is) but if I wait long enough I’m sure they’ll do it as an official service.

As usual you’ll need Firefox and Greasemonkey to use these scripts.

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By engtech | Posted in Firefox and Greasemonkey, IDT Labs Software Development, Technology, friendfeed | Tagged | Comments (15)

Greasemonkey Scripts: Friend Feed Twitter Client and Remove Visited Links

March 27, 2008 –

Web Browser Tips & Tricks

“Friend Feed” week seems to be continuing at IDT. But don’t worry, there’s a team of trained attack Bonobo monkeys prepared to take me into a dark alley and beat me up and make me suffer if I don’t stop talking about Friend Feed. What can I say? This is what it looks like when a web app gets people excited. I’ve put together two more Greasemonkey scripts to add features I want in Friend Feed.

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By engtech | Posted in Firefox and Greasemonkey, IDT Labs Software Development, Technology, Twitter, friendfeed | Comments (28)

Crunching the Friend Feed Stats to Find the Most Popular Web Apps

March 26, 2008 –

Social Bookmarking and Social Voting

One of the nicest things about the Internet is that if you sit on your ass for long enough, someone will code up whatever little side project you’re thinking about starting. In my case, I was interested in finding out general statistics about Friend Feed as a tape measure of how popular certain social bookmarking sites are. Enter Friend Feed Stats. Thank you, lazyweb.

What Is the Most Popular Web Service?

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By engtech | Posted in Technology, Web 2.0 and Social Media, friendfeed | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (18)

How to Generate 100s of Backlinks in Minutes

March 25, 2008 –

Bloggin Tips and Tricks

In 25 ways to get an insanely popular blog Skellie describes 25 models for blogging that leads to an ever increasing audience. There’s one she missed out on: the abrasive model.

  1. Say something bone-headed so people clamour to their keyboards in order to prove you wrong.
  2. Make commenting on your post as hard as possible so that people will respond with blog posts of their own instead of a comment.

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By engtech | Posted in Marketing and Promotion, Microsoft Windows XP and Vista, Technology | Tagged | Comments (7)

Delicious Links - 20 links - friendfeed, lifehacks, blogging, programming, wordpress

March 24, 2008 –

Weekly Links

This is my weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together for my blog on Internet Duct Tape.

Subscribe to Internet Duct Tape using RSS or using email.

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By engtech | Posted in Best of Feeds | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off

Greasemonkey Script: Filter FriendFeed by Service

March 20, 2008 –

Web Browser Tips & Tricks

I’ve sipped the Kool Aid and I’m really liking Friend Feed as a lifestreaming aggregator. One feature that is a bit hard to find is filtering by individual services. I’ve created a Greasemonkey script that sticks a huge bar of icons at the top of the page to make this accessible.

  • It remembers the context you’re in.
    • If you’re browsing within friends, then clicking on the icons will filter by that service on your friends.
    • If you’re browsing within a specific user, then clicking on the icons will filter by that service on that person.
    • If you’re browsing the public timeline, then clicking on the icons will filter by that service for the public timeline.
  • It returns 100 results per page instead of 30.
  • It will automatically update itself if I update the script.

Let me know if you have any problems in the comments.

Read More »

By engtech | Posted in Firefox and Greasemonkey, IDT Labs Software Development, Technology, friendfeed | Tagged , | Comments (36)

Free WP Plugin Idea: Use Referrers Instead of Trackbacks

March 19, 2008 –

Free Ideas

Blogs have a way of keeping track of who is linking to them using trackbacks or pingbacks. It’s a good idea in theory because it helps you follow the discussion as it spreads to new areas, but in practice it is mostly filled with spam because getting a well-placed trackback on a popular website can be a good source of traffic.

Trackbacks were designed without any kind of authentication mechanism whatsoever, not even the most trivial test that the person who is says they are linking to you really is linking to you. So screw spammy trackbacks. Screw them in their naughty place. Take them out of your blog themes and blog engines and let’s build something better.

Here’s the idea: instead of showing a list of trackbacks for spammers to abuse, show a list of referrers.

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By engtech | Posted in Free Ideas, Technology, The War on Spam, WordPress | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (13)

The Fragmentation of Identity and Discussion

March 18, 2008 –

Connect with your readers

I’m a social web app junkie. Where most people use a few on a regular basis as a consumer and only a couple as a producer I am an active user on far too many sites. I’m not a beta junkie to the point where I try out every web service (especially not the ones spamming my blog contact email), but I do try out more than my fair share and manage to get involved before they reach the tipping point (like Friend Feed is reaching now).

The sheer amount of web apps out there leads to fragmentization of our online identities, but that isn’t a bad thing. The people who read my blog aren’t necessarily people I’m interested in talking to on Twitter, and none of us might share the same taste in music on Last.FM. For a while there I was talking about the Ruby programming language like crazy on this blog, but now I’m using a niche tumbleblog so that I can post more often on that specific technical subject without alienating my existing audience.

But it isn’t only our online identities that are fragmenting: it’s also the discussion around content. Once upon a time the way someone would comment on something you wrote would be to write a blog post of their own in response. Then blogs got a comment section and people could write what they had to say directly on the post. Now the discussion around a post has completely fragmented: people are saying stuff about your content on Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Facebook… pretty much anywhere except for the post where you originally wrote it.

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By engtech | Posted in Building a Community, Digital Culture, Technology, Web 2.0 Blogging, Web 2.0 and Social Media, friendfeed | Tagged , , | Comments (17)

Building an RSS Templating System

March 17, 2008 –

Hacking RSS with Yahoo Pipes

The blog posts might have been slow lately, but that’s only because there’s been an accumulation of interesting projects piling up on my hard drive. Here’s a few things that are in the pipe (which I’m talking about to stop my procrastination and force me to release them):

  • Sandbox Theme for Tumblr so that you can use Sandbox CSS themes on tumblr.com
  • Tumblr Theme Templates to make it easier to develop themes for tumblr.com without having to upload your theme to tumblr.com
  • Tumblr automatic backup + restore
  • WordPress.com automatic backup
  • Twitter There Will Be Followers - program to automatically follow back anyone who is following you on Twitter
  • PostMaster html2blog - automatically post formatted HTML to Tumblr, Blogger or WordPress
  • rss2html - powerful templating system for converting an RSS feed into HTML

It’s the last one I want to talk about. I’ve gotten tired of using Yahoo Pipes + Pipe Cleaner to build digest posts. It’s kind of a pain in the butt. So I want something that can take an rss feed, convert it to html so that I can use another program for automatically posting it to the blog. I’m not going the plugin route because of WordPress.com’s inability to support javascript or PHP plugins.

This is what I’ve come up with.

Read More »

By engtech | Posted in IDT Labs Software Development, RSS Syndication, Technology, Web 2.0 Blogging, Yahoo Pipes | Tagged | Comments (2)

Delicious Links - 20 links - tools, gamers, workhacks, code, links

March 16, 2008 –

Weekly Links

This is my weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together for my blog on Internet Duct Tape.

Subscribe to Internet Duct Tape using RSS or using email.

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

Internet Duct Tape is my blog where I talk about software, technology, blogging and other geeky subjects.

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

Internet Duct Tape is my blog where I talk about software, technology, blogging and other geeky subjects.

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

Internet Duct Tape is my blog where I talk about software, technology, blogging and other geeky subjects.

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By engtech | Posted in Best of Feeds, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (4)

Delicious Links - 17 links - programming, stumbleupon, blogging, windows, copyright

March 09, 2008 –

Weekly Links

This is my weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together for my blog on Internet Duct Tape.

Subscribe to Internet Duct Tape using RSS or using email.

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

Internet Duct Tape is my blog where I talk about software, technology, blogging and other geeky subjects.

This Week at IDT Labs

IDT Labs is where I announce new software tools I’m working on.

  • [TUMBLR] Regular Post Digest of the Last X Days
    • Build a list of the last X regular posts from your Tumblr account in the past Y days. Useful for doing weekly digest posts with Yahoo Pipe Cleaner . Based off of a pipe by romzombie . IDT Labs is a blog for news announcements about software, tools or blog themes created by InternetDuctTape.com .…
  • [TUMBLR] Delete your Tumblr with TumblrCleanr 0.0.1
    • There’s one Tumblr feature that’s missing: how do you delete your Tumblr? At some point you might want to destroy all traces of your tumblr (privacy concerns, or you want to use it for something else) and there isn’t an option to do that — other than click the delete button on every…

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By engtech | Posted in Best of Feeds | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Searching for the Perfect Inline Code Documentation Tool

March 07, 2008 –

Programming Tips

Even amongst programmers I’m weird because I have an intense love for documentation. No, that doesn’t mean I overly comment my code, or that you’ll catch me browsing happily through the product requirements document during my coffee break. I should be more specific.