As websites have moved away from static pages to interactive updating displays, the modern Greasemonkey hacker has been forced to learn new tricks: namely interacting with the Javascript on a website. Sometimes that’s harder than it looks because the Javascript on the site you want to modify has been minified.
When we look at technology we use everyday, the great success stories all have one thing in common: competition. They all achieved their success despite healthy competition, or perhaps because of it.
You might want to skip this post if you aren’t hosted on WordPress.com.
You may have heard talks about how “Related Posts” was going to become an integrated feature in the WordPress core. Last friday they released a feature called “Possibly Related”. They use Sphere.com’s technology to analyze what posts are related to the current post and add links to the bottom of it. Doesn’t sound bad, right? Wait for it…
For WordPress Multiuser (like WordPress.com) they’re including links to other “related” posts by other people.
For Earth Day this year I decided I was going to try to make a real change by commuting to work under my own power instead of using my car. I’ve been riding a wave of endorphin high as my body goes through the shock of experiencing exercise again for the first time in a long while. I can feel the winter doldrums lifting [1], and I asked myself: when was the last time I did something that makes a positive change in my life?
History has a tendency to repeat itself, mostly because the inventors weren’t old enough to have been around the first time. Having a blog is the same as having a BBS twenty years earlier; using Twitter is the same as using IRC. Of course there are differences [1], but progress is built on the shoulders of giants.
Like how 2007 was the year of microblogging, 2008 is the year of lifestreaming. People are becoming more comfortable with the idea after learning to swim in Facebook’s pond [2], and they’re ready to start swimming into the raging rivers of the public Internet. But before these neophyte tadpoles start eating flies, there’s one thing they need to learn:
Don’t cross the streams.
I’ve commented before that Friend Feed makes for a really sweet Twitter client because of the way it threads replies and how easy it is to reply to another user. The only problem is trying to find all of your Twitter contacts on Friend Feed.
I’ve written a program that uses Google’s social graph to find the links between Twitter users and Friend Feed users. Download the program, run it, enter your passwords and watch it find and subscribe to all of your Tweeps on Friend Feed.
Two of my blogging heroes and inspiration Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky have joined together on a new venture called StackOverflow: overflowing with awesomeness. They are also doing a weekly podcast, and you can download the first 45 minute podcast here (8 MB). In the discussion, Joel makes a great comment: Windows Vista gives you change without giving you any value. As a Windows XP user there is no compelling reason to upgrade because you’re going to have to relearn where everything is, but you don’t get any new and compelling features or applications to offset that.
This perfectly explained my resistance to the new WordPress 2.5 admin interface.
As a blogger, your content is going to end up being stolen and republished on the Internet. It’s a fact of life, there’s nothing you can do about it. One thing you can do however is put a copyright notice in your RSS feed with FeedBurner.
We’re deep into the beginning of the Information Age, as you can see from the propagation of information aggregators like Google Reader and the meta-aggregators like Friend Feed. There’s only one tip for handling information saturation that has any success: delete it.
It’s another week which means I have more Friend Feed scripts to share with you all.
I was investigation my dad’s computer trying to find out why it was so slow. There was the usual culprit of Norton Antivirus and Outlook Express. There’s nothing I can do about Norton, but he’s been using Outlook Express since 1998 and his mail folder is a whopping 5.8 GB. It’s time to perform my sonly duty and try to fix his slow computer, even though I haven’t used Outlook Express in the past ten years.
I’ll walk you through how I do it…
The problem: It’s 3am and the wireless mouse has run out of juice. Scrounging through the battery drawer shows 13 double-A’s, but none of them have a charge.
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.
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.
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.
“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 to Friend Feed.
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.
Keep reading for my analysis of the data
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.
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.
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