Archive for October 2007
After Google lost out last week in it’s bid for a stake in FaceBook, it’s pretty apparent one of the reasons Facebook chose Microsoft instead was that Google is about to unleash a true contender to the stranglehold Facebook has on the social networking world. Later this week Google will announce the OpenSocial API, it’s initiative to break down the walls of social networks exclusivity and open the data up for anyone to use. I can’t comment to too much on how specifically it will work since the details have not emerged, but it’s pretty apparent that the social networking world will now be MySpace, Facebook, and everyone else, with “everyone else” being part of OpenSocial.
Facebook meanwhile is planning on launching it’s own competitor for Google’s AdSense with an upcoming announcement regarding its SocialAds network. SocialAds will work by a cookie Facebook drops in your browser that follows you from site to site, and when you come across a SocialAds supported site, the (encrypted?) data is then sent to Facebook which in turn delivers an ad based on your profile. Interesting concept, but I’m not sure how useful basic profile information will be in tailoring ads towards things I’d like to buy.
The next year should be fun as both companies, with egos like none other, try to out-do the other.
Just when girlfriends thought it couldn’t get worse than seeing their boyfriends playing Halo for 8 hours straight wearing their Halo 3 collector’s edition helmet, comes the latest uber-gamer toy, the FPS Vest.
“The gaming peripheral will consist of eight zones, all of which will be able to direct appropriate force to accurately simulate a plethora of sensations, including bullet fire, explosions, punches and even finger taps.”
Now you can strap on your vest, throw on your helmet, and soon enough you won’t have to worry about your girlfriend bitching at you to take out the trash considering she’ll run far far away when you bring this home.
- Wordpress 2.3.1 about to be released
- Fake Steve Jobs on last night’s Facebook kegger
- 24, season 7 preview (video) – The best show on TV is almost back! Ditching CTU was a good idea, not so sure about bring TA back from the “dead” though, so I’ll be really interested to see the explanation behind that one.
- GMail adds IMAP functionality – Woooo! I heart you google. It will be interesting to see how they handle IMAP inboxes considering they preach “Don’t delete your email!”
Now I don’t speak legalease and their patent application is like a foreign language, but if they just tried to patent making money off patents, then we need patent reform, now! Holy crap. This is especially ironic since they pledged last year to not seek business method patents anymore. Suuuuuure.
As innovative as I think that company is sometimes, HOLY FREAKING CRAP can they be retarded at other times! It looks like Amazon.com was just awarded a patent for “including a search string at the end of a URL without any special formatting.” Since when can you patent obvious stuff? YOU CAN’T PATENT mod_rewrite! Hey Amazon, look at the search string in the URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousness
From the patent’s “Summary of Invention”
For example, a user wishing to search for “San Francisco Hotels” may do by simply accessing the URL www.domain_name/San Francisco Hotels, where domain_name is a domain name associated with the web site system. The system may also support the use of Boolean operators and/or other types of operators within the search strings.
You’ve got to be kidding me. If the user is smart enough to know to type their search term in the URL, wouldn’t that qualify as an obvious act? And don’t even get me started on prior art. How funny is this, the Wikipedia entry for “Prior art” at the address of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art goes back to July of 2004, prior to the patent even being filed!
Tonight’s project for me will be to write a patent application for ‘a method of using a permanent liquid stain (example: ink) on a contrasting color canvas to be used in permanently recording combinations of alphabetical and numeric characters.’ The publishing industry will be mine!!!
Can we please overhaul the patent system now? Pretty please?
- Yahoo Caught Cookie Stuffing – They again remind me why I don’t use their search.
- KDE 4 Screenshots – Ooooo… Purty.
- There are now more US World of Warcraft players than farmers – Can’t say I’m shocked, mostly just an eye-opener.
- How 9 tech companies burned through 2 billion dollars – etoys.com, pets.com, kozmo.com, go.com, etc… represented just about everything that was wrong in the early web. Glad you provided (costly) learning lessons for the rest of us.
- Pissed off customer calls Dell Tech Support – I think we all share his frustration.
Google’s Purchase of Jaiku Raises New Privacy Issues (NY Times)- Would you people shut up? This is all we’ve been hearing over the last couple weeks. Don’t you fear-mongers say this about every Google purchase? How about you focus on AT&T providing illegal wire-taps, Comcast making a boatload off wire-tapping, and the Bush administration seeking retroactive immunity for telcos which it admits have been breaking the law (why seek immunity if they haven’t been?). I trust Google a hell of a lot more than I trust our own government. That aside, Jaiku rocks, the only information Jaiku & Google will have is the information you choose to give it. Worried about privacy? Don’t use it. That simple. - Just a link to some themes for a new Wordpress blog I’m thinking about starting
- BitTorrent Gets More Social with AllPeers – Social Bittorrent? This could get interesting. And hey… anything to make BT easier for the masses is great for the technology cause I cringe everytime I have to explain what it is or how to use it to a novice.
- Social.FM Signs Microsoft Deal, Launches New Client – Just came across this service. Free music + Smartphone client = me likey.
- List of 4-letter domain names – Sadly anything pronounceable is long gone, but there are still a few thousand left.
I just noticed Google Docs has the ability to post to a Wordpress blog, so I’m giving it a test drive.
Update: Very cool! Now all that needs to happen is get the additional blog specific fields (tags, pings, categories, etc…) inside the editor and I’ll be a happy camper.
Memelabs.com has a What’s Your Meme IQ quiz, check it out. I got 37. I was sad they forgot to mention Patrick Tribett. Oh well Patrick, you can’t win ‘em all. But, I’m sure you already know that.
20
Enabling Wordpress 2.3 Tagging in Windows Live Writer
0 Comments | Posted by Derek in Blogging
Part of the reason for my recent increase in blogging is mostly due to my discovery of Windows Live Writer, I absolutely love it. The only complaint I’ve had so far is that it doesn’t support tagging for Wordpress 2.3, something recently introduced with the release of Wordpress 2.3. I assumed I’d have to wait for an update from Microsoft to be able to use WP 2.3 tagging, but it turns out that isn’t the case. Check out this post from Ruhani Rabin who provides a great tutorial on how to enable tags support in WLW for WordPress:
In a nutshell all you have to do is download the wlwmanifest.xml file and upload it to wp-includes. This file is what tells WLW a bit more about the blog and it’s capabilities. Once that is uploaded, update the blog in WLW (Weblog > Manage Weblog) and viola, the “keywords” box shows up in the advanced options menu below your post in WLW.
I figured it was about time to upgrade to a new theme, so I found this one, Snoods theme. Whaddya think?
Because this theme doesn’t accommodate the native tagging capability of Wordpress 2.3, I had to hack into the wp functions to add the capability to display tagging in the post. What Wordpress really just needs to do is append the tag info to the end of all posts, like I’ve done for this theme.
If you need to do the same, update “the_content()” function in wp-includes/post-template.php to the following code (additions in yellow):
function the_content($more_link_text = ‘(more…)’, $stripteaser = 0, $more_file = ”) {
$content = get_the_content($more_link_text, $stripteaser, $more_file);
$content = apply_filters(‘the_content’, $content);
$content = str_replace(‘]]>’, ‘]]>’, $content);
ob_start();
the_tags(‘Tags: ‘, ‘, ‘, ‘<br />’);
$tag_html .= ob_get_clean();
if (!empty($tag_html))
{
$content .=”<br /><div align=’center’ style=’clear:both;’><span style=’border:solid #333333 1px; padding:3px;’>”;
$content .= $tag_html;
$content .= “</span></div>”;;
}
echo $content;
}
This really the first time I’ve dove into the innards of Wordpress, and wow is it rather horrid. Considering how important Wordpress is to the evolution of the blogging community, developers are important, and with the way the code looks now, I can’t imagine anyone would take up Wordpress development as a hobby.
I just came across this article
AT&T unsure about bidding in 700MHz auction (InfoWorld)
“Company CEO indicates that FCC’s open-access rules for the valuable spectrum could hinder the development of a profitable business model.”
Essentially what you are saying is there is some prime, beachfront real-estate up for auction, which everyone is lining up to bid for, and you think the rules and the price make it such that a profitable business model cannot be made? Ok, there are two scenarios…
- a) AT&T is right, and the open-access rule for the 700 mhz spectrum make it such that no business can make money at it. In this scenario, everyone else is wrong, including Google who has proven to be more than capable at creating ‘thinking out of the box’ business models, and AT&T is right.
- b) AT&T is lazy & uncreative and as a company doesn’t have the talent or capacity to think of a business model around owning prime real-estate.
Given the fact that AT&T’s stock price is sitting at $41 and Google’s stock price is at $644, I’ll let you decide which scenario is more likely.
- Cowboys try to buy “cowboys.com” for $275 in an auction
- This is what happens when Lawyers invade the internet
- Feedburner + Wordpress how-to – With my recently upgraded blog, figured it was time to hook it up through feedburner. So, if you like want to use RSS to read my blog, subscribe to my feed.
- My Lifestream Pipe – I created what is essentially an aggregator for all my personal RSS feeds (blogs, microblogs, Netflix, Flickr, Picasaweb, etc…) and ran them all through a filter with Yahoo Pipes. While it appears to be somewhat buggy (varying results every run), it’s still pretty cool. I love yahoo pipes! At first I didn’t quite “get it” but knew the potential was there, but now it’s so easy to use and a very intuitive concept.
- Daily Show archives now online
- Ruby comes to the browser – Looks like some folks have been able to integrate ruby scripting into the web browser, which opens up a whole new world if it actually catches on and matures. Personally, I like Javascript, a lot, but there are some things with it that I think can be improved on. Mainly, it’s syntax can sometimes be backwards thinking when compared to a crisp and well thought out OO language like Ruby. I doubt anything major will come of Ruby as a browser scripting language, but the concept is cool and it can do nothing but help out the web development world, so I’m excited to see what happens with it. If you can soon do <script type=”text/ruby”>…</script>, I wonder how far off <script type=”text/php”>…</script> is?
- Video of Snowball the cockatoo dancing to Backstreet Boys – Pretty unbelievable!
- “Focused Jayhawks plan to remain a Big 12 contender” – YEAH! My boys are 6-0, and heading towards the title!
- How much money to BitTorrent sites really make in ads? – $60k / month? Yikes. I’m sure at least half of that goes towards expenses. Hope they enjoy the lawsuits that are inevitably coming.
- A great how-to in setting up Ubuntu as a full blown server
I realized I hadn’t yet picked up the latest She Wants Revenge album, so I figured this would be a good chance to check out Amazon’s new MP3 store. 15 non-DRM’d 256kbps tracks for $8.99 is a steal IMO. Thank god there is a place for someone like me to buy music now. I listen to my music on a variety of non-ipod devices, so anything with DRM isn’t really an option for me. While iTunes won’t be going away anytime soon, Apple is already feeling the effects and is realizing their monopoly is just about over.
Anyways, only a couple songs into the album, but I like what I hear so far. So check it out.
- Apple opening up the iPhone – Finally
- My Jaiku – Finally got an invite. Woo! I really like the concept of using their service as a RSS feed aggregator. I think I’ll still stick with Twitter for my microblogging for now.
Well, I just upgraded from Wordpress 2 to 2.3 and MySQL from 4 to 5, so this is mostly just a test. Oh, and the theme I was using doesn’t play well with WP 2.3’s tags, so I’ll have to work on getting another one up. In the meantime, you guys get “Default”. Be excited. I’ve also scrapped the categories for the most part in favor of tags as that structure makes more sense to me. I’ll work on rebuilding the both over the next couple days. I can’t believe it took Wordpress this frickin’ long to introduce tags. Yeesh.
Anyone have any invites to Jaiku they want to give me? If so, hit me up at drgath at gmail.
I’ve always thought the “life-stream” concept first pioneered by Twitter and now used by Jaiku was pretty cool even though I haven’t used Twitter as much as I should. Now that Google owns Jaiku, I’m sure it’s going to turn into a very cool product and be pretty integral to the GPhone OS someday.
