Joe inspired me to take a different approach to Blogshares. through gifts and no sales, plus playing Joe's game, I was able to increase my Blogshare worth and take my blog private. It was fun. I've subscribed.
I've created ShareBlogs as the new home for Joe's-slightly-less-crazy-but-fun-nevertheless game and should be moving forward with it soon. Hope to see some of you players there… ;~)
I have done it!
[Insert trumpet flourish]
After reading this post about how Technorati works, it was suggested that you ping the Technorati RPC server so it knew that you were around. I wanted to this with every post and asked some questions on my weblog in this post.
Well, I spent some time inside Radio and have figured out a solution. I wanted the correct Technorati URL to automatically populate the “URLs to Ping:” box on the desktop website. Here's a short description of how it's done.
[this is all at your own risk. I'm a Radio novice and you probably shouldn't take my advice. Ask Jake first.]
Open the Radio application. Go to the Tools menu and choose Developers…>Jump… Type radio.macros in the dialog box and click OK. You are now looking at a list of Radio's built in macros. Scroll down to near the bottom of the list to find “weblogPostForm”. This macro generates the weblog post form (duh!) found on the desktop website home page. Open the macro and look for some text that says “bundle //trackback URLs to Ping box” This is the “bundle” of code that takes the generates the “URLs to Ping:” text box and assigns the contents to a variable when the form is invoked.
Now that we are in the right place, here's where we make a change. Remember, if you screw this up and destroy your copy of Radio without a backup, it's your own fault.
Open the bundle (on a Mac double click the triangle). Open the subheading of the bundle. You should see the first line of code start with “add(“. Look for the HTML tag “text area”. It's inside this text area of the form box that we will add some text. This will allow it to autopopulate the form each time. Now, inside this tag, look for a formating part that looks like this:
wrap=\”soft\”>
Add the Technorati URL (http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping) to the right of the “>” symbol.
Close all of the Radio app windows. Restart Radio, if you like.
Reopen the desktop website home page. Now, when you post articles using the desktop website, the Technorati site will get a ping, along with the trackback URLs.
Questions? Comments?
Send Steve to BloggerCon! I have set up a PayPal account to accept donations for BloggerCon. There's a link button on the right of the page, just under my photo. I'm no Bryan Bell, but I think the point gets across. Button donations are accepted too.
Why Send Me?
I am a technology person with a customer service background. I can give you, the loyal reader (wink), a newbie's perspective of some of the famous and not so famous in the 'blogging world. I'll provide updates during travel, before-during-after the day's events, plus any extras (after hours dinners and the like). I'll take photos, too, and post them here. I think that I can offer everyone something of value, worthy of a few dollars and their time to read the posts.
While I work as a technology consultant for NuVox Communications, this is a little out of the realm of voice and data networking solutions. This means I'm on my for expenses, hence donations.
What will this cost?
Estimates as of 8/16/03: $500 for the conference, $500 for airfare, $450 for hotel (3 nights), $150 for food, and $200 for car rental. Add it up and you get $1800. Add a 10% factor for unforseen circumstances, and now you're talking some real money.
What happens if you get enough to go?
I'll post a note here, create another category in Radio with a separate RSS feed and start posting info, comments and the like.
What happens if you don't make enough?
I'm trying local sponsorships, too. I'll post the current donation amount under the button, so you'll have a tote board of sorts.
What happens if you get a lot more than you need?
With a running total, that shouldn't happen, but I will donate the remainder to my local food bank, Ozarks Food Harvest. They give groceries and financial help to the needy in the southwest Missouri region.
This post makes me think.
Something came up on the syndication syntax list that bothers me. Syndication (RSS for now, Atom next) depends on separating formatting from content. A lump of html is thrown into an xml wrapper and passed along.
What happens to the original style sheets and the styled treatment of the post?
I want my news reader to give me the basics of the content, mainly the text. If I want the rich experience of the site in it's graphical glory, I'd go to the page. A problem is that I'm a geek and my needs are different than most of America and the world. :>
I think what we need to be careful about here is confining RSS/Nechoatom to one type of experience vs. another. RSS is a content syndication format, not an alternative to the visual experience the WWW has become. Let RSS transport syndicated content. Let RSS aggregators read it and display the feed. Instead of combining the web browser with the aggregator and perpetuating the current conventional thinking, let's try to take this in a different direction
Create a different kind of aggregator, one that's a browser first and a RSS reader second. The browser has a preference page where you subscribe to feeds of interest. Second, add a list of keywords to find in the feeds. Third, add technology to monitor your site view habits (think Tivo without the privacy issues).
When you launch this program, it displays a “customized home page” using the prefs from the paragraph above. Click a button on the page and the app opens news/info/entertainment of interest where each category is a window, each web page a tab. Info you wanted to know is highlighted (cues from CSS embedded in the feed or web page). Keywords are highlighted differently.
Wow…where did this post come from. Too much caffeine too early….
Anyway, all of the technology exists for this today. Apple's WebKit and Microsoft's integration of IE allow an app to be written that displays valid HTML correctly, but not be limited to a web browser app.
Whew. Comments? Brent Simmons, are you out there? You are the person that could do this. If Watson and NNW slept together, this idea would be their child.
Update: John Robb is thinking along the same lines with this. By the way, John, fix Radio so your post links in your RSS feed are the permalinks back to your web site. This one was to Macromedia.
Dann Sheridan asks Jake Savin here if a hacking Radio/Manila blog would be appropriate. I'd love to see one myself.
I've been thinking about this, too:
I'm curious; perhaps someone out there knows…
Has anyone yet attempted to create “RSS email”, where the “feeds” served to a feedreader might be automatically synthesized from the emails themselves as things such as Person (from or to), Thread, Folder, etc? (One could probably easily implement this as a straight layer on top of IMAP.)
Here's the problem, though. What happens when the “news item” that came to me from email drops off my newsreader's list of recent articles? With email, I can flag it for a follow-up of import the information into a task item within my PIM. Since I'm using a Mac, Newsgator is not an option. Ideas? Comments?
Steve Kirks 