PubSubHubbub - faster than the speed of sound

There’s been a lot of chatter recently about Feedburner’s support for the PubSubHubbub protocol. Apparently, it means that blog posts show up much quicker in FriendFeed, Google Reader and other services. I must admit I was fairly sceptical as my posts still take a couple of hours to appear. However, I was wrong (again). Look at this recent example. The post showed up a full three and a half hours on Google Reader before I published it. ...

August 12, 2009

what you see is what you get

This is a quick test to check that Habari is no longer adding additional paragraph tags and random line breaks for people consuming this blog in a feed reader. Both of you. Many thanks to arthus (possible pseudonym alert) aka Morgante Pell (additional pseudonym alert) for creating the plugin that made this possible and the death of autop().

August 7, 2009

Why JS-Kit and Echo is doomed

Yet another service in the overcrowded blog comment field is JS-Kit who already have a conventional outsourced blog comment capability (similar to IntenseDebate and Disqus). JS-Kit recently announced an extension to the service called ‘Echo’ which also includes any fleeting reference to your blog post, refreshed in real-time from other services like Twitter, FriendFeed, Google Reader and Facebook. Echo isn’t generally available to mere mortals yet. Yes, you guessed it it’s limited beta, invitation only and curiously, you need a Twitter account to even request an invitation. However, if your name is Michael Arrington, Guy Kawasaki, Robert Scoble or Duncan Riley, you are entitled to use the service which is fair enough as it works best for high volume sites with lots of comments ...

August 6, 2009

mystery man

There’s only one man in the world who could have uttered the following: ‘On Monday I unfollowed 106,000 people on Twitter.’ Yes. You guessed it - Robert Scoble. And yes, before you ask, he used a script.

August 6, 2009

the month that never was

Since I started this blog almost four years ago, I have posted every month. Until last month - July 2009. To accentuate the radio silence effect, this blog was also completely offline for the latter two weeks of July 2009 (PHP/FastCGI configuration problem at Bluehost).

August 4, 2009

announcing Minima - an exciting, new minimalist theme for Habari

You see - I’m really wasted in IT. I really should be in pre-sales or on ‘The Apprentice’. I thought I’d return to my minimalist roots and change the theme on this blog. If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, no need to click through and leave a comment telling me ‘I use an RSS reader so I don’t care about your new theme’ because I already know. If you think ‘Hey - this theme is simply a blatant rip off of Russell Beattie’s blog, I’m going to run and tell him’, don’t bother. I already know and so does Russell. ...

May 8, 2009

consolidation of commenting services

Since I started this blog, I have maintained an interest in various blog commenting services. Back in November 2007, I experimented with SezWho and also reviewed three more similar comment tracking services before finally settling on Disqus. Competition is obviously a good thing but this is proving a tough climate for small, Web 2.0 companies competing in a small, overcrowded marketplace and we have recently seen some consolidation in this area. SezWho - Unfortunately, SezWho ceased trading yesterday with a recommended upgrade path to JS-Kit. Disqus - still going strong with recent announcement of improvements to performance and UI. coComment - still going albeit with a horrendous interface. co.mments - consigned to the dead pool. commentful - still alive. For now. The two main commenting services that appear to represent serious competition for Disqus are IntenseDebate and JS-Kit although I have no personal experience of either product. Anyone out there used them ? ...

March 27, 2009

blogging statistics

Just quickly reviewed the number of posts in each full year since I started this blog. 2008 - 94 2007 - 219 2006 - 395 What does it all mean ? Not sure. Does it matter ? Probably not.

December 27, 2008

why Reddit is useless for bloggers

Yesterday was 1 December and an innocuous post on identi.ca about an Advent calendar immediately reminded me of an amusing (and completely true) blog post I wrote two years ago. This, in turn, prompted me to write this short note on identi.ca and the post on identi.ca subsequently appeared on my FriendFeed stream. Normally, when I post a new blog entry, the post gets visited by a handful of people - presumably a subset of those subscribed to this blog. In this case, this wasn’t a new post so regular RSS readers wouldn’t see this content so any visitors had to come from identi.ca or FriendFeed. ...

December 2, 2008

evangelism - Habari style

Dear Prudence That’s excellent news. I am glad to hear you have managed to get PDO installed and now have Habari up and running on your site. As for how I happened to stumble across your site, well…. There’s an army of committed, passionate Habari enthusiasts who routinely conduct Twitter, Web and blog searches for every single mention of the word ‘Habari’. In addition, one of the primary responsibilities of the mysterious organisation - the Cabal - is to infiltrate Government intelligence agencies worldwide (GCHQ, NSA, Mossad, KGB) and access transcripts of all mobile phone conversations and SMS text messages. Sophisticated AI algorithms (grep with regular expressions) are then used to mine that data, searching for Habari related terms. ...

November 27, 2008