I took a three month break from blogging and social media sites so that I could focus 100% on a critical project at work. Strangely enough I didn’t miss the flow of information; I was still able to find interesting links for coffee break time by browing Hackers News. Here’s a break down of my experience from leaving for so long and rejoining it.

Blog

Blog traffic went down -26% (vs -12% for the previous period).

Feed subscriptions up 9% (vs 12% for the previous period).

My blog email address is inundated with press releases and the very occassional question about an old post or tool.

My blog comments are a horrible nightmare of spam that I still have yet to wade through. WordPress has an annoying bug that when you click “Mark As Spam” it always returns you to the start. There’s been 20 pages of comments. It’s likely that most are spam.

It makes me wonder how much time a day I was spending on blog maintenance. The time sink in blogging isn’t writing posts; it’s all the related activities.

News

Surprisingly, I didn’t miss out on much by not having my lips attached to the news firehouse. Some crazy PM is trying to put me in jail with a new Canadian copyright bill that someone needs to question him about how it benefits his constituents. The iPhone is finally available in Canada, and the data plan is almost-but-not-quite liveable. Facebook has a redesign in the works. Xbox has some cool ideas for release next fall.

I’m sure there were plenty of things happening that I could have gotten worked up about, but nothing happened that directly affects my life that I would have found out about on the Internet.

LinkedIn

I’ve had a strict policy of only using LinkedIn for people I’ve actually worked/went to university with, and it’s been a good tool for contacting ex-coworkers years later about new job opportunities. Spam free.

Facebook

I try to keep Facebook to “real life people only”, and that works well for me. I only use it for group emails, and for photo sharing. Spam free once you get rid of those people who invite you to use applications.

Google Reader

I’m oversubscribed still. When you check your RSS feeds once a month, it becomes much more about the people who consistently keep you thinking or providing good information. Of course, information is only useful if it has impact on your life.

We, the information overloaded, collect new information but I wonder how much of it is retained and has lasting impacting on our lives?

Twitter

I didn’t feel any pain of Twitter downtime because I didn’t log into it. I need to cull my friendslist to make it more useful. But I found Kathy Sierra on twitter and if that’s the real thing then it’s a good sign for twitter having the potential for making me think vs phasing it completely out of my life because of the constant self-promotion.

I still like twitter for chatting with other bloggers that I respect.

Friend Feed

Still not sure if I like rooms or not. The Friend Feed hacking community is kicking even harder lately with a ton of new greasemonkey scripts thanks to Hao Chen. It looks like Lou Cypher is getting involved in Friend Feed as well which means even more cool little hacks.

Nothing new has been happening with ffapps or friendfeedwatch though.

Delicious

It might be time for me to abandon delicious for something new to use for bookmarking. The future does not look peachy for delicious with Josh leaving Yahoo. Maybe it’s time to look at Google Reader shares as an alternative.

Last.FM

I’m still using it, still finding great music because of it. I do like The Filter for making lastfm-esque playlists of my own music collection.

Real Life

I’ve been enjoying the summer and having more time for family, friends and non-Internet hobbies like reading, movies, and games. I really appreciate the knowledge I’ve built up with the programming I’ve done. I plan to continue that in that direction: releasing useful free software and delving into creating my own web apps. I want to spend less time participating and more time creating.

This is my weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet. You can follow this list of links as I post them on Friend Feed or on Twitter. Or you can get the weekly update by subscribing to Internet Duct Tape using RSS or using email.

• [BLOGGING] Exposed – Blog-Post Confidential, nytimes.com
  • From the article: ” I kept coming back to the idea that I had a right to say whatever I wanted. I don’t think I understood then that I could be right about being free to express myself but wrong about my right to make that self-expression public in a permanent way.”
• [BLOGGING] Stop asking, start filtering, a.wholelottanothing.org
  • Filter out the PR companies, for they are dumb and don’t let us unsubscribe.
• [BLOGGING] Video Comments? Blow Me., expertidiot.com
  • Video comments are the stupidest feature ever and this sums up my opinion of them.
• [CODE] Blogging Horror, girtby.net
  • Has Coding Horror jumped the shark? Jeff responds in the comments.
• [DIGITAL CULTURE] Gilligan’s web, roughtype.com
  • Counter argument to Clay Shirky’s pro-internet piece from last week.
• [FRIENDFEED] FriendFeed Friday Tips #1: Five Ways To Use the Hide Function, louisgray.com
  • How to use hide as your information filter
• [FRIENDFEED] FriendFeed Friday Tips #2: Using the Bookmarklet, louisgray.com
  • More ff tips from lg
• [FRIENDFEED] Keep Your Eyes On FriendFeed: It May Be The Google Of Social Networks, webomatica.com
  • Why Jason things Friend Feed is one of the social apps to watch for 2008
• [FRIENDFEED] On FriendFeed, We’re All TV Channels, bhc3.wordpress.com
  • Great analogy. I wouldn’t worry too much about your ‘channel’ — just be yourself and they people who find that interesting you probably share interests with.
• [INFORMATION OVERLOAD] Too Many Choices, Too Much Content, readwriteweb.com
  • Dear Internet, give us a better way to filter information than “turn off the computer”.
• [LIFEHACKS] Grocery List Templates For Healthy People, smarterfitter.com, via:lifehacker.com
  • Great little Excel template for those often shopped for items
• [PIRACY] Understanding Anti-Piracy Enforcement, torrentfreak.com
  • An attempt to clear up some of the FUD.
• [SOCIALMEDIA] Summon Monsters? Open The Door? Heal? Or Die?, gilesbowkett.blogspot.com
  • Are social media sites useful for anything other than sucking up your time?
• [SOCIALSOFTWARE] Designing for the Social Web: The Usage Lifecycle, bokardo.com
  • Your users are at different stages in adopting your software, make sure you target each stage in your messages.
• [STARTUPS] How to be authentically fake, ricksegal.typepad.com
  • Don’t use stock photography and claim its team shots of your employees. This is the future of visual search engines.
• [TECH] Early Adopters Are Useless, technosailor.com
  • Needs more meat, but has some good links.
• [TECH] Looking back at mesh 2008, mathewingram.com
  • Collected links to the Mesh 2008 conference
• [WEB2.0] How to Build a Social Web App, simon.incutio.com, via:news.ycombinator.com
  • These are the most amazingly concise notes I’ve seen of social web app best practices by the guy who made delicious.
• [WORDPRESS] 13 of the best WordPress plugins, davidairey.com
  • Plugins for Self-hosted
• [WORDPRESS] How To Protect Your WordPress Theme Against Upgrades, themeshaper.com
  • I didn’t know that you can essentially derive a new theme off of an existing WordPress theme.

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

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

• Filtering Reddit and Hacker News

  What’s wrong with all of these “social web application sites”:

  People who waste their own time have, in effect, more votes than people who value it – to elevate bad but popular ideas and irretrievably sink independent thinking.

  It’s analogous to what’s wrong with the entire massively online roleplaying game genre (eg: World of Warcraft) in that success is a greater factor of the time invested than of skill or talent. Many social web applications add extra features to keep the users interacting with the site, even if this interaction offers dubious value to their lives.

• Weekend Reader – blogging, twitter, marketing, funny, lifehacks

Tags: blogging, friendfeed, programming, technology, wordpress

This is my weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet. You can follow this list of links as I post them on Friend Feed or on Twitter. Or you can get the weekly update by subscribing to Internet Duct Tape using RSS or using email.

• [BLOGGING] 6 Ways That Bloggers are Like Rappers, copyblogger.com
  • Are you down with the B.L.O.G.? Yeah, you know me!
  • (blogging, 31 saves, 29 inbound links, 7 diggs)
• [BLOGGING] How to Target the Right Social Media Sites, problogger.net
  • Howto guide for bloggers on using sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon to generate traffic.
  • (socialmedia, blogging, 44 saves, 7 inbound links, 15 diggs)
• [BLOGGING] the thorny issue of blog comment ownership, nbrightside.com
  • Who owns a comment?
  • (blogging, comments)
• [CODE] Google REST Search API, blogoscoped.com
  • This could be useful for web apps.
  • (google, rest, 19 saves, 7 inbound links)
• [CODE] We need a Wikipedia for data, bret.appspot.com
  • Where is the open source database for map info, whitepages, movie times, music info, etc.
  • (data, opensource, innovation, 222 saves, 79 inbound links)
• [FIREFOX] Why downloading Firefox is like getting into college, sethgodin.typepad.com, via:avc.blogs.com
  • From the article: ” In the lingo of Nancy Reagan, Firefox is a gateway drug.”
  • (firefox, marketing, 71 saves, 62 inbound links, 20 diggs)
• [GEEK] My Cat Bubba Posts Videos and Twitters using an EeePC and Ubuntu, fsckin.com, via:webomatica.com
  • It’s a pretty static video of the cat eating, but nice hack.
  • (cats, 3 saves, 2 inbound links, 33 diggs)
• [LIFEHACKS] From 10000 to 0 Emails in an Inbox in 24 Hours, problogger.net
  • Switching to Gmail to become more productive with email.
  • (lifehacks, workhacks, gmail, email, 22 saves, 14 inbound links, 5 diggs)
• [LIFEHACKS] Just say NO to crap!, squawkfox.com, via:skelliewag.org
  • The ultimate decluttering tip is not to consume.
  • (lifehacks, declutter, 2 saves, 11 inbound links)
• [STARTUPS] We Need A New Path To Liquidity, avc.blogs.com
  • From the article: ” what happens when a company gets purchased: The service languishes. The team leaves. It stops getting better. And often gets worse.”
  • (web2.0, business, vc, 116 saves, 99 inbound links)
• [STARTUPS] What the New York Times “death by blogging” story got right., calacanis.com
  • From the article: ” In some ways I think I’ve realized that life is just a big video game and if one game doesn’t work out you put another quarter in and try again.”
  • (startup, entrepreneurship, blogging, 17 saves, 18 inbound links)
• [TWITTER] Improving Twitter, kungfugrippe.com
  • Merlin Mann’s ideas for how to improve twitter. He’s one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter
  • (twitter, 26 saves, 18 inbound links)
• [TWITTER] Twubble, crazybob.org
  • Twitter friend of a friend finder.
  • (twitter, tools, mashup, 513 saves, 100 inbound links, 6 diggs)
• [WEB2.0] AppEngine World: your one-stop resource for Google App Engine, appengineworld.com, via:marshallk.com
  • AppEngine news aggregator. I wish I had an AppEngine account :(
  • (appengine, google, 5 saves, 3 inbound links)
• [WEB2.0] Google App Engine, code.google.com
  • Google releases blogspot for web applications.
  • (google, python, hosting, 2148 saves, 100 inbound links, 26 diggs)
• [WEB2.0] Mulling On Google App Engine, al3x.net
  • Alex Payne (of Twitter)’s thoughts on the new appengine
  • (google, hosting, web2.0, 4 saves, 3 inbound links)
• [WORDPRESS] Coming Soon: My Personal WordPress Theme Starting Point, themeshaper.com
  • Ian is releasing his Sandbox-plus-plus theme with some stuff from BluePrint CSS. I’ve been waiting 9 months for this. :)
  • (wordpress, themes, 3 saves, 2 inbound links)
• [WORDPRESS] The Great WordPress Attack, psionmark.com
  • If you aren’t running WP 2.5, your site is probably hacked.
  • (wordpress, 5 saves, 6 inbound links, 5 diggs)
• [WORKHACKS] The Case Against Overtime, caffeinatedcoder.com
  • Compelling arguments as to why you shouldn’t work overtime as a programmer.
  • (career, balance, programming, 6 saves, 3 inbound links, 4 diggs)
• [WPDESIGN] Raising Personal Standard for Paid WordPress Themes, wpdesigner.com
  • What a WordPress theme should include.
  • (wordpress, themes, 6 saves, 10 inbound links)

This Week at IDT Labs

• Friend Feed Scripts: Unsubscribe, Who Are You and Better By Service

  It’s another week which means I have more Friend Feed scripts to share with you all.

• Speed Up Outlook Express

  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…

• Delicious Links – 17 links – wordpress, webdesign, productivity, google, search

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

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

• [FRIENDFEED] Easy Unsubscribe v0.1Add an unsubscribe link to individual user pages.
• [FRIENDFEED] Who Are You? v0.1Show more information about who people are beside their profile picture.
• [FRIENDFEED] Even More Expander v0.3- Bug fix: had problems if there were several “more >>” links.
  - Bug fix: didn’t work well with pagerization

Tags: blogging, google, hosting, lifehacks, themes, twitter, web2.0, wordpress

This is my weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet. You can follow this list of links as I post them on Friend Feed or on Twitter. Or you can get the weekly update by subscribing to Internet Duct Tape using RSS or using email.

• [BLOGGING] 7 Reasons Why your Website Won’t Last Without Analytics, makeuseof.com
  • This is in my “top 5 beefs with wordpress.com”. Blogging without Google Analytics sucks because you’re never able to self correct.
  • (analytics, webdesign, 18 saves, 9 diggs)
• [BLOGGING] How to Create a Rock-Solid Tagline That Truly Works, copyblogger.com
  • Create your tagline by thinking about the problems you solve.
  • (copywriting, blogging, 30 saves, 18 inbound links)
• [CSS] 960 Grid System, 960.gs, via:technospot.net
  • Looks like Blueprint CSS, with more polish.
  • (css, grid, webdesign, 2444 saves, 100 inbound links, 11 diggs)
• [GREASEMONKEY] Google Gears + Greasemonkey to take Wikipedia offline, code.google.com
  • Proof of concept on how to use Greasemonkey with Google Gears. I want to try this out, I think the combination of Gears, jQuery and Greasemonkey could lead to some awesome scripts.
  • (greasemonkey, google, javascript, tutorial, 11 saves, 95 inbound links)
• [LIFEHACKS] 10 Ways History’s Finest Kept Their Focus at Work, lifedev.net
  • Look at the productivity tips of some of histories greatest figures.
  • (productivity, lifehacks, 408 saves, 46 inbound links, 240 diggs)
• [LIFEHACKS] 12 Rules for Getting a Grip on Massive Email, problogger.net
  • How to manage too much email.
  • (email, productivity, 12 saves, 6 inbound links)
• [MEMES] I Can Has Rezearch Papar?, cylegage.com
  • Long article discussion internet culture, memes and anonymity.
  • (culture, internet, 327 saves, 59 inbound links, 2 diggs)
• [MYBLOGLOG] FOAFster — Mashable FOAF, from MyBlogLog, kentbrewster.com
  • Ok, this might be the mashup that gets me using MyBlogLog again.
  • (mybloglog, mashup, foaf, 9 saves, 4 inbound links)
• [PYTHON] Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python, python.net, via:benjamingolub.com
  • Python style guide by the maker of Docutils.
  • (python, programming, tips, 1270 saves, 19 inbound links)
• [RUBY] Announcing Ninja-Patching!, avdi.org
  • How to patch code so that it will randomly kill other code.
  • (ruby, funny, hacks, 17 saves, 4 inbound links)
• [SCIFI] Brasyl, Halting State, The Last Colony and Rollback: The 2008 Hugo Voters Electronic Editions, scalzi.com
  • How to obtain electronic copies of this years Hugo award nominees.
  • (scifi, 2 saves, 5 inbound links)
• [SEO] I’m Getting Pretty Tired of Startup Advice that Doesn’t Include Any Mention of SEO, seomoz.org
  • Most web startups are dumb about getting direct search referrals.
  • (seo, startup, search, entrepreneurship, 173 saves, 35 inbound links)
• [TWITTER] I’m Over Twitter, threeminds.organic.com
  • From the article: ” With Twitter, each of us shouts into the void to the community at large, rather than taking the risk of speaking directly to one another.”
  • (twitter, 25 saves, 15 inbound links, 3 diggs)
• [WORDPRESS] A Proposal for Theme Management in WordPress, themeshaper.com
  • Make the footer easily customizable.
  • (wordpress)
• [WORDPRESS] WordPress 2.5 usability review, noscope.com, via:archgfx.net
  • Discussion of what the WP2.5 admin panel does wrong.
  • (wordpress, design, 8 saves, 5 inbound links, 2 diggs)
• [WORKHACKS] Meetronome, meetronome.com
  • Online meeting minute generator that also calculates the average cost of the meeting
  • (meetings, workhacks, 2 saves)

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

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

• Battery Charged or Not
  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.
• Controlling Your Privacy
  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.
• Presenting: Livejournal Theme for WordPress
  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.

• How to Get an RSS Feed for your XBOX 360 Gamertag
  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. 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.

  Here are the various ways you can access your Xbox 360 Gamercard to use with other websites.

• Delicious Links – 20 links – friendfeed, blogging, javascript, psychology, startup
  This is my weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet.

This Week at IDT Labs

• [FRIENDFEED] Easy Unsubscribe v0.1
  Add an unsubscribe link to individual user pages.
• [FRIENDFEED] Who Are You? v0.1
  Show more information about who people are beside their profile picture.
• Sneak Preview
• [FRIENDFEED] Even More Expander v0.3
  - Bug fix: had problems if there were several “more >>” links.
  - Bug fix: didn’t work well with pagerization
• [FRIENDFEED] By Service v0.5
  - Dynamically grabs the list of services once per day.
  - It should always display the latest services.
  - When you’re on a users’ page, it’ll add options to filter by the specific services they use.
  - When you’re on the main page it will hover in place in the sidebar
• [FRIENDFEED] Remove Visited Links v0.4
• Hides the visited links using Friend Feed’s “hide entry” function. The entry will be hidden across multiple computers. You can see the hidden entry at the bottom of the page using the normal “show hidden entries” mechanism.How awesome is this? When you read Friend Feed at work, you don’t see the same entries when you come home because it’s persistent across different computers (since it’s using the FF site itself).When you read reddit, digg, stumbleupon etc you don’t see the same links in Friend Feed.This is the bees knees when it comes to improving the signal-to-noise ratio on Friend Feed.
• [FRIENDFEED] Twitter Client v0.4
  - Will show the correct character count when tweeting from FF. Counts down from 140 instead of 104 :)
  - Will show tweets as being from ‘idt’.
• [WORDPRESS] Auntie Spam and Comment Ninja updated for WP 2.5
  Auntie Spam and Comment Ninja are updated for WP 2.5. They are still backwards compatible with WP 2.3
• [TWITTER] Redirect direct links to tweets to use quotably
  Quotably is a neat-o service that provides threaded conversations on Twitter. This greasemonkey script will automatically convert any http://twitter.com/*/statuses/* link to go to Quotably instead.

Tags: productivity, webdesign, wordpress

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.

Click through to the blog to see the live demo. It’ll be available as a theme later tonight after I finish tweaking the last few stray issues.

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.

• [BITTORRENT] Protect Your Privacy When Downloading, lifehacker.com
  • Two tips for not being caught as the nasty pirate that you are.
  • (bittorrent, torrents, 31 inbound links)
• [BLOGGING] 20 Types of Pages that Every Blogger Should Consider, problogger.net
  • Great examples of how to use the WordPress page feature. I wish I didn’t have so many damn problems with it on WordPress.com (can’t remove it from my theme head, trackback prob).
  • (blogging, wordpress, tips, 581 saves, 46 inbound links, 21 diggs)
• [BLOGGING] 7 Blogging Statistics Rules – There is Life After Page Views, hanselman.com, via:raganwald.com
  • From the article: ” If you post a Gallery or a List or anything post with a Prime Number and the word “Rules” in the title, you’ll get traffic. You post smart, compelling content, you need to be wicked smart before folks take note.”
  • (blogging, statistics, 16 saves, 8 inbound links)
• [BLOGGING] A Caffeine Inspired Interview with Jeff Atwood from CodingHorror.com, caffeinatedcoder.com
  • “The only difference between good and great blogs is that the good bloggers kept writing until they became great bloggers.” — Jeff Atwood
  • (blogging, writing, tips, codinghorror, 3 saves, 6 inbound links, 6 diggs)
• [BLOGGING] Group Interview: What Do Online Advertisers Look For in a Website?, dailyblogtips.com
  • Daniel gets the skinny on how to sell ads on your website.
  • (advertising, blogging, 20 saves, 8 inbound links, 3 diggs)
• [FRIENDFEED] A Few FriendFeed Treats Out There, jeffisageek.net
  • A list of the cool little hacks people have made for FF so far.
  • (friendfeed, 5 saves, 5 diggs)
• [FRIENDFEED] Friendfeed 2018, blogoscoped.com, via:winextra.com
  • The future of Friend Feed.
  • (friendfeed, humour, web2.0, 5 saves, 3 inbound links)
• [FRIENDFEED] Share that link on FriendFeed using FeedDemon, winextra.com
  • Share items on FF using Feed Demon.
  • (rss, friendfeed)
• [FRIENDFEE] The FriendFeed Playground, ffapps.com
  • Avi put together a FF apps site for pointing to the cool apps people are building around FF.
  • (friendfeed)
• [GEEK] Wired’s Geekster Handbook, a Field Guide to the Nerd Underground, wired.com, via:reddit.com
  • Which geek are you? I’m 1-5 but thankfully not 6.
  • (geek, 2 saves, 3 inbound links, 10 diggs)
• [GREASEMONKEY] How to play nicely with jQuery and Greasemonkey, joanpiedra.com
  • Tips on accessing jQuery inside your Greasemonkey scripts.
  • (greasemonkey, jquery, javascript, programming, 46 saves, 15 inbound links)
• [JAVASCRIPT] Great JavaScript presentation by John Resig, lazycoder.com
  • I started using jQuery a lot this week and its friggin awesome. I must watch this video.
  • (jquery, javascript, 2 saves)
• [MARKETING] Polarize Me, fastcompany.com, via:37signals.com
  • The ‘Made to Stick’ guys talk about how in order to have people love you, you have to decide who will hate you. No walking the middle line.
  • (marketing, branding, 43 saves, 36 inbound links, 1 diggs)
• [SOCIALSOFTWARE] Why I will never get another date, jennifer-mccarthy.blogspot.com
  • The truth of social web apps exposed.
  • (socialsoftware, humor)
• [STARTUPS] How To Use Perks and Rewards in Startups to Get The Best Talent, instigatorblog.com
  • Anywhere could hire me away if they offered me the best-of-breed source control, chat, backup and allowed me to attend conferences.
  • (startup, hiring, 6 saves, 7 inbound links, 37 diggs)
• [STARTUPS] The Psychology of Entrepreneurial Misjudgment, part 1: Biases 1-6, blog.pmarca.com
  • Long read, but the section on incentives/disincentives are particularly interesting and applicable to all aspects of your life.
  • (entrepreneurship, psychology, startup, 304 saves, 54 inbound links, 13 diggs)
• [WORDPRESS] FriendFeed Comments WordPress Plugin, blog.slaven.net.au
  • Display the Friend Feed discussion on your WordPress blog.
  • (friendfeed, wordpress, 9 saves, 8 inbound links)
• [WORKHACKS] The KJ-Technique: A Group Process for Establishing Priorities, uie.com, via:labnotes.org
  • The KJ-Technique is a method for getting the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ as fast as possible without getting bogged down by borderline cases.
  • (workhacks, psychology, 234 saves, 23 inbound links, 1 diggs)
• [XBOX360] REST API for Xbox Gamertag Data, duncanmackenzie.net
  • Public rest API for Xbox Gamertag. Gives you an XML file.
  • (xbox360, rest, 7 saves, 5 inbound links)

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

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

• Greasemonkey Scripts: Friend Feed Auto-Pagerization, Resharing Links and Even More
  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.
• Greasemonkey Scripts: Friend Feed Twitter Client and Remove Visited Links“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.
• Crunching the Friend Feed Stats to Find the Most Popular Web AppsOne 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

• How to Generate 100s of Backlinks in MinutesThe 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.

• Delicious Links – 20 links – friendfeed, lifehacks, blogging, programming, wordpress
• Greasemonkey Script: Filter FriendFeed by ServiceI’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.

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

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

• Behind the Curtain
  Here’s a sneak peak into the trials and tribulations of hacking up websites with Greasemonkey:
• [TWITTER] Redirect direct links to tweets to use quotabl
  Quotably is a neat-o service that provides threaded conversations on Twitter. This greasemonkey script will automatically convert any http://twitter.com/*/statuses/* link to go to Quotably instead.

Tags: blogging, friendfeed, javascript, jquery, psychology, startup, tips, wordpress

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.

• [BLOGGING] The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere, readwriteweb.com, via:friendfeed.com
  • Examples for bloggers on where to find and how to manage all the conversations that are happening OUTSIDE of your blog about your blog content.
  • (blogging, 90 saves, 71 inbound links, 26 diggs)
• [CODE] Google Code University, code.google.com, via:lazycoder.com
  • Google is putting together tutorials about programming subjects for university level. Good refreshers.
  • (programming, google, code, tutorials, 2628 saves, 100 inbound links, diggs)
• [DIGG] 12 Must-Have Tools for Active Digg Users, doshdosh.com
  • This is a *KILLER* list. The extensions I’ve already tried on the list are must haves, and the rest look even better.
  • (digg, tools, 72 saves, 28 inbound links, diggs)
• [EMAIL] Do Not Reply, donotreply.com, via:codinghorror.com
  • Many companies use @donotreply.com for their automatic emails. What they don’t realize is that donotreply.com is a real web address and he’s posting the contents of the emails! IT security at its worst.
  • (email, 138 saves, 82 inbound links, 8 diggs)
• [FRIENDFEED] FriendFeed is for Lurkers too, oracleappslab.com
  • How FriendFeed is becoming a user generated content repository for the parts of the web that people are actively creating.
  • (friendfeed, 2 saves)
• [FRIENDFEED] Friendfeed Grid, blogoscoped.com, via:louisgray.com
  • A random look at the people on Friend Feed.
  • (friendfeed, visualization, 30 saves, 8 inbound links)
• [FRIENDFEED] Hack to Get an RSS Feed from FriendFeed Search Results, lifestreamblog.com, via:techcrunch.com
  • FriendFeed is a lifestreaming aggregator. Here’s some tips for getting RSS feeds from it.
  • (friendfeed, 4 inbound links)
• [FRIENDFEED] How FriendFeed Became Internet Famous, runningwithfoxes.com, via:friendfeed.com
  • An analysis about how FF became the “IT” webapp of 2008.
  • (friendfeed, 4 saves)
• [INTERNET] George Clooney, esquire.com
  • Esquire sits down with Clooney and goes through a Google search of his life. Interesting from the geeky POV of all the information that is out there, and how accurate is it, really?
  • (interview, humor, via, 120 saves, 72 inbound links, 25 diggs)
• [JAVASCRIPT] EJS – JavaScript Templates, embeddedjs.com, via:gilesbowkett.blogspot.com
  • I might be able to use this with rss2html to work with Yahoo Pipes formatted data
  • (javascript, programming, erb, 36 saves, 8 inbound links, 20 diggs)
• [LIFEHACKS] 5 Tools to Track How Much Time you Waste while Online, makeuseof.com, via:news.ycombinator.com
  • I recommend RescueTime out of the list they have. The best suggestion might be “unplug your internet connection when you’re trying to get work done”
  • (lifehacks, timetracking, 223 saves, 26 inbound links, 959 diggs)
• [LIFEHACKS] The Top 100 Productivity and Lifehack Blogs, collegedegree.com, via:readwriteweb.com
  • Huge list of lifehack blogs organized by topic.
  • (lifehacks, 596 saves, 71 inbound links, 6 diggs)
• [LIFEHACKS] Wisdom from the way-out edge, theage.com.au, via:chipsquips.com
  • From the article: ” Reward risk, risk is good. Trust crazy people. Believe in yourself, everyone else is faking it. Find the real problem to solve.”
  • (innovation, technology, software, lifehacks, 7 saves)
• [MARKETING] Nomadic Growth: Moving to Greener Pastures, skelliewag.org
  • In order to keep expanding your audience you have to keep reaching out to new plateaus.
  • (marketing, blogging, 6 saves, 2 inbound links, 16 diggs)
• [SOCIALSOFTWARE] Relationships are complicated, factoryjoe.com
  • What works better: asking users to explicitly list their relationship with people, or viewing how they interact with people and deducing the relationships from there?
  • (socialsoftware, relationships, 2 saves, 6 inbound links)
• [STARTUPS] How To Use Perks and Rewards in Startups to Get The Best Talent, instigatorblog.com
  • Anywhere could hire me away if they offered me the best-of-breed source control, chat, backup and allowed me to attend conferences.
  • (startup, hiring, 4 saves, 2 inbound links)
• [TWITTER] favotter, favotter.matope.com
  • It’s like twitter.com/popular — a list of tweets that have been favorited a lot. Pretty entertaining.
  • (twitter, mashup, socialnetworking, 43 saves, 17 inbound links, 5 diggs)
• [WEBDESIGN] 101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Web Site, insidecrm.com
  • If you run a website then there’s some gems in here you haven’t thought of in a while. In depth advice on each item is available.
  • (webdesign, 1378 saves, 86 inbound links, 1749 diggs)
• [WORDPRESS] 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.5, technosailor.com, via:andybeard.eu
  • I can’t wait until we get some of this stuff on WordPress.com
  • (wordpress, blogging, 60 saves, 46 inbound links, 8 diggs)
• [WORDPRESS] More WordPress Theme Viewer Screenshots, winextra.com
  • Preview screenshots of the new WordPress theme viewer
  • (wordpress, themes, 4 inbound links)
• Powered by Delicious Links Pro

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

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

• Greasemonkey Script: Filter FriendFeed by ServiceI’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.
• Free WP Plugin Idea: Use Referrers Instead of TrackbacksBlogs 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.

  Instead of using trackbacks, why not use referrers?

• The Fragmentation of Identity and DiscussionOnce 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.
• Building an RSS Templating System
• Delicious Links – 20 links – tools, gamers, workhacks, code, links

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

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

• [FRIENDFEED] Filter By Service v0.1
• [DELICIOUS/STUMBLEUPON] Delicious Stumbles v2.01

Tags: blogging, friendfeed, lifehacks, programming, wordpress

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.

Yes, referrers are spammed just as much as trackbacks. You can use a javascript/image mechanism to track referrer stats to verify that it isn’t a bot. You will still have to use some kind of blacklist of known bad referrers (the same way you have to do with trackbacks).

Now you have a plugin that collects data on non-spammy referrers, and THAT’S what you use instead of your trackback list. You order the referrers based on the amount of traffic they’ve sent you in a recent time period. You probably want to ignore search engines from the list. But you probably want to include social bookmarking sites.

This would destroy the “first post” trackback spam race because unlike trackbacks, no one is going to show up in the list unless they’re sending you traffic. It’ll also support sites that don’t bother with trackbacks (anything built after 2006) as long as they’re sending traffic.

As a blog visitor I’d love to come to a webpage and instead of seeing a useless trackback to some splog find that 1246 people have visited from StumbleUpon, 453 from Lifehacker, and 47 from the homepage of WordPress.com. It would tell me so much more about who finds this interesting, where to go to find more “off the blog” discussion, and other sites that have related content.

As a blog creator I’d love seeing that kind of per post referrer information captured somewhere.

This isn’t a revolutionary idea by any means, so I’m fully expecting the lazyweb to either correct me as to why this doesn’t work or point me in the direction of a plugin that already does this.