// Internet Duct Tape

Social Media — What is it Good For?

Posted in Technology, Web 2.0 and Social Media by engtech on July 24, 2008

Social Bookmarking and Social Voting

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.

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Weekend Reader – javascript, friendfeed, google, lifehacks, web2.0

Posted in Technology by engtech on June 08, 2008

Weekly Links

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.

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Weekend Reader – friendfeed, blogging, technology, programming, wordpress

Posted in Best of Feeds by engtech on May 25, 2008

Weekly Links

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.

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How to Get an RSS Feed for your XBOX 360 Gamertag

Posted in Games, IDT Labs Software Development, Microsoft Windows XP and Vista, Yahoo Pipes by engtech on March 31, 2008

Hacking RSS with Yahoo Pipes

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. For once I’m not the only person who feels this need. There’s at least two of us! :)

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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 unless you’re a member of the Xbox Community Developers Program. Here are the various ways you can access your Xbox 360 Gamercard to use with other websites.

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Delicious Links – 20 links – friendfeed, blogging, javascript, psychology, startup

Posted in Best of Feeds by engtech on March 29, 2008

Weekly Links

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.

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Crunching the Friend Feed Stats to Find the Most Popular Web Apps

Posted in friendfeed, Technology, Web 2.0 and Social Media by engtech on March 26, 2008

Social Bookmarking and Social Voting

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.

What Is the Most Popular Web Service?

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Delicious Links – 20 links – friendfeed, lifehacks, blogging, programming, wordpress

Posted in Best of Feeds by engtech on March 24, 2008

Weekly Links

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.

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Delicious Links – 19 links – tips, google, music, code, blogging

Posted in Best of Feeds, Technology by engtech on March 01, 2008

Weekly Links

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.

This Week at Internet Duct Tape

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

This Week at IDT Labs

IDT Labs is where I announce new software tools I’m working on.

  • [TUMBLR] Regular Post Digest of the Last X Days
    • Build a list of the last X regular posts from your Tumblr account in the past Y days. Useful for doing weekly digest posts with Yahoo Pipe Cleaner
  • [TUMBLR] Delete your Tumblr with TumblrCleanr 0.0.1
    • There’s one Tumblr feature that’s missing: how do you delete your Tumblr? At some point you might want to destroy all traces of your tumblr (privacy concerns, or you want to use it for something else) and there isn’t an option to do that — other than click the delete button on every…

This Week at Ruby, eh?

Ruby, eh? is where I blog/tumble about the Ruby programming language.

  • Rake RDocTask with all of the options stubbed out
    • http://pastie.caboo.se/159372  Rake::RDocTask.new(:rdoc) do |rd| # rd.external # run the rdoc process as an external shell # rd.main = “name” # ‘name’ will be the initial page displayed # rd.rdoc_dir = “html” # set the output directory # rd.rdoc_file = [] # List of files…
  • Rake: Recursively parse a list of all the requires from a source file
    • There’s probably an easier way to do this. http://pastie.caboo.se/159362  # Recursively parse a list of all the requires from a source file def local_requires(source) results = [] File.open(source,’r’).each_line do |line| if line =~ /require [‘”]([^'”]+)[‘”]/…
  • I Can Has RSS?I’ve switched to FeedBurner for RSS support . And set up full feeds, thanks to Alex . (I had no idea that they were turned off!)
  • Bulk updating Gem sourcegem install allison Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org I swear to god that rubyforge is actually a humongous peer to peer network made up from stealing our bandwidth when we do a gem install.
  • Rake Tip: force tasks to run based on operating systemhttp://pastie.caboo.se/158812 task :windows_only do raise “Must be run from Windows, not #{RUBY_PLATFORM}” unless RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /mswin/ end task :linux_only do raise “Must be run from Linux, not #{RUBY_PLATFORM}” unless RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /linux/ end
  • Rake TipBAD: s.gsub(/.rb$/,’.exe’) GOOD:  File.basename(s).ext(‘exe’)
  • Rails: how to delete ActiveRecords to a recycling bin
    • The contenders: acts_as_paranoid – 2005-09-17  Creates a delete_at column and overrides finders to ignore columns with deleted_at set. Last release was 2005-12-20, about 1600 downloads. Around ~100 blog mentions. This guy is using it instead of acts_as_trashable   Reported not working on…
  • validates_presence_of and validates_length_of
    • Pick one : validates_presence_of :snausages validates_length_of :snausages, :maximum => 3 OR validates_length_of :snausages, :maximum => 3, :allow_nil => true I broke my app because of not including allow_nil grep validates_length_of app/models/*.rb | grep -v allow_nil // engtech  …

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