Category Archives: Tools

Watching ReadWriteWeb Content Scrapers in Action – Via WordPress Pingbacks

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Admittedly it’s been fascinating to watch the content scraping in action…

Last night the great folks at ReadWriteWeb wrote about one of my blog posts (about Node.js) in their “ReadWriteHack” channel. How did I first find out?

One of the spammy sites that scraped RWW’s content sent a pingback to my blog post!

In WordPress, which I use on Code.DanYork.com, a pingback comes in as a comment… and over the next few hours I received more and more… I’m still getting them now. I’ve visited several of them and they are the typical content scraping sites – they take someone’s legitimate high-quality content and surround it by various ads (and without any links back to the original article)… hoping you will find their site first. These are the kind of sites that Google needs to keep working on devaluing (and they are).

You can see here some of the ones I’ve already killed as spam:

contentscrapers-1.jpg

Now, I’m sure this is not all of the sites scraping RWW’s content… I can see many other links in a Twitter search that certainly could be spammy sites, too.

I do wonder whether these sites wanted to send a pingback or whether they just installed WordPress and kept the default checkbox checked:

discussionsettings.jpg

It very well may be that they do want the pingbacks, as they would appear as legitimate comments on my site which might then drive traffic over to them. They might be trying to game SEO, but WordPress sets all the comment links to rel='external nofollow' which will kill any SEO value.

Regardless… it’s been interesting to watch… and, frankly, as a content creator myself, sad to see. But it is just another facet of this world of online content we live in today…

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Will OnSwipe Give You A Flipboard For Your Own Blog?

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Viewing this post and video from TheNextWeb today, I couldn’t help but wonder if OnSwipe will be like Flipboard for your own blog? The video makes me think it is perhaps some type of WordPress theme that would reformat your content for an iPad in a similar fashion to all the various themes that will reformat your blog for a mobile browser like the iPhone.

But is it purely a theme for WordPress? Or is it a hosted service? That’s not clear from the video… and you can only sign up to be notified of the beta whenever that will happen.

Regardless, I definitely like what I see here! Being a heavy user of the iPad, I’d love to present my content in a format like this…

The Next Web / OnSwipe Interview from The Next Web on Vimeo.

What about you? Would you like a service or tool like this that took your existing content and made it look awesome on the iPad?

UPDATE: In the comments to TheNextWeb article, founder Jason Baptiste (shown in the video) says this:

We no longer and won’t be offering the Flipboard look with OnSwipe. That was a technology demo we did previously as PadPressed.

Too bad on one level as I definitely like the look, but yes, it does conflict with what Flipboard already offers. It will be interesting, then, to see what they come up with…

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What’s new in WordPress 3.1? Watch this tour of screenshots…

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What’s new in WordPress 3.1 that is currently in beta? How is it different from WordPress 3.0? My friend Sallie Goetsch recently gave a presentation to the East Bay WordPress Meetup (in the San Francisco area) and made her slides available via SlideShare:

Word press 3.1 feature tour

It’s a nicely done tour that can help all of us who are using WP to see what is coming up in the next release! Thanks, Sallie, for putting it together.

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SEOMoz: The Social Media Marketer’s SEO Checklist

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seomoz.jpgWhat should the social media marketer care about with regard to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? How can you tweak your blog posts and other social media marketing to obtain the best search engine results?

Those are the questions addressed today by Jen Lopez in a great post over on SEOMoz entitled “The Social Media Marketer’s SEO Checklist“. She makes a key point right at the beginning (my emphasis added):

Normally in the SEO world, links are like money in that the larger the bill (more authority), the more powerful it is. So for a long time, most SEOs blew off links from social sites like Twitter and Facebook since they didn’t have much direct SEO value because the links are almost always nofollowed. Now that we know that Google and Bing use Twitter and Facebook to influence regular search results, it’s time to start thinking about how the person in charge of Social Media can start to think like an SEO as well.

The post itself is loaded with links to learn more about SEO and various related topics and strategies.

It’s a great post and one that anyone working with social media should read. (The comments are good to read, too.)

Thanks, Jen, for writing this piece!

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2 Very Simple Ways to Backup All Your Del.icio.us Bookmarks

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delicious.jpgWith the word out today that Yahoo will be shutting down Del.ico.us at some point in the near future (per TechCrunch and AllThings D), the buzz on Twitter tonight has been all about how to backup your del.icio.us bookmarks… and what other services to use. Having been a long-time user of delicious, with literally thousands of bookmarks over many years, I was naturally concerned and followed the conversations closely.

The net of all that is that there are two simple ways to backup your bookmarks today (and I’ve done them both).

First, you can simply go to:

https://secure.delicious.com/settings/bookmarks/export

You will get a HTML file that includes all your links and notes and, in the HTML source, all your tags.

Second, for the more technically inclined with access to the “curl” command from a command prompt, you can issue this command:

curl https://[username]:[password]@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all > bookmarks.xml

which will get you a nice XML file full of all your bookmarks, tags and notes. This worked like a charm in a terminal window on my Mac. (Hat tip to @andrew_k on Twitter for this tip and to @pfhyper who retweeted it.)

Now that you have either or both an HTML or XML file you can then import those into some other service… or at the very least have access to your bookmarks. You obviously don’t have the “social” aspect of del.icio.us, which is where so much of the power lies… but you do have all your bookmarks.

Note that in theory you should be able to issue these commands up until Yahoo! shuts down the service… so if you keep bookmarking sites in the weeks ahead, just remember to re-issue these commands from time-to-time to keep a local backup.

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Anyone recommend WordPress hosting providers that give out IPv6 addresses?

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NewImage.jpgCan anyone recommend affordable hosting providers for WordPress that currently provide IPv6 addresses?

As I’ve written about before, I’m working on moving all my sites from TypePad over to WordPress and am currently evaluating several hosting providers. One new criteria I added to my list recently is this:

I would like my blogs to be available over IPv6.

Why? Simple. I tend to write across my various blogs on “emerging technology” issues. Much of the audience for my writing are the “early adopters” who are working with new technology, new toys… and generally working on the bleeding edge of communication.

As some of those folks (myself included) either move their networks to IPv6 or at least experiment with IPv6, I would like my sites to be natively accessible over IPv6 like many other sites are now available including Google, CNN, Facebook and more. Call me silly, but when I’m doing IPv6 testing, I’d like to be able to get to my own sites without going through a IPv6-to-IPv4 converter.

I also want to do this move once, because it’s going to be a big enough pain-in-the-neck as it is, between the initial migration from TypePad and then pointing all the domains over, mapping them, etc.

I’m currently testing out Bluehost and in talking to their support team, they are looking to have some IPv6 options available next year… but I: 1) don’t want to wait; and 2) want to be sure IPv6 addresses will be available. A2 Hosting offers IPv6 addresses, but only for their more expensive dedicated hosting offerings. I’m looking for someone who can provide more of a web hosting or Virtual Private Server (VPS) offering with IPv6.

SOLUTION?

SixXS offers a great list of hosting providers offering IPv6 and some of those look quite interesting… I just don’t personally know anyone hosting on them.

There is, of course, one of the strong proponents of IPv6, Hurricane Electric, who offer a traditional web hosting offering… which might be okay, although I admit that I’m more partial to a system that gives me ssh access with ideally full root access. I can get that root access – and IPv6 – over at someone like RapidXen that goes to the other extreme and just gives you bare bones hosting, i.e. here’s your server, here’s your command line… have fun. (Which I can be fine with, although I’m not overly interested in being responsible for all the system admin of my system.)

So… with all that, anyone out there have recommendations for hosting providers where I can run WordPress with IPv6? (thanks in advance)

P.S. And yes, it’s not 100% clear to me if WordPress plays well with IPv6, but then again, I know some people are doing it!

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How Do You Scale Your Corporate Usage of Twitter? (Free Webinar Nov 30th)

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If you start using Twitter or Facebook for interacting with customers and are successful – how do you scale that interaction as you grow?

As I mentioned in my report into today’s FIR podcast, I’ll be presenting in a free webinar on this topic coming up on Tuesday, November 30th, as part of Voxeo’s monthly “Developer Jam Session” webinars. I’ll be talking about some of the tools and services we offer that can help. If you would like to attend live and ask questions, the registration info is below or on the Jam Session page. If you can’t attend the actual presentation, the webinar will be available for later viewing. Here’s the abstract of what I’ll be talking about:

DeveloperJamSession.jpg

Serving the Social Customer: Scaling Your Support for Twitter, Facebook and more

Tuesday, November 30, 2010: 8:00 AM US Pacific, 11:00 AM US Eastern, 5:00 PM Central European

REGISTER NOW

By 2014, Gartner Research estimates that social networking services will replace email as the primary communications vehicle for 20 percent of business users – and for many people this is already the case. As you connect to customers in social channels, a key question is – how can you scale that communication? If you have only a few people monitoring Twitter, what do you do when they go home? As you successfully interact with people on Twitter, how do you handle the growth?

Do you hire a whole new group of people to “tweet”? Or do you look at how appropriate forms of automation can help you scale your interaction?

Join Voxeo’s Director of Conversations, Dan York, in this free Developer Jam Session to explore how Voxeo’s tools and platforms can help you scale your usage of social channels. You will learn how to monitor twitter account and take action on incoming messages or mentions. You will see how to send urgent notifications via SMS or voice based on certain keywords that appear in tweets. You will learn how you can craft appropriate automatic responses based on what customers send via Twitter. You’ll see how an automated app can assist the person monitoring a Twitter account in collecting information to provide a response. And… you will see how all the social interaction can be tied into the same analytics and application you use for other interaction channels like voice, SMS, IM, and mobile web. Plus you will get a view of how these services can be extended to other social services like facebook.

Please do join us! It should be a fun session!

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For all you love fonts, check out what’s coming in Firefox 4…

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Wood Type

Flickr credit: lwr

If you, like me, enjoy good use of typography, check out the support for control of OpenType font features via CSS coming in Firefox 4:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/11/firefox-4-font-feature-support/

These are some of the minor nuances in typography… but they can add up to make a site or document just look that much better! I’m looking forward to trying them out once FF4 becomes available..

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Hands-on: Using iMovie on the iPhone 4 to create, edit and post to YouTube

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Every since Apple released iMovie for the iPhone 4 I had been wanting to make a video start-to-finish on the iPhone 4 for no other reason than to see how it worked.  I recently had that opportunity and the result is this Emerging Tech Talk interview with Phil Wolff from Skype Journal:

As other reviewers have noted (two examples: Ars Technica and MacLife), the iMovie app is very limited in terms of the kind of editing you can do and particularly in the types of titling and transitions. When you start a project you choose a “Theme” and that then establishes what titles and transitions you can use. I chose the “Modern” theme and the result is the titles you see.

It was rather frustrating in that I like to have “end credits” at the end of my videos that describe a bit about the video and also leave with a URL for people to go to. If you look at any of my other ETT episodes (like this one) you can see what I’m trying to do. With iMovie on the iPhone, as you’ll see at the end I wound up using a bunch of half-screen credits to get the effect I wanted to do.

One other frustration was that I couldn’t crop the video… and in my case part of my finger wound up being in the video.

While limited in editing, I will say that it was rather cool to do all of this on a mobile device:

  1. Shoot the video interview with Phil. Note that I used iMovie’s ability to switch cameras to first get a clip of me talking and then switch to Phil.
  2. Edit the video to remove a couple of sections where we went off on tangents or just into content that didn’t need to be in the video.
  3. Add opening and end credits.
  4. Add overlay titles for Phil’s title and later his website.
  5. Export the video to a 720p video file.
  6. Upload and publish the video to YouTube. (Note that this upload/publish is not actually done by “iMovie” but rather from the other “Photos” application on the iPhone.)

Once I got the hang of using the controls on iMovie on the iPhone, it was pretty simple and easy to do. Apple does provide a FAQ with some helpful info.

I had to cut my ITEXPO trip short due to some family issues, but my intent had been to do the editing and publishing directly from the conference floor. Given the lack of good WiFi at the event, I’m not sure that I really could have done much uploading there… but I certainly could have done the editing – and even done that on the plane trip home.

Given the much greater power of iMovie on my regular Macs, I’m not sure how much I’ll personally use this iMovie on the iPhone. For the work involved, I think it’s much easier to transfer the movie over onto my iMac and do the editing right there. However, I can definitely see this as a way to do mobile video production and will probably wind up trying it out some more at future events.

If you want to try it yourself, iMovie is available from the App Store and costs $4.99 US.

If you have tried it out already, what did you think of it?

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CSS3Please.com – a great way to learn about CSS3

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css3please.jpgIf you are, like me, interested in understanding more about how Cascading Style Sheets Level 3, a.k.a. “CSS3”, particularly as it plays a major role in the ongoing evolution of HTML5 particularly on mobile platforms, you will probably find this site immensely useful:

http://css3please.com/

CSS3 has been in development for quite a while (intro from May 2001) and is still evolving (current status) but it represents a great advance in control over design of web sites directly in a browser.

With CSS3 one of the greatest benefits is the ability to replace images with in-browser elements.

Consider something as simple as “rounded corners” on a box. Without CSS3 you have to use images. With CSS3, you can ditch the images and create rounded boxes directly in the browser. For instance, this paragraph should have rounded corners (and a shadow) if you view it in the most recent builds of Firefox, Chrome or Safari.

What I’ve done is simply added an inline style to the <div> and then added multipled paragraphs inside of that div block.

CSS3Please.com lets you experiment with CSS3 directly in the browser… and then copy/paste the results over into a stylesheet for your site (or use as an inline style as I have here). It’s a cool tool for those of us interested in design.

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