vrypan|net|log

FFDirect 0.7.0 is out. Most notable new feature is the automatic polling of friendfeed for post “likes” and comments. The results are included in the HTML body of the post (unlike other similar solutions, that use javascript).

If you like the way ffdirect shows up in this blog, try adding the following lines in your CSS:

.ffdirect {
padding: 2px 4px 2px 8px;
background: #ebeff9 ;
font-family:Verdana,"BitStream vera Sans",Helvetica,Sans-serif;
font-size:10px;
display: block ;
}
.ffdirect a {
color: #0000cc ;
text-decoration: none;
}
.ffdirect img {
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
}
(Make sure you enable the corresponding option in Settings->FFDirect after you install or upgrade the plugin)

this entry on Friendfeed

Panayotis misc

I’m testing the next version of FFDirect. It will automatically insert a link to the corresponding friendfeed entry at the end of a post, and will also pull friendfeed comments and likes. (I’m using version 0.6.1 here, it’s not publicly available yet, I want to make sure everything works fine before relasing it.)

Please help me test it by adding likes and comments at friendfeed -the link should be automatically inserted bellow.

(it may take up to 30 minutes before your likes and number of comments appear here.)

this entry on Friendfeed - 4 comments. endiaferon, chrislaz and 1 more liked it.

Panayotis misc ffdirect

It’s been a subject I debate with myself. Do I want the activity that happens around a post of mine in different places around the web pulled back to my blog? For example comments left on friendfeed, of tweets linking to my post?

YES. Yes. I’m not just writing blog posts, I’m initiating conversations, that’s why I have the comments open. The discussion around my posts should be pulled back to my blog!

or…

NO. If people feel more comfortable to discuss my blog posts in other places, I should respect it. They prefer friendfeed or twitter or a forum, for their own reasons. They may even be different groups of people, with different codes of communication -mixing them might not be a good idea. There are even some privacy issues: do I have the right to make public a “protected” discussion on friendfeed, or a private tweet?

Well? What do you think?

this entry on Friendfeed - 1 comment. test account liked it.

Panayotis misc

FFDirect 0.6.0 is out. Most notable change is that FFDirect has it’s own friendfeed client ID now, so your friendfeed posts will show “from FFDirect” allowing your followers to filter them better. Plus you get some minor bug fixes.

This is how the “cliend ID” will show up in your friendfeed posts.

Panayotis misc ffdirect

One of the nice features of FFDirect is automatic URL-tagging the links in your posts published to friendfeed and make them appear as a separate “campaign” in your Google Analytics reports.

Once you’ve installed and enabled FFDirect, go to Settings->FFDirect and check “auto-tag URLs for Google Analytics”, and you’re done!

After you’ve published a post or two with FFDirect enabled, check your Google Analytics reports. Go to Traffic Sources -> Campaigns and you should see something like this:

(you may have to wait a couple of hours for Google Analytics to create the latest report)

Panayotis misc ffdirect

I’ve fixed some bugs in FFDirect, please upgrade to v0.2. I’m also working on a couple of ideas to make the plugin make the best out of friendfeed, like how is the body of the content better presented and adding auto URL-tagging for Google Analytics. Stay tuned.

Panayotis misc ffdirect

I’ve just released version 0.1 of FFDirect!

Images included in your articles should show up in your friendfeed posts.
Here are some, for testing:

Any link to an audio file (.mp3, .wav, .aac) will also appear in your friendfeed entry, using the embedded audio player (I’m not sure if the player will play wav or aac files…)

Here is a link to na mp3 file: test audio

Panayotis misc ffdirect

The newest Wordpress plugin from BackType brings web activity back to your blog. It scans sources like Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed, Reddit and other blogs, and brings conversations regarding your posts back to your blog as comments.

That’s a good idea, but it will never work as good as it should. For one reason, there will always be services that BackType doesn’t understand well or don’t know of. Or short URLs that can’t be scanned easily for domain names.

I consider my blog to be the one place on the web I truly own. It’s my on line home. My on line identity is not my email, it’s my blog. I would like every single web service to ping back to it, whenever (I’m) it is mentioned. Twitter, Digg, Flickr, Friendfeed, they should all ping back my URLs.

One more thing: wordpress should accept pingbacks/trackbacks for the homepage, so if vrypan.net/log/ is mentioned somewhere, the service should be able to pingback this page.

Panayotis misc backtype, pingback, trackback

TechCrunch asks if url shorteners are evil.

URL shorteners are just lossless information compressors. Much like a zip function compresses information, in the same way URL shorteners compress a URL. No information is lost, but we need more resources to decompress and use it than in the original state.

There is one big difference between a function like zip and a URL shortener: the first one is based on an algorithm, all you need to extract the original information from a zipped file is knowing the zip algorithm. On the other hand, URL shorteners are using dictionaries: each URL shortening service is a dictionary that translates the short URL back to the original. If we don’t have access to this dictionary, the compressed information is useless.

In a way, there is a power shift from many to few: what everyone could read and “understand”, (ie go to a URL), now needs someone else’s permission, or at least existanse, to be read (ie the service must be up and running to convert the short URL to its original form). I think that’s what bothering Dave Winer when he says that “We need to prepare for the day when N of the URL shorteners go out of business. When that happens a large part of the web will die. It will not be a good day.”

Obviously, URL shorteners are useful, that’s why they exist. They are useful in cases where we are willing to sacrifice some resources (CPU cycles, and a couple extra HTTP requests) to have the same information consume less space (characters in this case). What us users should be asking for is a piece of the “power” we lost. “Let me map my own domain onto theirs, easily back up all my data, and give me the ability to switch services when I want, or when I need to”, says Winer.

But that’s not all. Many URL shorteners go beyond information compression. They keep extra stats, like click stats. They capture user “gestures” and user “attention”. They let us know “how many users clicked on the link I suggested on twitter”, when they did, etc. Marketeers have been using intermediate URLs for years to measure email and banner effectiveness. Many URL shorteners give this feature to everyone.

Unfortunately, these intermediate URLs (in the form of short URLs) are the best tool we have to do this right now. This is why I don’t see URL shorteners going away, even if we found an algorithmic (and not dictionary-based) compression method to shorten URLs. But there’s an interesting field for new tools there.

Panayotis misc URL shorteners

Yesterday, Dave Winer wrote:

One easy way to lower the cost of URL-shortening is to use our own domain names in place of tinyurl.xom, bit.ly, tr.im, et al. Any one of those services could take the lead here by allowing for that. Let me map my own domain onto theirs, easily back up all my data, and give me the ability to switch services when I want, or when I need to.

I would call it “data protability for URL shorteners”. It’s what I’ve been trying to push for more than a year by urlborg.xml (and was actually inspired by an older post of Dave Winer) .

Panayotis urlborg