10 bloging hacks

Micro Persuation has one of the most interesting articles with ten handy hacks/resources a blogger should know of. Must read.

Styling FeedBurner’s BuzzBoost

In order to present my linkblog I used FeedBurner’s BuzzBoost feature. However the presentation was not what I wanted it to be, so I read the examples and created my own stylesheet.

You can see the result at the bottom right of this page.

I was tempted to write som javascript that would allow to expand/collapse the body of each post, but it wouldn’t make much sense for the linkblog. Anyway, here is the CSS for anyone interested to hack it:

div.feedburnerFeedBlock {
font-family: Verdana, arial, sans;
font-size: 9px;
width: 200px;
border: 1px #999 solid ;
padding: 1em ;
}

div.feedburnerFeedBlock p.feedTitle {
font-size: 110%;
font-weight: bold;
}

div.feedburnerFeedBlock span.headline a{
color: #990000 ;
font-weight: bold;
}
div.feedburnerFeedBlock span.headline {
display: inline;
}

div.feedburnerFeedBlock p.date {
display: inline;
margin-left: 1em;
margin-right: .5em;
color: #aaaaaa ;
}

div.feedburnerFeedBlock ul li div {
display: inline;
}
div.feedburnerFeedBlock ul li {
text-indent: 0 ;
margin:0;
padding:0 0 .25em 0;
}
div.feedburnerFeedBlock ul {
margin:0 0 1.5em;
padding:0 0 1.5em;
border-bottom:1px dotted #ccc;
list-style:none;
}

Seashore, image manipulation for OS X

Seashore

Seashore is an open source image editor for Cocoa (OS X). It is based on The Gimp (will read Gimp’s .xcf files too), but since it is using Cocoa, it does not require X and it is much faster. Even though it is in version 0.1.7 I found it to be pretty stable.

The bottom-line: it’s free, it works and it can only get better!

UPDATE: It will only open .xcf files…

Rip-Mix-Burn for Feeds?

I have been quite enthusiastic about FeedBurner since the very first time I used it. I even did some coding using the various feedburner APIs and tried to integrate it with my appcliactions.

Then it struck me: we are in the rip-mix-burn era, rip-mix-burn should apply to feeds too.

We’ve got FeedBurner, that’s quite good for the BURN part. Search engines like Yahoo!, Google Blogsearch, Icerocket, Technorati, del.icio.us and others provide us with many options to RIP information into RSS or ATOM.

What we don’t yet have is a good MIX service. I would like to be able to mix two or more feeds regardless of the format they use (RSS, ATOM and variations) and get a single feed in the format I want. It would be nice to have additional options like “insert feed name befor title”, or “include this feed as a once-a-day/week summary” (FeedBurner does this for del.icio.us feeds but it could make sense for Flickr “photo streams” and probably other services too), etc.

Anyone working on something like this?

FeedBurner Mgmt API in PHP

I’ve been messing around with the FeedBurner Management API. It will let you list, create, modify and delete your “burned” feeds. It’s nice and simple and I have a couple of cool things in mind that would take advantage of it’s features.

However I did not find any PHP implementation, that’s why I wrote my own. :-)

Feel free to use and modify the code.

flock rocks!

Flock, the new web browser rocks! It’s still beta, but soooooo coool!

Upcoming.org Team Joins Yahoo!

Upcoming.org Team Joins Yahoo. Considering the rummors about Google Calendar (Google Calendar URL Is Live) this could be indicating that “web based calendar” could be the next major web app….

iTerm (terminal for OS X)

Being used to Linux, I was not satisfied with OS X terminal. I do not know, something was wrong with the fonts (esp. when I had to edit Greek text), something was not right with the terminal emulation mode when I SSH-ed to linux machines. Then I found iTerm which is GREAT!

I also liked the “Bookmarks” and “Profiles” features.

Highly recomended if you work at the command line on OS X.

Google Blog Search

Google Blog Search is Google’s “blog search engine”. The nice thing is you can have results as RSS or ATOM feeds. You can also sort results by relevance or date.

Nice.

“Flickr TV” box



IMGP2280.JPG

Originally uploaded by vrypan.


My “Flickr TV” box. An old iMac running Gentoo Linux automaticaly downloads photos from Flickr Central to create an interesting and unexpected slideshow. iMac’s design makes it ideal for home :-)