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RSS Cloud Is Exciting News

Bwana — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:59:58 +0000

I’ve always been a big fan of real-time information on the internet. Ever since the early days of IRC and Usenet, I would prefer IRC since the entire experience was live and real-time. Usenet and forums had the delay factor.

Yesterday, I read about the decision WordPress made to support RSS Cloud. What is RSS Cloud? It’s essentially modifications to the existing RSS specification to enable real-time publishing via RSS feeds. That’s my take on it anyways. That means if you use a supported RSS reader like Dave Winer’s River2 or Lazyfeed, you’ll receive a “instant” notification when a RSS cloud supported blog is updated.

This blog is supported by PubSubHubbub via Feedburner, but I’ve installed the WordPress RSS Cloud plugin anyways.

Why is all this exciting?

Those who claim RSS is dead don’t realize their newfound love for Twitter would be moot if it were not for RSS. Breaking news on Twitter comes from two main sources in my mind: websites and personal experience. For tech news, I doubt there is much personal experience for news unless there’s a conference or an event. Most juicy, 0-day news comes from websites. These websites often have a… wait for it… RSS feed. The race to post tech news first on Twitter usually stems from who can refresh their RSS reader the fastest.

This is exciting because RSS has been empowered to update us all in real-time and have less dependence on others reposting and retweeting stuff they found first. Tools like LazyFeed are leading the way in this charge and more will come thanks to open standards.

RSS is hardly dead, it’s becoming more useful.

Embed Your Real-time FriendFeed Activity On Your Blog

Bwana — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:13:30 +0000

The real-time web is the buzzword of 2009. As technology advances, we become more impatient. We want our information and we want it 5 minutes ago. If a story is reported 2 hours after it happens, it’s ancient history in the age of Twitter and FriendFeed. I’m a big user of FriendFeed not only for the information it brings, but the interesting discussions that occur surrounding them. It’s a great dashboard of the social web.

FriendFeed has a real-time feature that some are not aware of. This feature is available for FriendFeed lists, rooms, and your friend streams. It shows FriendFeed activity as it happens and can be addictive if you let it Today, I found (through FriendFeed of course) a little nugget that allows you to embed your friends real-time activity right on your blog. To do so:

Navigate to your page by clicking “Me” on the left sidebar. Then click “Yourname + Friends” on the top tab bar
Next, click the “Real time” link, and then click embed in web page
You can then configure the embed width, height, and title. Copy and paste the HTML to your blog and you’re set.

I was aware you could embed real-time FriendFeed through rooms, as I wrote about back in May, but I didn’t know you could also embed your friend stream. Here’s what mine looks like:

As of now, you cannot embed your main feed, or your discussion feed which consists of your comments and likes. That would be the next logical feature to add since the FriendFeed discussion feed is rich with content that you are interested in. Take a look at mine to get an idea. I’m glad FriendFeed is continuing to improve and if you want the world to know what you’re doing on FriendFeed at any given moment, go ahead and embed your FriendFeed activity. See you on FriendFeed.

Intense Debate Now a Part of Automattic

Bwana — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:08:11 +0000

The commenting software, Intense Debate, was acquired by Automattic today according an announcement on their blog. I’ve went on record to state my support for Intense Debate and their benefits over their main competitor, Disqus. Recently, I’ve been beta testing some of their newer features and I can definitely see the reasoning behind the acquisition. There are some exciting features coming!

Intense Debate has temporarily went back into private beta (which won’t affect current users), so you’ll need to wait a bit to create a new account. If you’re not familiar with Automattic, they are the parent company of great blogging software such as WordPress, Akismet, and Gravatar. Intense Debate adds a great commenting system to the fold and I can’t wait to see what becomes of the merged technologies.

Congratulations Intense Debate, I’m happy for you guys and will continue to show my support.

4 Ways to Enhance Your Blog With FriendFeed

Bwana — Wed, 28 May 2008 19:19:04 +0000

FriendFeed is great mechanism for sharing information and discussing topics around the social web. I’ve blogged about it before, and so have many others. There are many people who have successfully embedded Twitter statuses in their blog as well as other RSS information. The term “Lifestream” has been chosen to denote updates from your “social graph” and many have implemented this idea on their blog, including myself. In this post, I’ll explain multiple ways to add FriendFeed information to your blog. Note, these have been tested on WordPress 2.5.x and should work on other platforms unless noted otherwise.

Add the official FriendFeed widget to your blog. This is done by navigating to http://www.friendfeed.com/embed, and then inserting the supplied code to your blog.

You can install this in your sidebar or on a dedicated page simply by copying and pasting the code supplied in your blog template.
Modify the official FriendFeed widget to embed certain services to your blog. I learned this yesterday from Paul Buchheit. You can filter which services you wish to embed by modifying the embed URL:

The items in bold in the above example denote the username, the number of items and the service name respectively. This particular widget will show the last two Twitter entries for username bwana. This is powerful in that it shows the latest service entry as well as the first few FriendFeed comments. The service names can be internal (FriendFeed messages), blog, lastfm, seesmic, googlereader, and so on. To get the name of the service, go over to FriendFeed and hover over the service icon and look at the URL. This is what an embed looks like for Twitter:
Embed your latest FriendFeed messsage text only. There are multiple ways to do this, but thanks to Benjamin Golub, I’ve found the feed supplied by the API is the easiest way. The first thing to do is to determine your FriendFeed ATOM URL from the API. It is of the format

http://friendfeed.com/api/feed/user?nickname=[YOURNICKNAME] &service=[SERVICE]&output=atom&num=[COUNT]

My URL is

http://friendfeed.com/api/feed/user?nickname=bwana &service=internal&output=atom&num=1

Once you have established your feed URL, use your favorite RSS/Atom plugin to embed it in your blog. For WordPress, the RSS widget should work fine. My favorite is feedlist. With my blog, I simply put the following in my template where I wanted the update:
feedList(array("rss_feed_url"=>"http://friendfeed.com/api/feed/ user?nickname=bwana&service=internal&output=atom&num=1","before"=>"", "after"=>"", "ignore_cache"=>"30")); ?>
I like feedlist because it gives you a great deal of control on how to handle the feed output. The resulting output looks like:

Again, you can place this anywhere in your blog. I put it at the very top of my index page above all blog posts.

[Update] – Magpie (which is built into WordPress now it seems) chokes on FriendFeed entries that are shared with an image or media attached. I’m looking into finding a workaround or solution in the meantime.
Add FriendFeed “comments” and “likes” to your blog posts. Unfortunately, this solution only works with WordPress. Louis Gray and Thomas Hawk are very interested in someone writing something for Blogger. This involves installing the FriendFeed WordPress plugin by Glenn Slaven. After installing and enabling the plugin, comments made in FriendFeed will be shown on your blog posts. Users can also directly comment to FriendFeed from your blog post. This is very powerful if you wish to combine your own blog comments with FriendFeed comments. This is what it looks like:

These are my favorite ways to enhance my WordPress blog with FriendFeed, and I’m quite sure there are more ways to do it. What ways have you enhanced your blog with FriendFeed? Has it worked? Leave a comment here or on FriendFeed.

Intense Debate or Disqus? I’m torn.

Bwana — Wed, 14 May 2008 19:17:28 +0000

I can’t decide.

I’ve used and loved Disqus in the past, but felt the data portability options were limited. I loved the data portability options of Intense Debate, but found it lacked support with FriendFeed. Recently, I went on record as to my reasons for liking Intense Debate. One of those reasons included their willingness to support Seesmic video comments. Today, Disqus has added Seesmic Video comments to their system. I’m left with the following:

Intense Debate allows me to import/export comments to and from my WordPress blog with relative ease. That is good feeling to have.

Disqus integrates with FriendFeed very well and has gained great popularity due to Dave Winer and Robert Scoble‘s seal of approval. Their (Disqus) community is very bullish about the platform.

So part of me wants Disqus for the Seesmic/FriendFeed support while the other part likes the data portability options (the ease of it) of Intense Debate. Now here’s another thing: This post may draw people from the Disqus AND the Intense Debate communities. Since I currently have Intense Debate installed, I doubt many Disqus users will bother commenting. That’s a whole ‘nother bag of apples.

I really miss video comments and was willing to move to Intense Debate because they expressed interest while I heard nothing from Disqus. Now, Disqus has launched support, and I’m hearing nothing from Intense Debate.

Torn.