If you haven’t heard of Videntity, you may recognize it as the major force behind my landing page.  If you don’t have an OpenID, you can get one from Videntity.  If you have one already (like me) you can log in using it.

Then, you can associate a profile with your OpenID.  Yes, you’ve done this a million times before.  Videntity is different — you can actually import your existing profile from elsewhere if it is done using hCard.

You can also add friends to your profile on Videntity.  Here again, the service is different.  You are not bound to adding people who have ever used Videntity — anyone with a URL can be added.  Full XFN vocabulary is supported.  This powers the primary friends list on my home page.

Enter the bookmarklet.  I have written a bookmarklet that works cross-browser.  Click it, and it detects hCards and Facebook links on the current page.  It presents you with a list of these people it has detected and lets you either click over to their profile (useful in itself) or add them to your Videntity profile as friends.

So, drag the following to your bookmark bar and watch the magic!

http://singpolyma.googlepages.com/videntity-bookmarklet.js'; document.body.appendChild(js);})();">Videntity Bookmarklet

Yet another experiment in following the community.  I have used the toolbar-creation tools from Conduit to create a social toolbar for the Blogger hacks community.

The toolbar has links to all the major Blogger hackers (if I forgot you, I’m sorry, tell me and I’ll add your link!), a drop-down to the main sections of the hacks wiki, a built-in search of the wiki (the co-op one isn’t allowed… but I linked to it), a feed-reader that alerts your when a hacker posts something new, and an announce section for community-wide alerts.  There is also a chatroom, email notification, weather, and pop-up blocking option.  All components are optional.

One of the really cool things is that there is a version for both Firefox and Internet Explorer.  If I update the toolbar components on their site, everyone’s toolbar gets updated, without a reinstall.

So, check it out at the toolbar homepage.

This script now integrates properly with both GMail and Google Reader. Reinstall and enjoy 🙂

“What?” you say, “You don’t use Facebook, Stephen, you’re so cool and geeky!” Ah, but unfortunately not all of my friends are, and I have been drawn in to the service. Mind you, I don’t spend hours reading the profiles of people I don’t know 😉 I do use it, however.

There’s one thing I’ve always hated about Facebook — the notifications system. Many too many emails flooding my inbox about what is happening, either that or I have to check the site regularly. No RSS on the things you actually want notifications of. Worst of all messages, the one thing you REALLY need notification of, won’t even send you an email.

The ‘official’ solution is to install the Facebook toolbar. I tried it, it’s nice, but I don’t use the service enough to warrant that screen real-estate OR that memory usage.

My solution is a Greasemonkey script. It integrates notifications of messages, group invites, event invites, and friend requests into the side of your GMail view. Install the script, go to GMail, click the Facebook logo and log in. For best results, check the ‘remember me’ checkbox (funny, you can’t have it remember you for logging in to the site, but for a third-party script you can…). Go back to your GMail and click the link that appeared where the Facebook logo used to be. Voila. If you checked the box, next time you go to GMail it should just display the notifications without intervention from yourself.

Die email notifications!

Userscripts.org entry

School is soon coming to an end for me (time to find a job!), which means somewhat more time to help all of you out.  I have had support requests sitting around, some over a month, in my GMail box waiting for me to have time.  In the last week and a half I have dealt with most of them.  However I have discovered that this can cause an organisation nightmare, trying to remember what I have and have not done.  So I have transferred remaining support requests to a ticket system, kind of like Bugzilla, but it’s Trac-powered.

If  you wrote me and your request is not in the system, please add it.  Please do not add things (bugs/feature requests) that are already there.  I DO get notified by email when someone adds a ticket or comment.  Please DO use this for bug reporting / support requests whenever possible in the future 🙂  Please remember, however, that anything posted there is public and thus private things (ie, your template) should likely be sent by email and not attached 🙂