On some ‘closed’ blogging / forum services there are present some features you cannot, present, find elsewhere. One of the most prominent of these is the ability to see all comments by a particular user. Some people have decided to overcome this problem by posting their comments to del.icio.us. Johan Sundström at ecmanaut has come up with a Greasemonkey script to automate the process. This then allows you to have an RSS feed and aggregation page (powered nicely by del.icio.us) for all comments you place on other people’s blogs, and even to publish all or some of these comments to your sidebar. I fully agree with the concept here, however I believe that using del.icio.us in this manner is counterproductive, for a few reasons :

1. Del.icio.us is about posting URLs, comments are content with often no proper URL themselves
2. Del.icio.us is about tagging, and while there is much useful metadata that can be associated with a comment, I see little or no use in tagging it
3. Because del.icio.us is not meant for this application, many features that would be useful to comments are not and will never be implemented (see below)

Viewing all comments by a particular person is certianly a useful option, even including comments posted on their own blog, however a way to filter them to just on other people’s blogs would be useful. Following all comments on a particular post is certianly also a useful option, since so many bloggers are forced to reply to comments via their blog and via email to make sure the reply is received. Following all comments for a particular blog would also be useful. While some of these features are already provided by some blogging platforms / services, they are rarely all offered and rarely in a conveniant way.

What we truly need is a new service, one that tracks comments (and possible trackbacks) from all blogs just as is being done now by those posting to del.icio.us. It could provide feeds and aggregation pages for all the features I’ve listed above, and probably many I haven’t thought of. Aggregation could also be merged in-service to one page / feed, much like the del.icio.us inbox, so that you could add posts / blogs to monitor the comments of without overcrowding your feedreader with feeds for old posts or even for all the blogs you comment on. A single feed is much more conveniant for such practise.

Johan’s Greasemonkey script could easily be modified to work with such a service instead of with del.icio.us, and independant bloggers could even integrate the comment-to-commentblogger link directly into their ‘your comment has been posted’ pages. Eventually, services like Blogger could theoretically even allow you to store your commentblogger username and password in your account and auto-post all your comments to your commentblogger account.

Tags: Blogging Comments del.icio.us delicious Syndication Web2.0 ecmanaut

Google has launched a new service, dubbed ‘Google Analytics‘. It seems to be sort of like Mint, an elaborate Javascript-powered hitcounter and traffic measuring service. Unlike Mint, it is not hosted off of your webspace, but is rather managed on the Google servers. Also unlike Mint, it is free. Having never used Mint, I am not really qualified to do a comparison otherwise, but I may try out Google Analytics eventually.

Tags: Google Google Analytics Web Webstats

Del.icio.us pushed a bunch of new features the other day (see announcement). One of the best things they’ve done is released a help section. While del.icio.us is not complicated and anyone who knows what they’re doing can figure it out by messing with it (especially if subscribed to their mailing list), however for new users this is not all that appealing, and a help section is a time-saver, even for more advanced users.

Another new feature in this set is what they’re calling ‘editable breadcrumbs’. Basically it’s what the advanced del.icio.us users have been doing since the beginning, navigating to an exact tag combination without having to click all the proper navigation links in the sidebar. Whereas people have been using the easy-to-remember URL system on del.icio.us to do this by entering manual URLs in the location bar of their browser, this system adds a textbox to the header area on your del.icio.us account so you can enter such custom tag combinations there directly, without having to remember the URL form, which could be useful to new users.

Following up to their Javascript Link Rolls feature (which allows you to easily include your recent del.icio.us bookmarks in your website), they have released ‘Tag Rolls’. The nice, dynamic interface lets you create, basically, a tag cloud of your del.icio.us bookmarks and provides a Javascript code to use for including it in your website.

Tags: del.icio.us delicious Websites

How many profiles do you have? I have one with Blogger, Technorati, Xanga, Blog.com, and I’m sure others. The problem is that each of these profiles only works within the service it was created for. I also have numerous pages that could be considered my ‘homepage’. So which is my ‘real’ URL? Which should I give out to people? Up until now I have decided that question based on who they were and what service they were with. No more.

Tagalag has solved the problem for me. While this may be one more profile to add to my ever-growing list, this one will let me reference all others. I can integrate all my information and URLs together, and the other features provided by this BETA service is large and growing. They do not reveal any part of your email address unless the person viewing your profile already knows your email address (ie, you have to give the site someone’s address in order to find a version of their profile page containing their address). All information is optional. Someone was thinking here.

It isn’t quite a ‘Universal Profile’, because the information you can store is still locked in to what they provide. But with all the Web 2.0 functionality, including a full external API, the only thing they would have to do would be provide arbitrary fields support to perfectly fit the bill.

My Taglag Profile

Tags: Profiles Tagging Websites Reviews Taglag

I have moved my technical blog from it’s old home on blog.com to this new blogger site for multiple reasons. One is that I was growing sick of the uncustomisability of the blog.com templates. Another is that blog.com recently has been undergoing maintenance and upgrading for the third time since I started with them, and while blogger may not be perfect, it is definately less buggy right now. Here are the URLs for all things as per this new site :

Site URL – http://singpolyma-tech.blogspot.com/
Post Feed – http://feeds.feedburner.com/singpolyma-techblog/
Comments Feed – http://app.feeddigest.com/digest3/FTDZN6YNPD.rss
All Tags – http://del.icio.us/singpolyma.techblog/

I will slowly be moving all posts from the old site over to this one and backdating them so that the archives work properly, and will be updating the del.icio.us account simultaneously. Some of the posts have already moved, but I am working from oldest to newest so it may be awhile before they’re all there. Yes, I am moving the comments too, which may cause the comments feed to act funny for awhile.

Feedback on this new site design is welcome as I work out the bugs in the move.

Tags: General