Interactive Llama

Update 06/11: PostRank appears to still work, but they have been bought by Google (not a big surprise…). We are waiting to see if the Social First top-down strategy that Page is implementing will cause PostRank to atrophy or shut down anytime soon. There is a Chrome/Safari plugin that works with Google Reader, too.

Update: FeedHub is dead. It’s been deceased for almost a year now. Their parent company mSpoke shut the free news feed authority weighing system. I have replaced FeedHub with another free feed weighing service, PostRank. It’s not as convenient to use. All your feeds are not combined into one feed. If you have over one hundred feeds that you subscribe to, you will want to export an OPML file (collection of feed URLs) and import that file into your feed reader. You do however have the option within each feed to allow either all, good, great, or only the best ranked news feed articles. (more…)

I enjoy reading books. Most of the time, I read non-fiction. I don’t have anything against fiction. My wife reads fiction, but it’s not my cup of tea, unless its a classic. Whatever you read, you would probably like to share it with your friends. Now it’s easy. With these steps you can tweet about your latest book by simply adding the book to an Amazon Wishlist. No figuring out how much of the title you can post within the 140 character limit. No creating a TinyURL for the Amazon product page. A few hours later your twitter account will tweet your book addition! (more…)

If you follow me on Twitter, you noticed that I recently bought a home and that I was confused about the date of BlogIndiana. I’m happy to say that our move-in date and the blog conference are on separate weekends, so now you don’t have to help me move (you were planning on it right?). You can go to BlogIndiana at the IUPUI Campus Center on August 16th and 17th.

I read many books from the library. I don’t finished reading many books though. First of all, they are free, since they are from the library, and second my attention span doesn’t last that long. I believe browsing the web daily from age 14 (circa 1996) will do that to someone (read the latest cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, is Google Making Us Stoopid). Most of the books I read come from the magazines I read (The Atlantic, Books & Culture: A Christian Review) or from the podcasts I listen to (Diane Rehm, This Week in Tech).

Either way, I want to share my latest reading endeavors across my blogs. But how? (more…)

As you already know, I post all my non-reply tweets from Twitter on my personal blog with Twitter Tools. I do not display the posts with the Twitter Tools widget, but with SideBlog. With SideBlog you can place all posts from a particular category in the sidebar. I have chosen to show only my “Tweets from Twitter” category. The original output of SideBlog places a title, post content and a permalinked “#” at the end of the post. This wasn’t minimalistic enough, and on top of that with Twitter Tools the first 40 characters of your content is your title, so you are repeating yourself. I don’t care for the pound sign, “#”, either. So I made the following changes to the plug-in. (more…)

It’s been a hot debate over what to include in your blog’s RSS recently. I say you should include more than blog posts in your RSS feed IF (and this is a big if) you can editorialize what goes in. The following, explains how to change which tweets from Twitter get posted to your blog and into your RSS feed.

If you use Alex King’s Twitter Tools (version: 1.1b1), you will want to make the following two changes to his code. The first one will make your tweet-post URLs and title more beautiful and SEO friendly by not splitting words at the end. The second one will remove reply tweets (‘@username’) from becoming posts in your blog, so that half-conversations do not get recorded. (more…)

bbPress is still under version 1.0 (as of this writing, it’s at 0.8.3.1). You might think forums are dead, why not just Tweet away on a closed group channel or such. Although not the latest thing, forums are foundational. They are the web version of newsgroups and essential for large groups of people. As a lover of WordPress, I can’t wait to see bbPress develop and mature. Looks like others can’t either: Automattic raised $29.5 million in their Series B round of funding.

Update:
You can find your Public Profile link this way:

1. Click Settings/Privacy Settings
2. Click Search
3. Scroll down to “Public Search Listing”
4. Click “See Preview”

You’ll be taken to your public search page and can copy the link from there.

Original Article:

Slowly Facebook has disabled direct links to profiles. Originally you could link to

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=000000000.

All you had to do was copy and paste the URL from your address bar while you were logged into Facebook and you were good to go!

But the Facebookers disabled that.

If you want to keep all your information private, but want to post a link to add you as a friend, now you can do a search and limit it by id number:

http://www.facebook.com/s.php?k=100000080&id=000000000

To view the above link, you still have to login. If you don’t want users to have to log in and don’t mind submitting your profile to search engines, now you can create a public profile and link to it

http://www.facebook.com/p/First_Middle_LastName/000000000

I could not find anywhere that would list how to make this URL. I looked around and had to try the schema by example. It is as listed above with your profile id attached to the end instead of the “000000000″

I have not tested Dreamweaver CS3, but prior versions of the program do a mediocre job of displaying CSS correctly. For instance, div tags do not always display correctly without inline style tags–which we all know is such a coding faux pas. This has led to a departure from using a WYSIWYG editor and to using the browser to construct webpages. Below are the best aids I have found in debugging and editing webpages in the browser Mozilla FireFox. (more…)