tired and sleepy, and my work day hasn't started yet.

RSS Feeds for Multiple Sites

First off, what are RSS feeds. RSS is the logical successor to what in the late 1990's was called "push technology." It's basically a sign-up service, where a website update is sent to the client's feed reader.  This is not an email service, though there are email clients and webmail which can double up as RSS readers. 

Nowadays, RSS is defined as "really simple syndication."  And it really is simple.  It's so simple that most bloggers can activate this on their blog without any problem at all. It's just an option switch, turning Atom/XML on.

The good news is that RSS sends a message to RSS aggregators informing them that the website has been updated. And the aggregators broadcast this to other aggregators.  And if you are signed up to receive the feed, you're informed of the update.  Why is this a good thing? For the blogger or website owner or webmaster, he doesn't have to maintain a subscription list, and have the email sent to the subscribers.  Maintenance wise, that is so neat.

And as I mentioned earlier, even a newbie can have RSS turned on.  And with that, the world knows when a blog is updated.  This is an advantage because even without knowing it, the blog is being listed for search engines. There's no need for the search engine spider to go to the site and crawl all over the directories.

On my part, the last point is the one I really like.  Significantly, this can be extended further by submitting the RSS feed or channel to more RSS aggregators. This is part of my job. It makes the blog more easily seen by search engines, and has a positive impact on page rank.

The fun part is that I do also this on my own and for free with some other blogs I like reading. It's my way of sharing these blogs with the rest of the world. (Of course, this works only for publicly readable posts. Private posts stay private.)

--Andoy
16 Feb. 2010

Posting to Multiple Sites

Lately, I've been experimenting with posting on multiple sites, not just for status, micro-blogs and blogs but also for pictures.

Maybe, that should be specially for pictures. Lately, I've been into multiple sites for social media networks, and other sites. It's a bother to update all of them at the same time. This way, I update once, and all of them get to receive the updates.

For posts, I've been using Ping.fm. For pictures, I found Pixelpipe. The good thing about both is that you can use your phone to send pictures from your phone directly to the sites (via email) or you can use WAP (specially for Ping.fm).

Pretty cool.

--Andoy 15 Feb. 2010

had 2 whole green olives, 2 slices black olives, 2 caper pcs, and a slice of pickle. new kind of midnight snack.

watching THE BIG BANG THEORY season 2. feels like reviewing for an exam.

in a taxi in the middle of traffic and the driver says: "akala ko ba walang traffic sa marikina."

in a taxi in the middle of traffic and the driver says: "akala ko ba walang traffic sa marikina."

valentine's day sucks. feeling anti-social. hiding under a bed seems like a good idea just about now.

pixelpipe also features photo updates/submission via email.

thinking of expanding pixelpipe pipes to include a whole lot of picture sharing sites.

thinking of expanding pixelpipe pipes to include a whole lot of picture sharing sites.

crashing; there are days i swing from cabin fever and a touch of agoraphobia; officially going crazy

tired, getting hungry and imploding

crashing; there are days i swing from cabin fever and a touch of agoraphobia; officially going crazy

sleepy and brain-fried. good night.

loaded a firefox plugin for posting pics to multiple sites. i think it worked. yay!

like a hamster running on a wheel... round and round it goes.

The Circuitous Route of Social Network Linking

Am experimenting with forwarding my status updates and posts on Social Networks. What I really want is to post once and it gets published in a lot of other places. 

I tried it first with Plurk. I set up Plurk to send the post to Twitter as a tweet and to update the Facebook status.  This works fine. But it does not extend itself that far. For what it's worth, I've been using WAP to send to Plurk, to post to Twitter tweets, because I can't send tweets directly from my phone.  Yup, I send tweets from my phone.  In the roundabout way I've just described.  The way things are, that's going to be the way it's going to be.

I also use HootSuite to view and post tweets as well as view feeds from Facebook. 

Now, I am experimenting with Ping.fm. Several advantages:
1. I can use WAP to send to Ping.fm. As long as I have a cell phone signal, I can post.
2. it can connect to 36 social network sites (of which I've activated 10 of them (gtalk status, yahoo profile, multiply, hi-5, blogger, twitter, facebook, linkedin, myspace and plurk).

A brief note: as part of my job, I need to register to a lot of websites. I have a list of more than a thousand websites and this list is going to get much longer.

3. Anent to the above, if I register to a new social network site, hopefully, I can add this to Ping.fm and update from there.
4. I have the option to use Hootsuite to post to Ping.fm.  I have Hootsuite.com up on the browser about half the time I'm on the computer, and that's a lot longer than I stay on Meebo, YM or Skype.

Disadvantages:
1. I still have to check which accounts get updated, and if it's tagged as a status or as a blog post.
2. Plurk is not cooperating. Or is behaving in a weird manner. I've disabled Twitter and Facebook forwarding on Plurk. It worked part-way. The status updates, tweets and posts don't go to Twitter, but they still go to Facebook. This will take some more tweaking before I get it right.
3. I can use WAP to send to Ping.fm. As long as I have a cell phone signal, I can post. (this could be addictive)

Another brief note: I know I have accounts with Flickr, AIM, WordPress, Delicious, Diigo, Vox, TypePad, PhotoBucket and Yahoo Meme, but I'm still thinking of reasons to connect these to Ping.fm.

--Andoy
11 February 2010

bookmarking. any interesting links out there? send them to me and I'll queue 'em

feeling like it was a short nap. a senryu moment without words.

yup, reading in bed. a real book, not a PDF.

watching CAPRICA eps. 3. Intriguing.

almost morning and thinking of hard bound books.

if this works it simplifies a lot of things.

testing ping.fm for micro-blogging and status updates on multiple sites. this should be fun.

Old school game, 3dtris now web-based flash game: http://3dtris.de