I am Darren’s weblog.
For some reason I feel like I had seen this as a default feature on Facebook way before apps hit the scene. Regardless, here it is. The Friend Wheel. Reminds me of a Katamari Domacy ball.
Whats up with the black sheep on the top right?
Anyway you can get your very own at http://apps.facebook.com/friendwheel/
For years the bane of my podcasting existence has been that dreaded time at the end of post-production…Distribution. Yet today I am happy to say I’ve put a few new tools in my arsenal that will alleviate the wretched headache.
TubeMogul is to video sharing sites as Ping.fm is to social networks. It’s a producers dream come true. With it I can upload a single video and have it redistribute to 17 of the top video sharing sites.
Living in a house with 3 other geeks and a meger 2 Mbps upstream cable Internet connection this has the potential to stave off those “who’s using up all the bandwidth” fights.
That alone is worth its weight in megabytes but it actually gets better. The tracking and reporting features are some of the best I’ve seen in a video site. No longer do I have to login to a dozen sites and manually input numbers in a custom excel sheet to get a clue how my videos are doing.
At a glance I can see how all my videos are doing across the video sharing sites or check out individual video stats. TubeMogul reports show yesterday vs. today’s views and the percentage gain or loss. You can drill down and get really specific about videos, sites, and date ranges.
The flash-based charts are a nice touch too. The stats can be exported to a spreadsheet or embedded on a web page. Below I’m displaying my YouTube stats over the last 45 days.
Over the last three days Shannon has been uploading individually sliced segments from our back catalog to TubeMogul supported sites and as you can see it’s been pretty successful already. I hope the campaign can draw more viewers into the show with these short form snippets.
Anyway it seems that TubeMogul is
comprehensive enough for a major television network and easy enough for a casual vlogger to use.
So the premise is pretty simple. Ping.fm is a service that allows you to send status updates to multiple services like facebook, myspace, twitter, plurk and pownce by emailing a secret address. I really like the service but I’m also having trouble completely adopting the usage in my day to day.
Twitter seems to be more convenient for me, especially with all of the third party apps for it like TwitterBerry. What I’d like to do is continue using twitter as I do and also have some of my tweets rebroadcast to my other social networks using ping.fm. I don’t want to rebroadcast my @replies since those aren’t generally about what I’m doing.
I figured this would be a great project for Yahoo Pipes. I was able to quickly make a pipe that pulls in the RSS feed from my twitter account and clean it up. The first Regex operator removed the “hak5darren: ” prefix from the messages. I know it’s not elegent but it works.
A neat feature of ping.fm that isn’t very publicized is that it ignores anything following and including four consecutive dashes. Using the Regex operator I was able to append “—-end” to the tweets in the feed. This will come into play a little later.
Lastly in the Yahoo Pipe I set a filter operator to block any items that begin with @. This removes @replies which would be out of context on other social networks. Finally the pipe is output to an RSS feed called tweet redirect.
Running the pipe I’m quite happy with the project so far but I still need a way to get the newly cleaned up tweets out of RSS and into emails destin to my secret ping.fm address. Yahoo has an alert service which will send new items in the feed via email but the messages are in HTML and not easy to work with.
After looking around for a simple RSS to Email service I came across RSSFWD.com which does exactly as the domain implies. You give the site a feed and an email address and you’ll get the option of doing HTML or plain text emails, immediate deliveries or daily/weekly digests.
This is where it gets a little sticky. RSSFWD doesn’t require you to sign up for an account to use the service but when you setup a RSS to Email forward it sends a subscribe email with a unique link that must be clicked to activate the forwarding service. Obviously I can’t have it email directly to ping.fm else I’ll miss the unique url and be unable to activate the service.
At this point in my retweeting adventure I was getting pretty tired and as a duct-tape fix decided to use Gmail to forward the forwarded RSS feeds. I signed up for the RSS forwarding service to my Gmail account, received the activation email and clicked the confirmation link, and setup a filter to forwarded any new messages from RSSFWD.com to Ping.fm.
In theory all of this works. And after my initial tests I can say it does exactly as you would expect. Yahoo Pipes grabs my tweets and cleans ‘em up. RSSFWD pulls in the cleaned up feed and spits it out to Gmail. Gmail gets the emails and ships ‘em off to Ping.fm. And Ping.fm sends my tweets off to Facebook, Myspace, Pownce, and Plurk. But alas I am not in social networking status updating heaven.
Yahoo Pipes and RSSFWD are SLOW!
Still, not bad for an hour of hackery in the middle of the night, right? At least now I’ve got the proof of concept down and can start looking at ways to do this properly.
At the moment I’m thinking of using PHP, which has built in RSS, Regex, and Mail functions to process the tweets and ship ‘em off directly to Ping.fm. With a cron job running the script every N minutes I think it might be a viable solution.
The only problem is my PHP-fu isn’t quite what it used to be. I’ll keep my blog updated as I progress on this project. I’d love to hear what the code monkeys out there think.
A working replica of the bluebox featured in the 1971 Esquire
article “Secrets of the Little Blue Box”. It uses my 12F683 PIC design.
How awesome is that?
This new service SocialBrowse seems really neat. I know I’ve seen similar sites like this in the past but this one, with its Twitter-like friends and followers features looks pretty promising. The Firefox addon allows you to share links you find around the web with your friends. A sidebar in firefox displays a list of your friends links while they’re surfing.
The neatest part is that links which have been shared by people you follow get little friend icons next to them. It’s really not obtrusive and really adds to the passive nature of the service. Imagine scrolling through a large blog only to see your friends icons next to all the hot stuff? Here’s an example from my last post at DKnet.
Its kinda like a passive twitter and stumbleupon mashup. If it got critical mass I could see it being pretty useful. I only wish it allowed users to leave sticky notes on sites with their comments.
Here’s my profile. Check out my links or add me as a friend?
I’ve been keeping an eye on this mod, Synergy, for a while now as it promises Half-Life 2 co-operative play and finally got a chance to test it out last night. I feel that CoOp play is something that has been missing in FPS game since the early days of Doom and Quake so I’m very happy to finally experience the fun that is the Half-Life series with someone special.
A few months ago when I first looked at the project it looked a bit too confusing and, well, beta to setup but with 1.1 I’ve got to say it feels nearly stable. I’m sure in a few more versions it’ll have that polished feel. Setup is as simple as clicking next, next finish on a simple installer and the only prereqs are that you have HL2, HL2DM, and Source SDK Base installed and opened at least once to initialize. Once installed Synergy adds itself to Steam as a 3rd party mod ready to launch.
At first I thought I would need to run a separate listen server to get a local game going but running a “quick play” campaign does essentially that. The other players on the LAN simply launch the game and either click through on the local games list or run CONNECT <IP ADDRESS/NETBIOS NAME> in the console. The former didn’t quite work for us but interestingly enough Internet players were able to connect even though I hadn’t setup any crazy port forwarding or anything. Weird when networking works without much thought eh?
It would have been awesome to play HL2 co-op between Missouri and Virginia before Shannon moved in, but now that she’s here the experience is far more enjoyable. Shannon (@snubs / snubsie.com) and I played through the first quarter of Half-Life 2 last night using the mod and it was a blast. Mubix even joined us towards the end to help kick some Combine butt.
Synergy handles multiple Gordan Freemans pretty well all things considered too. I’m not exactly sure how the NPCs choose which person in your party to keep eye contact with while interacting but its basically like everyone gets to be the main character. The only bug I’ve seen to look out for is that NPCs will sometimes walk over players, causing them to become immobile.
The best part has to be the strategy that it adds to what was a single player game. I only wish the difficulty was a little harder as I saw in the first helicopter battle, 3v1 isn’t exactly what Valve intended.
Regardless if you’re a Half-Life freak like me you’ll have to check this out. I’d love to run a HL2 campaign with the Hak5 fans sometime, that would rock. Hit me up if you’re interested and keep on fraggin’!