No question for me that Windows Live Writer is the best product to come out of Microsoft’s Live project/platform/whatever. The Writer Zone blog announced today that there’s a new release available.  It’s a CTP (Community Technology Preview), not a stable release because they’ve added a bunch of new SDK plugin stuff along with the updates to Live Writer itself.

Steve Hodson has a great post outlining all the new features in the application, there’s heaps of great stuff in there, including some little things like recognising what lighbox plugin you’ve got installed on your blog & allowing you to set the images to use this.  The Auto Linking features is also cool, an automatic glossary.  Download the installer here.

One of the main issues that some people have been having with the FriendFeed Comments Plugin is that sometimes, seemingly randomly, it will fail to match up a post with the information from FriendFeed.  There are a couple of reasons why this does happen, but the problems all centre around the fact that I have to use the post title to match up the details because there’s no other uniquely identifiable piece of information available.

This is of course a problem when people edit the title, either due to a typo or a editorial change.  Also there seems to be some string encoding issues, especially around the 32,000 different characters that can render to look like an apostrophe.    I’ve spent quite a lot of time trying to strip out the special characters and normalise the titles so I can be sure of getting a match between what’s on the blog & what’s coming back from the FriendFeed API.  I even tried just stripping out non-alphanumeric characters, but then I had a complaint from an amazingly patient person who’s site was using Cyrillic.  So what I’ve got now is a rather hodgepodge solution where it tries to strip out as many characters as possible, then does an md5 hash on that to use as the id, and some people are still having issues where, for no apparent reason, the posts won’t match up.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was listening to the L33t Tech Podcast and they mentioned that Twitter developer Alex Paine said that one of the things that’s causing all the stability problems for them is that Twitter was never designed as a communications platform where people would have back & forth conversations, it was meant to be a CMS.  Robert Scoble then said that the Twitter developers assumed that everyone would just answer their question “What are you doing?” 

But now with the @replies and #hashtags people are using it for all sorts of different things.  People are using it as  a bookmarking service, a todo list and geo-locator and so on.  Full-on conversations happen on Twitter. And although it may not be the best platform for it, once a conversation gets going, it tends to have its own momentum. Sure sometimes you can say “lets take this over to FriendFeed” or “lets go onto IM”, but if it’s a conversation where people have passionate opinions, that probably isn’t going to happen.  People aren’t going to stop and think first.  Usually.

Facebook ran into this same issue over the little word ‘is’.  Originally all Facebook status messages started with ‘is’, as in ‘Glenn is wasting time on Facebook instead of working” (Anyone from the office reading this, that was just an example, really).  They expected people to use it for the same purpose as twitter, as a ‘what are you doing/thinking right now’.  But of course, people didn’t want to just do that, they wanted to be able to say other things, maybe things not directly about them, or maybe in a different tense.  So you ended up with this weird Facebook-grammar like ‘Glenn is wow it’s really hot today’ (see this group for a good list of them), or you had to twist what you were going to say into something about you right now.  So really, Facebook was slowly molding you into a narcissist.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have my resume on this site.   It’s in plain HTML, marked up with the hresume microformat.  A number of people have asked me why I’ve done this, whether it is not just a waste of space.  The fact is that even though I have no email address or phone number on this site, just the contact form, I get at least 2-3 messages a month from recruitment headhunters with job opportunities.  Quite a lot of these are decent roles, they may not be exactly what I’m looking for, but it’s a good thing to get your name & resume out there.

One of the main reasons for this is that if you type “.net resume Sydney” into Google, my resume usually turns up on the first or second page.  I know some people have a resume linked to on their site in Word or PDF format.  Now this is fine, and Google can index both formats, but it is far easier for the recruiters to scan HTML quickly and there’s no need to load other applications.  They go through a lot of resumes every day, so anything you can do to make yours more visible is going to help you out. 

Now make it a cut-down version, don’t give them everything, and I really don’t suggest putting your address, phone number or email address on there.  As I said, as long as you have a contact form of some sort, you’ll still get contacted.  Also I suggest leading with a summary, sort of a mini-cover letter.  Outline what you do now, briefly what you have done & what you’re looking for in your next job.

Also, keep an up-to-date version of your resume in Word or PDF format that you can send back to recruiters when they contact you.  I keep a copy on a USB thumbdrive that I carry everywhere.  Once a recruiter contacts you, they’re going to want a file that they can print out & send to the prospective employers.

One more thing I’d mention is this: if you’re not interested in a new job, still put your resume up.  You may not need a job now, but odds are that you will within the next year or two.  By putting your details out there you increase your visibility and increase the likelihood of getting a job when you need it.

Never turn down an opportunity.

I’ve just checked in a new version of the FriendFeed Comments plugin, which you can download here.  If you’ve already got it installed it should be showing up that an update’s available any moment now.

There’s a lot of code tidy ups and debug improvements, but the major change is the addition of the ability to remember your FriendFeed username & API Key when you comment on or like a post.  There’s now a ‘remember’ checkbox under the API Key field (which is now password masked, like it always should have been!).  If you tick that, it will drop a cookie onto your computer which means you don’t have to keep typing in your username & API key for that blog.

An important security note: the cookie doesn’t contain any identifiable information in it.  It just has a hash key value that is used to look up your username & api key in the blog’s database (which is stored in plain text in the blog’s database).  There is no way through the plugin for the site owner to see your API Key, but if they open their database directly, it is possible.  As in any other case, only share your API key with sites that you trust.  If you don’t tick the ‘remember’ box, your username & api key will not be stored anywhere.

As always, try it out here and then give it a go on your site if you like.  Any problems, please let me know.

Amit Agarwal from Digital Inspiration has posted that FeedDemon, the best RSS reader ever, has been updated to version 2.7.  It’s kind of unexpected as the last version that was announced by Nick Bradbury was the 2.6.1 RC2.   Nick has added Amit’s post to his shared clippings folder, but other than that there’s been no ‘official’ announcement.  FileForum seems to have gotten the update first, and then the Newsgator download page was hastily updated to the 2.7 version (the page still mentions the 2.6 version, but the download file is for 2.7).

Read the rest of this entry »