Technology – Page 26

Bad Behavior Misbehavin’?

A couple weeks back I installed Michael Hampton’s Bad Behavior plugin for WordPress. Seemed to have a attracted a lot of positive comments while I’ve been drowning in spam, so I figured, what they heck.

Well, it turns out that this is a pretty heavy duty solution that can bring some unintended consequences.

For one thing, forget about going directly to your WordPress blog from your Gmail account. Bad Behavior blocks the Google proxy.

And, as Tom Raftery and I discovered, forget about showing up on TechMeme.

Though you can edit BB’s whitelist.inc.php file to ignore TechMeme’s IPs (70.86.131.10, 70.86.46.66, and 82.165.180.34), Tom hasn’t seen any success yet.

With Akismet’s recent nap, I’m going to leave BB running for awhile longer with the IPs whitelisted and see what happens. Unlike Tom, I’m not that concerned about getting on TechMeme, but it is kind of a bummer that we haven’t found a simple and reliable solution yet.

Becoming a PIN person

I had no idea that you could send PIN messages to other Blackberries. I presume that you’re supposed to keep this stuff super secret, but I love that instead, as is your wont, you can turn these things inside out and make them social.

So I went ahead and got myself a pinppl account and now I’m promoting it.

Via GigaOm.

MacUpdate launches MacZot-like service called “MacUpdate Promo”

MacUpdate is now offering a daily service providing discounts on software to MacUpdate members. The service is similar to MacZot or Woot — sites offering a large daily discount on various current hardware or software.

A River of Fruit

Emily Chang, Pete Cashmore and the Download Squad all talked about xFruits months ago, but it seems pertinent to bring it up again now that there’s been some pickup of Dave’s River of News meme.

Interestingly, you can either run your own rivers without relying on Dave to offer the content or set up your own at xFruits, as John Walker suggests.

Heck, while we’re on the topic of decent mobile sites, I’ll point out a few other destinations I frequent on my Blackberry:

Adobe hearts XFN

Turns out that Adobe has been storing up a bunch of links on del.icio.us. Also seems like they’ve got a recent hankerin’ for microformats. Howzem apples?

Via Lifehacker.

Performancing now does MySpace

Those upstart folks at Performancing have released a version of their blog editor that works with MySpace. This is also apparently one of the first add-ons using their own PFF extension system.

Plazes for Mobile

Had dinner with Felix from Plazes the other night — always good dining company. An exciting recent development for them: looks like they’ve also publicly launched Plazer for Mobile! Now if only they supported the Blackberry… c’mon guys, Google’s doing it! Why can’t you?

Follow up on the mousetrap

Apparently I could have been more clear in my post on the Google Authentication mousetrap, so here’s some additional summary points:

It’s not so much about lock-in as it is that Google can steamroll over independent competition because of their ability to integrate and cross-promote services. In the first bubble, they called this synergy and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s better for users, but worse for upstart competitors.
As web apps become the norm, being able to move your data between them will become essential, and since almost all web apps require some form of authentication, you need to be able to share your credentials between these web apps to transfer the data.
Microsoft Word already runs on OSX and so you already can copy and paste data between it and Appleworks. My point is that that’s not the case on the web today. Because commercial use of APIs are restricted, you have to wait for companies to forge business deals before you get the kind of interop that you already have between different company’s desktop-based applications.
I feel that my view is squarely looking at reality — looking at what will happen if we don’t open up data formats and authentication protocols. I am placing my hope on microformats and OpenID — not because I care so much about the technology, but because until we have open standards for transferring data and open protocols for authenticating, it’s going to continue to be a disempowering situation for your typical end user. Like me.

The future of The John

On a visit to Berkeley for the Craigslist Nonprofit Bootcamp this past weekend, I happened to check out the lavatree (that’s phonetic mind you). To my surprise, they had waterless urinals! Cleverly, the designer of the urinals, Sloan Valve, left their name right in the trough, allowing me to find the source of this golden nugget and pass it on to you, fair readers.

Now, not only are these urinals environmentally friendly and odorless, but they’ll save you a boatload of loot on water and sewage savings!

And here in Web2.0World we thought we were all so innovative and oh so smaht. Seems we got nothin’ on the folks building out The John 2.0.

See your visitors in heat vision!

Today CrazyEgg, the brainchild of pinkoteer Hiten Shah, finally launched.

I’ve been dying for this to come out for sometime, being the visual person that I am. While MeasureMap helps me make sense of the data, it’s never really shown me, per page, where the most action is happening — nor in real time overlays (not to mention that it’s gone silent as of late). And while Google Analytics has a similar link analysis tool, it’s pretty nasty to look at compared with CrazyEgg.

They’ve also gone the smart (sustainable) route with their freemium pricing model.

Cheers Hiten and co., and Edward Tufte, eat your heart out!