News

Kontactr Update:

I was kontacted by the folks from Kontactr yesterday in regards to my review and they really appreciated it. They also gave me a small update as to the features they are working on.

We are working on allowing the users the ability to customize the AJAX form too. Also the ability to change the “Sender” of all the mails sent through Kontactr as “message@kontactr.com“. This will let you filter your messages more easily.

The ability to customize your Ajax powered contact form would be a big plus. If they wanted to, they could probably develop a social network where users could share their contact form designs with one another. This may be a stretch of the imagination but I think it’s certainly possible.

Free Stock Photos Via PhotoGen

Photgen.com Providing Free Stock Photos

Still paying for your photos and images? Forget royalty-free – try totally-FREE. Photogen stock photos are now FREE for commercial and personal use. The Photogen FREE stock photo gallery is constantly being updated with new photos and images. This should be an instant hit with website theme creators and template developers as other sites charge an arm and a leg to use their stock photography.

Here are a few links to the most popular images found within the service:

http://www.photogen.com/free-photos/free-stock-photo-1186.html

http://www.photogen.com/free-photos/free-stock-photo-1027.html

http://www.photogen.com/free-photos/free-stock-photo-210.html

http://www.photogen.com/free-photos/free-stock-photo-195.html

http://www.photogen.com/free-photos/free-stock-photo-1159.html

Thanks to Ray Cheung for the scoop

UK Version Of StumbleUpon

Streakr.com

Newswire is reporting that Streakr.com has entered into a beta phase and they are calling on users to test out their site. Streakr is described as a social networking, bookmarking, web discovery service. Users download a “discovery” bar into their browsers which finds new websites based on that users particular interests. Does this sound familiar yet? If not, please continue.

Users can then rate sites that they like or dislike by clicking on a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” icon. Now the service should really sound familiar! Stumbleupon anyone? The sites can also be reviewed and then shared with other Streakr members via the social network.

The CEO is and co-founder had this to say about Streakr:

“Streakr is unique in that it brings together web discovery, social bookmarking and a social network in a user-friendly, customisable environment.

“Web 2.0 is all about discovering, creating and sharing, so we’ve built Streakr to reflect that. One click and you can find the hidden gems of the web; rate them and instantly share them with your friends.

To make a long story short, it appears as though Streakr.com is going to be the UK version of Stumbleupon in what seems like every aspect. I wonder if they can get away with this?

Pardon My Dust

Blog Construction
I have spent the past 24 hours redesigning this site. I wasn’t too happy with the top half of the site as well as the sidebar. I also wanted to change the sites appearance as I am going to start blogging about more subjects rather than strictly adhering to Web 2.0. As I become more involved in the blogosphere, I am generating new opinions and knowledge that I want to share. I also wanted to give the blog a personal look and apply a personal feel.

It was a painstakingly long process, filled with problems. At times, the site looked like a complete mess which was viewable to anyone who visited the site. Instead of doing all of the changes locally, I decided to make live edits, something I discourage anyone from doing if you want to keep traffic flowing to your site. I’m still messing around with a few different design elements but for the most part, the redesign is finished.

Let me know what you think!

Twitter Updates Profile Sidebar

Twitter is going through a round of small updates today. One of the most noticeable differences revolves around the sidebar located on the right hand side of the site when your browsing a users profile. The sidebar now looks like this:

Twitter Updates Sidebar

Twitter has taken this oppurtunity to provide users an easily accessible link which allows users to configure their phone or IM client to work with Twitter. The update comes as a surprise to many as the official Twitter blog doesn’t mention any updates that were in store for the Twitter site. I noticed that the ARCHIVE section of my Twitter profile has been inaccessible for about 40 minutes. It makes me wonder if they are changing some things around with that area of the site as well.

Digg Like Comment Editor For WordPress

http://www.raproject.com/wordpress/wp-ajax-edit-comments/How many times have you published a comment, realizing just a few seconds later that you misspelled something, or your URL was incorrect. Usually, you would have to create another comment which would dismiss the previous comment.

Ronald Huereca of the Reader Appreciation Project has released a WordPress plugin which gives administrators and regular users the ability to edit their own comments within a given time frame. The plugin pretty much works in the same way that the Digg commenting system works.

The plugin uses Ajax so the entire page never needs to reload. Once a comment is published, a timer starts to count down the remaining time available to edit the comment. Once the timer reaches zero, only the administrator can edit the comment. Users can also edit their email address, or their URL by clicking on the text that needs to be edited. This will open the comment editor window allowing you to make the necessary changes.

Plugin Features

  • Utilizes the jQuery library.
  • Comment editing times out after 15 seconds.
  • Better error handling.
  • Graceful deletion for compatible themes.
  • A hook for other plugin authors to tap into.
  • Compatible with many plugins, including Akismet, WP Cache, Better Comments Manager, WP Grins, TinyMCEComments, and many more.

I have installed this plugin on this blog so now you’ll be able to edit your own comments. We need every WordPress blogger to install this plugin, or something similar so that users can edit their comments. Why this functionality is missing from WordPress by default is beyond me, but the solution provided above works out very nicely. Please visit The Reader Appreciation Project and grab your copy today and install it as soon as possible so people can edit their own comments.

Special thanks to the guys who host the WordPress Podcast for tipping me off on this plugin.

Yahoo And Google Social Networks Round 2

In a recent blog post, I described the way I am trying to converge my online presence, as I am beginning to go through social network fatigue. Thankfully Google and Yahoo get the gist and are working on two new social networks which hope to combine a user’s online presence onto one page. Their first attempts, Orkut and Yahoo360 have failed, with the exception of Orkut which actually has a strong following in Brazil.

Google sponsored a project last year at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute that was designed to “rethink and reinvent online social networking,” the Google Operating System blog reported. The site also has screenshots. Dubbed “Socialstream,” the service would be more like a unified social network that would allow someone to have accounts on multiple services but centralized contacts in one location.

On Yahoo’s side, there is a project called Mosh. Check out this job description for a summer intern spot at Yahoo on a “cool new social network product.” According to the post, Yahoo’s looking for someone with lots of friends on MySpace and Facebook and who is “damn funny.”

I would love to see either one of these new social networking services actually see the light of day. It’s a breath of fresh aire to see that companies are beginning to realize the potential behind social convergence.

Who’s Amung Us Update

http://whos.amung.us

Since the launch of Graphs.Amung.Us, the Whos.Amung.Us site has seen a dramatic increase in the time it takes to load the page. I’ve also noticed that the little icon used to display how many concurrent users are on your site at one time has occasionally disappeared. The icon, when clicked on, is also producing Internal-500 errors which is shining proof that the infrastructure behind the service is maxed out. Christopher Shannon has recently posted a blog entry that clarifies the issues currently ongoing:

We’ve been experiencing a huge surge in traffic lately, and our current infrastructure is stretched to the max right now, but we are working as fast as we can to get things back up to the blazing fasts speeds we used to enjoy, so just bare with us for a couple more days.

Good thing they recently added Google ads to a few of their pages or else WhosAmungUs would probably go belly up.

Who’s Amung Us Update

http://whos.amung.us

Since the launch of Graphs.Amung.Us, the Whos.Amung.Us site has seen a dramatic increase in the time it takes to load the page. I’ve also noticed that the little icon used to display how many concurrent users are on your site at one time has occasionally disappeared. The icon, when clicked on, is also producing Internal-500 errors which is shining proof that the infrastructure behind the service is maxed out. Christopher Shannon has recently posted a blog entry that clarifies the issues currently ongoing:

We’ve been experiencing a huge surge in traffic lately, and our current infrastructure is stretched to the max right now, but we are working as fast as we can to get things back up to the blazing fasts speeds we used to enjoy, so just bare with us for a couple more days.

Good thing they recently added Google ads to a few of their pages or else WhosAmungUs would probably go belly up.

Jaiku Fixes Annoying Problem

http://www.jaiku.comFinally, Jaiku has fixed an annoying problem which I have been giving them hell about for quite some time. Twit actually has a channel on Jaku that I joined awhile back. Twit or (This Week In Tech) is administered by Leo Laporte and as you can imagine the channel became very popular very fast.

On the right hand side of the channel area is anumber which represents the amount of users who have joined that channel. Underneath that number, every user who is part of the channel also has their avatar displayed.

Once the channel member count reached about 1,000 it became apparent that something was wrong. The text that a member would type into the text area box would appear slowly while the images on the right hand side would load. All 1,000 images. I’m not sure if the amount of user avatars being displayed had something to do with the Ajax part of the page but it slowed everything to a crawl which became very annoying.

Only A Few Avatars Are Displayed

I am happy to say that Jaiku has fixed this problem. Now if you look at the right hand side of the Twit channel, you should see a list of member Avatars and then a MORE link which will provide you a page with even more avatars. Thank you Jaiku for fixing this annoying issue. Browsing and posting in popular channels has become fun again!