Java Blog Posting Library
Does anyone know of any Java-based (or any other language, for all I care) utility or library that makes it easy to post blog entries to various blog systems (Blogger, MovableType, WordPress, LiveJournal, etc)?
Does anyone know of any Java-based (or any other language, for all I care) utility or library that makes it easy to post blog entries to various blog systems (Blogger, MovableType, WordPress, LiveJournal, etc)?
One of my very good friends, Kevin, as well as my old CEO back from my Spoke days, work at a company called MerchantCircle. Kevin recently opined about how the focus of MerchantCircle relates to the upcoming presidential election.
First, a quick note about what MerchantCircle does: think "social networks for businesses" and you kind of have the idea. Instead of focussing on the consumer, like review sites like Yelp and CitySearch do, they focus on the business. Businesses can "partner" with other businesses for coupon deals (think "friends"), create their own home page, (think "profile page"), and provide an official response for praise or criticism of their business.
I find his points interesting specifically because of the waves Fred Thompson is now making as he begins his candidacy. Fred Thompson is claiming that he, like Howard Dean, will use the power of the internet and social networks, to run a more effective campaign for less.
So far we've heard about Barrack's MySpace page, but I don't really think things like that are a good demonstration of how Web 2.0 can be utilized to improve our democracy. MySpace is, afterall, mostly about kids who can't even vote, or stoners who likely won't.
However, more focussed communities like MerchantCirlce (small businesses), Digg (high tech workers, perhaps?), or online schools (ie: University of Phoenix, etc) might provide an excellent conduit for engaging in deep, thought-provoking exchanges about specific issues.
Forget town halls, virtual town halls, or even debates - they are too general and end up suffering from the "law of diminishing returns" because their audiences cover such a broad base. I think engaging with a specific community about needs specific to them, on a mass scale, would really open our eyes up about the candidates. I would love to see an online chat with Digg users, or a forum for MerchantCircle users to ask tough questions.
Update: MerchantCircle just recently celebrated it's one-year birthday. Congrats to them. I love the idea of bridging local small businesses and the vastness of the internet.
My only complaint would be that they focus on the business owner and not the consumer, but that's not really a valid complaint because they readily point out to and integrate consumer-focussing sites, ending up being a companion to them more than a competitor.
A good friend of mine is looking for some PHP wizards. The startup is interesting, the people are smart, and the location rocks (right next to the San Francisco Giants ballpark, where I used to live). See if the following matches you (or someone you know), and if so ping me and I'll get you introduced.
And for you Java guys that read my blog (most of you): don't be put off by PHP. Remember, Resin can run PHP now, and so there is an opportunity to mix Java and PHP if it makes sense.
Who We Are
LicketyShip is a technology startup angel backed by some of the brightest minds in the Silicon Valley . Named a Top 5 Startup by Fortune Magazine, LicketyShip aims to deliver items consumers order online in 2 hours, direct from retail stores.
Here's a brief article that describes what we're up to:
www.techcrunch.com/2006/05/11/kozmo-nostalgia-try- licketyship /
Who We're Looking For
We're looking for 1 exceptionally talented PHP Programmer/Designer to join us in our quest to change the face of e-commerce. The warrior we're looking for will not be just an employee – he will become the 5th member of a tight-knit team.
If you consider yourself one of the best PHP Programmer/Designers on earth, have a fire burning deep within you to be part of a meaningful, successful company, and want to be a member of a strong, dedicated team just as passionate about technology as you, then this may be the only job you'll ever have to apply for.
Our Lifestyle
Our homebase is the infamous Third Floor at 625 2nd St. in San Francisco , just across from the ballpark in the South Beach/South Park area. Some of our good friends and neighbors are VideoEgg, Ruby Red Labs, Spot DJ, Odeo, and Buzz Logic.
Startup life is a blast - we go out together, eat many meals together, and even occasionally hit the punching bag together (best company purchase we've ever made) :-p
We work like a family, and we're all in it for the same reason - we absolutely LOVE what we do, and we wake up every morning excited about what the new day will bring.
Your Job
Your Skills
Next Step
If this job sounds like its for you, send your resume to: mydreamjob@licketyship.com SUBJECT: I Am A PHP Warrior. Or just leave a comment on this blog or email me at plightbo@gmail.com and I'll get you in touch.
If anyone is interested in taking on some extra part time work (maybe 5-10 hours a week) for a stealth project in the area of social networking (can't say more at this point), backed by a very solid team with a proven track record, let me know.
The technologies we're working with include a mixture of things from Project Able and things from RIFE. Right now we're only interested in bringing in people who are highly trusted and have some spare time. So if you're one of my opensource acquaintances and have the time, let me know. Sorry, if I don't know you it is best that you not ask to get involved right now.
Requirements include:
My friends at MerchantCircle, which was founded by some of the same people behind my old company, Spoke, were selected today as the business blog of the day.
Not surprising either, the blog is very active and has a lot of insight in to their business plans. But more than that, it's actually a good resource to learn from too. The founders of MerchantCircle have a lot of experience and it's nice to know you can glean some of that experience off of their blog.
Feel free to check it out here. Or if you're actually a small business owner (or know someone who is), check out their product when it officially launches!
Who the hell decided that Gmane was worth a damn? It has to be the most retarded webapp ever. I just wrote up a long post to the jetty discuss list and got back this error: You have lines longer than 80 characters. Fix that.
Are you kidding? They really want me to go through each line and manually add line breaks at 80 characters. Keep in mind that the input is in a textarea box, so knowing where 80 characters is not exactly easy.
Honestly, this has to be the worst designed webapp. Ever.
A friend of mine, Auren Hoffman, is starting a company called RapLeaf. If anyone is looking for a job in San Francisco with a very early stage startup, let me know and I'll get you hooked up. Auren is a very smart and well-connected guy and I'm sure RapLeaf will do great. I've tested out early prototypes and I think they are on to something.
Job openings cover both engineering and marketing. See more at Auren's blog about two marketing positions (here and here). For the engineering positions, you can just drop me a note and I can pass your resume along.
Bonus points: they are using Rails, if that helps (personally, I'll forgive Auren, but just this one time) :)
Some of you may have noticed I've been blogging more. That is because I finally got off bloglines + MT's built in blog publication/website. I've started using NetNewsWire and MarsEdit and it is just so much easier to track blogs and post my own entries. If you have OS X and don't use them, try it out.
For all this talk about how Spring and whether it is good or bad or we get it or don't get it, there is one thing about this whole discussion that really irks me: javablogs.com. Based entirely on the subject, rather than the content, the "popular entries" are currently "I Don't Get Spring" and "I Don't Get 'I Don't Get Spring'". To prove my point, I titled this post something even more "headline grabbing" - and I won't be surprised that it makes it's way to the top of the popular entry list.
I propose we fix JavaBlogs. Why not start a system where blogs in a community (Java, Politics, whatever) can be rated after they have been viewed? Then those ratings can be applied in the popular topics. On top of that, it catches those who don't visit javablogs.com but instead come through RSS feeds.
Anyone else think JavaBlogs' popularity system is a bit lame?
PS: Sorry to be a tease with the subject, you'll find no flame war about Spring in this entry (though I have recent entries talking about it, so go there if you want).
PPS: I'm planning to write a blog community service exactly like this, but for Politics. Perhaps the JavaBlogs community can join me and we can produce a generic system that works for any community. Or, for those Java folks that are also political couch potatoes, let me know if you'd like to help out.
I have finally made the switch over to FeedBurner - please update your RSS readers accordingly. The new URL is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Blogbody
Dojo. WebWork. Struts. Selenium. Selenium IDE. OpenQA. OpenSymphony. All of these communities have their mailing lists synchronized with a Jive Forums installation that I manage, and today I made RSS feeds slightly more detailed for those that wish to watch a project's activity without subscribing to a mailing list or visiting a web site every day.
Simply grab the standard RSS feed for threads (fourth icon to the right) at the OpenSymphony forums or OpenQA forums. Then just add &full=true to the end of the URL. The RSS feed you end up with is a list of the active threads, with the entire thread discussion included. It's a bit "heavy weight", but it works great with a news reader like NetNewsWire. The list of authors of each reply at the top makes it even easier to quickly check if a known expert in the community has recently replied, letting you quickly skim over the thread.
So if you are looking for an easy way to track these projects, try out these new RSS feeds. Feedback is of course welcome!
There aren't too many reviews of iWeb around, so if anyone wants to know the skinny, I have just two words for you: skip it.
iWeb has to be the worst software Apple has ever released. It looks slick at first, but then you realize right away there is a problem: the blog software doesn't have comment support. Or trackbacks, or any other interactive capability. In fact, it simply just spits out static HTML every time you update the site.
On top of that, dragging in images from iPhoto does not resize them for use on the web. Instead, iWeb just resizes the img tag width and height attributes, making the download sizes far too large.
Furthermore, the templates Apple provides are not editable. This means that each time you create a new blog entry, you have to remove or overwrite the lorem ipsum text in the template, as well as the photo included (in some of the blog templates).
In fact, the only good thing about iWeb is that the non-blog stuff is just mediocre. For those that don't know how to set up a website, their templates are so-so. But even then, they are extremely limiting. Too bad, it really looked like it had some promise.
My friend Auren Hoffman suggested I check out karmaOne. Like LinkedIn, the idea is to use the power of the social network to refer people to open jobs. Using referral rewards as incentive and requiring candidates already be employed, this approach is a bit different than LinkedOn. On top of that, LinkedIn uses connections that are much stronger than karmaOne. That is, in LinkedIn you actually have to know the person you are referring to (this person may be a strong or weak tie).
In karmaOne, the traditional strong and weak ties are used, but there is a new kind of connection being utilized: a person merely needs to be connected to you by reading your blog. I think this approach is interesting, as some of my best contacts I've made in the past were through blog-reading. There is a lot more of a social dynamic to reading someone's blog than I think we give credit for, and it sounds like karmaOne has recognized that and is trying to capitalize on it.
The blog connections are interesting, but don't represent the core of karmaOne. More importantly, they feel that the best candidates for a job are those that already have a job. And with that, they actually don't allow people who are unemployed to use their service. I find this approach interesting (though a little sad for the guy just laid off).
I present the first selection of job openings sent my way. Let's see how it works out:
A while back Mike blogged about "open companies" in regards to the start a wiki war. I tend to agree that companies that embrace "openness" (which is a bit tough to define) tend to be the ones that can turn on a dime and confront new challenges more quickly. I tend to think that one could even offer the source for free (a la Resin) and merely construct the license agreement such that companies must pay for the product if they intend to use it commercially. I am one of those people that doesn't believe that money is lost just because someone pirates software or music -- only if they pirate it in lieu of buying it. Since corporations never risk getting in legal hot water, I don't tend to be concerned with releasing the source provided the license protects me.
So I found out why MT-Blacklist wouldn't accept my settings. It turns out it has nothing to do with MT-Blacklist, but rather MT 3.12 (and other versions, no doubt), have a bug which prevents plugins from saving data when using Postgres. This really irritates me.
See: http://www.rayners.org/2004/06/getting_postgre.php
For one, it bugs me because MovableType is now commercial software and appears to not be thoroughly tested. But since I didn't pay for it (I'm using the free version, for now), I can't really complain too much about that. If only it was written in Java, then I could fix the crap out of it. My perl hacking days have long passed.
The other reason I'm annoyed is because the open source community (of which MT was part of until recently) continues to rely on MySQL as if it is the only DB in the universe. Look, I am heavily involved in the open source community, as many of you know. But the real world has taught me that not only is MySQL not used everyone, it also really sucks!.
I mean come on -- no foreign key constraints? Are you kidding? And I guess sub-selects were just recently added. People: let's get real and start using some real DBs.
So I finally upgraded lightbody.net. It used to be a Pentium 166 or 266 (I forget) with 256MB of RAM and a 6GB hard drive. Today it is an AMD Athlon 2200, 512MB of RAM, and a 60GB hard drive. Woo hoo.
I mostly did this to make MT-Blacklist run faster. Comment spam is getting ridiculous on this server, and my blacklist was so damn large that my old machine took 20 minutes to apply all the patterns.
So I also upgraded to MT 3.1 and MT-Blacklist 2.0. Unfortunately, it appears that something is busted between those two and the fact that I'm running mod_perl (though turning off mod_perl didn't seem to help). In short, I can't even turn MT-Blacklist on. I click "activate" and then submit the form; then I get a page back saying the settings were saved sucessfully.
Except that none of the settings changed. Grrrrreeeeat.
I don't want to add one of those plugins that requires a "security code", mostly because I feel they are messed up for disabled people (not that I have any blind readers as far as I can tell).
Anyway, so my server is beefy but now I'm getting comment spammed to death. If anyone knows how to fix this, I'd be forever in your debt.
So I installed MT-Textile, but I still can't scode in. I guess scode (the security key comment spam stopper) required the perl GD module, which is quite a pain to install. So much for CPAN always working.
Anyway, at least Textile was easy. Now for some fun:
* Blah
* Blah
* Blah
After more than 100 comment spams being added to my blog as well as my brother's blog, I've decided to do something about it. I added the MT-Blacklist plugin and took care of 95% of the comment spam in a single click. I'll be digging through the rest of my records as well and plan to keep my black list up to date.
Thanks Jay Allen!
Pretty old news I guess, but I'm just trying to get back in the swing of regular "postings" (I'm boycotting the word "blogging", it's too geeky).
My company released version 1.7, which sets the stage for some really exciting developments between now and the coming months. A sneak preview of what we are building can be found in the new support for public profiles. Check it out at http://center.spoke.com
So Jon Udell has a dilemma: when using LinkedIn he was asked to define his relationship with someone using a predefined list of options. Of course, none of those options fit his needs and he finds it frustrating that LinkedIn is trying to box in his unique relationships.
Lately I've been thinking about my social network less about a graph of connected dots with a single dot (me!) in the middle of it all, but rather a cluster of dots in the middle of the network, where the cluster are various forms of "me", depending on how I present myself to the person I have a relationship with.
What I mean by that is that the way I act towards my mother is different than that way I act towards my roommate, which is different from the way I act towards my boss. Not only is measuring the "strength" of that relationship important (Spoke does this and I believe LinkedIn has plans to do this as well), but I believe that in non-virtual social circles the people at each end of the relationship are unique as well. There is only one "Patrick-talking-to-his-brother", just as there is only one "Chris-talking-to-his-boss". These slants on the individual make the social network much more complex.
In the real world we manage this daily without even thinking about it. I don't swear in front of my grandma, and so the person she knows is slightly different than others know me as. That unique perspective is important in our daily lives and is very subtle and most likely impossible to ever measure. I don't think that means that social networks are doomed to fail (duh, I wouldn't work where I do if that were the case), but I do think this subtlety adds an extra level of complexity to the task of mapping out someone's social network.
Jon writes that his relationship could have been better represented in the form of a Google query URL. In the future I think more software systems will begin to combine data from all over the place to better understand the unique perspective of each relationship. While not totally perfect, it might provide a good approximation of the billions of neurons that fire off in our heads when we decide on whether to claim, "That was a good fucking movie" or "That movie was really neat".
Just found out about Dodgeball 3.0 from Many2Many. This is the reason why I will upgrade my phone and add text messaging to it. I've never really been impressed with all the fancy features on my phone (hell, it hardly works half the time anyway), but this is truly awesome.
I just heard from Dennis Crow, who is the creator of Dodgeball, and he informs me that it should be available in San Francisco in "early January". I can't wait.
This reminds me of ActiveCampus at UCSD. Through some funding by HP, my professor Bill Griswold was able to get hundreds of PDAs in to the hands of incoming freshman. Then using 802.11b cards and triangulation techniques, he could provide everyone a map of where their friends were on campus.
In a class I took with professor Griswold, Ubiquitous Computing, my team created a messaging system that was designed to route messages based on predefined rules. The idea behind it was that when linked up to ActiveCampus, rules could be created like "if I’m away from my desk and it is 8:00AM - 5:00PM, forwards emails to my phone". I'd love to see this kind of stuff really take off. Of course, as I mentioned a couple days ago, there is a great deal of anxiety that can be brought out when computer systems know where you are at all times.