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December 3, 2008

December 3, 2008 · 2 MIN READ · BY LOUIS GRAY

Amazon Wish Lists of the Geeks and Bloggers In Time for Holidays

Amazon Wish Lists of the Geeks and Bloggers In Time for Holidays

A year ago tonight, I suggested you get in the Holiday spirit and buy your favorite bloggers a gift, by leveraging their public Amazon Wish Lists. With Amazon being available to practically anyone, and featuring just about every item imaginable, making a list for Santa is as easy as logging into your Web browser and clicking on a few items. Given this simplicity, most techies have set up Wish Lists, and if you are in a giving mood, you can make them very happy. After all, it's said the holiday season is about giving, less so than receiving, so you have plenty of opportunities, as in 2008, I've expanded the list dramatically, including not just household name bloggers, but the techies behind some of our favorite Web applications, and the other authors you've seen help expand the variety of posts on the site.

Even with the economy being the way it is, I'm sure you can surprise somebody out there with a little gift. Here are links to what some of the folks you bump into online are looking for this year... making your life even easier if they are on your Secret Santa list.

Extended LouisGray.com Team



FriendFeeders Team



Bloggers and Techies


This list is by no means fully inclusive, so have some fun with it. Find names I missed and post them in the comments or send me a request if you think you should be included! Have a great holiday and go shop!
AmazonChristmasHoliday
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December 3, 2008 · 2 MIN READ · BY LOUIS GRAY

Push Yourself to a Healthy Lifestyle With Web Communities, Tools

Push Yourself to a Healthy Lifestyle With Web Communities, Tools

By Daniel J. Pritchett of Sharing at Work (Twitter/FriendFeed)



photo by nchenga
Has your career eased you into a sedentary lifestyle?  Are you keeping your mind sharp by tracking tech trends but losing your hold on physical fitness?  One of the big downfalls to wired life is the ease with which we can lose touch with our surroundings but the emergence of the social web is helping to change that.  Keep reading for some communities and tools that will help keep you informed and motivated in the never-ending journey to a healthy life.

Learn new exercises and proper form
Try YouTube and Wikipedia for demonstrations of proper form.  One of my favorite virtual personal trainers is YouTube's Scooby1961.  Scooby is a very modest and endearing fellow.

Real-world personal trainer Ross Enamait has a site full of workout information and a vibrant personal fitness community on his forums.  Ross's stuff tends to be geared towards the "combat athlete", so if you're not into boxing et al you might not appreciate the tone of the forums as much as you will enjoy Ross himself.

Share motivation through social networks

Track your progress with gadgets and web tools

My daily walk plotted on GMap Pedometer
    Nutrition help
    You'll want to keep your diet on track, too.  Check up on the nutrition content of your favorite foods using any of a number of online resources like NutritionData.

    Your turn!
    What keeps you motivated?  What are your favorite online health resources?  I'm sure LouisGray.com readers can chip in with your own personal fitness anecdotes, favorite health tips, and best-loved social networks for exercise help.  I'd say the one thing that really got me thinking about fitness in manageable terms was BripBlap's article titled 101 thoughts on losing 100 pounds.

    Read more by Daniel J. Pritchett at Sharing at Work.
    SportsTwitterWebfitnessYouTube
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    December 3, 2008 · 5 MIN READ · BY LOUIS GRAY

    15 Useful Google App Engine Applications

    15 Useful Google App Engine Applications

    By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)


    Google App Engine, which was released in April 2008, is a platform for building, hosting and scaling web applications using Google's infrastructure. It allows a developer to build and test web applications without the worry of maintaining servers, and so forth. It's pretty much a plug and play type of solution, just upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users. A lot of these applications are very raw and are just test beds for the developers. There are quite a few that are useful and have some potential. This post highlights 15 of them.

    1) Down or Not

    This is a simple utility that will tell you if a website is online or offline. This site also displays a tag cloud of the last 100 or so websites that have been queried for their uptime.



    2) Check Google Pagerank

    This will allow you to check your website's Google Pagerank. What's also great about this utility is the ability to check Pagerank for up to 100 domains per time.



    3) Jumbra

    Jumbra allows you to combine your favorite RSS/Atom feeds into a single RSS feed. This could save a lot of time with unnecessary checking of multiple feed urls. You can combine up to 30 feeds to create one custom master feed. You can also share this url, and when you add new feeds, your jumbra feed will update automatically. I also set up a testing Jumbra RSS feed you can take a look at.


    4) Browse the iPhone app store

    This application is an HTML version of the iPhone app store. You can see the full previews of any selections available for purchase such as music, movies, games, apps etc. I particularly like this app because you can browse the iPhoneappstore without the iTunes software. It's at the point of purchase that you are directed to the Apple iPhone App Store, where you must have the iTunes software installed to complete the sale.


    5) Go2

    Go2 is a quick, free web Proxy. Proxy servers usually sit between an application such as a Web browser, and a web server. They intercept all requests to the real server to see if it can fulfill the requests itself. I tested it by using a simple http request, and it worked. The results and IP address all point back to Google's network. Black Spider is also another Google App Engine/web proxy that works well.


    6) TCP3 Short and Tiny URL Generator

    TCP3 is a url shortening application. It serves the same purpose as the rest of these services do and it works efficiently. There is an option for creating vanityurls. They also offer a gadget for iGoogle, and a toolbar shortcut that you can use to shorten the url of whatever page you happen to be on at the moment.


    7) MyTextFile

    MyTextFile is an ajax-powered notepad for quickly storing bits, or a single plain file of text. You can use it to store notes, snippets of text, web urls,or any other form of scribbled information. Login in with your Google credentials, and easily write notes on the fly and access them anywhere.


    8) URL-Info

    This application allows you to find out more information behind a specific web url. This retrieves the HTTP headers, links, images, and others information. Be sure to add this tool to your SEO toolbox.


    9) Linkius
    This application gives you your own custom mobile url to access and store bookmarks. The bookmarks are accessible via your mobile optimized url. You can create groups, and add new links directly from your desktop. I find this to be a pretty simple and solid application for what it was designed for.


    10) Treksee Map Pedometer

    This is a useful mash-up that will show you the distance between two points, in miles or km. You could use it to track how far you drove, biked, jogged etc. I could see myself using this for plotting the mileage points on family summer vacations, which involves a lot of time spent on the road.


    11) PrintWhatYouLike.com

    This application allows you to print only the the relevant data on a web page. This is done by letting you remove or reformat the elements on a web page. Trim the excess junk, white space, advertisements and save paper in the process. This should be a definitebookmarker.


    12) News Served Del.icio.usly

    This is an interesting tool for discovery. It works by finding and reading the latest news by using your Delicious tags. You give the site your Delicioususername only and it generates news categories that are basically personalized with your bookmark tags. Clicking a tag will bring up the most relevant news sources for it, that are pulled from blogs and other news sites.



    13) Re.flect.net

    Re.flect is a simple website mirroring service. Here's how it works. "Give it a URL and Re.flect will attempt to serve a pre-cached copy of that URL. If the cached copy does not exist it will try to cache and serve that request on-demand, future requests will then be served from their cache limiting demand on the originating server."


    14) Lullar Com

    This application allows you to search and find people across the social web. You can search for social profiles by email, first name, last name orusername. It's very similar to usernamecheck.com.


    15) Spy

    Louis wrote a nice review on Spy back in August. Spy is great for monitoring elements of the social net for topics of interest and brand monitoring. The service scans in real time, Twitter, Google Reader, FriendFeed and more. Looking backwards as little as one hour, or as much as two days for the relevant topic sources. It's a great way to visualize the social media conversations going on about a specific topic.



    You can find more interesting and usefull apps at the Google App Engine Application Gallery.

    Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.
    applicationsWeb applicationsGoogleWebGoogle App Engine
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    December 3, 2008 · 2 MIN READ · BY LOUIS GRAY

    Twitter Withdraws Plans for Supporting OpenMicroblogging

    Twitter Withdraws Plans for Supporting OpenMicroblogging

    By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

    In a very quiet announcement in a bug request on Google today, Alex Payne, API Lead at Twitter, announced the popular microupdate service would switch the status of implementing OpenMicroblogger support from "Accepted", to "Won't Fix".  In the words of Payne, "We've considered this request, and we feel that OpenMicroBlogging doesn't map cleanly onto the services and methods that the Twitter API provides, particularly as we expand our set of methods in the next release."

    We previously covered Twitter's initial plans to offer OpenMicroblogging support here before.  With Twitter's attendance at Steve Gillmor's Bear Hug Camp it seemed it may only have been a matter of time for Twitter to accept OpenMicroblogging into their network. Such acceptance would mean other developers could implement their own microblog implementations that could communicate with Twitter in an easy format, and allow users of those services to continue to follow the friends they had already established on the Twitter service. Twitter, being the near-monopoly in microblogging that it is, seems to have other plans.

    While Twitter is seeming to remain open to some other option that would resolve the issues that OpenMicroblogging seems to fix, they have continued to ignore the OpenMicroblogging community in being open to letting Twitter lead the discussion on OpenMicroblogging.  Back in July, Evan Prodromou, author of the OpenMicroblogging spec, put the offer out, asking, "If you have some ideas of what sort of adoption metrics we have to hit, let me know."  The question went unanswered however as the issue quickly became one of the most popular issues in the queue for Twitter to implement.  It appears in this particular instance, Twitter simply doesn't want to listen.

    Payne tried to calm the concerns by saying, "Should the specification evolve to better reflect what we're trying to achieve, we'll reconsider supporting it." Prodromou responded to Payne's offer by stating, "Alex, we're working on a next release of the OMB spec. If you can send me your notes on what you'd like to see in OMB, I'll be happy to include them. Since the point of the protocol is to create a federated network of Twitter-like sites, it's clear that we'd love to hear your suggestions."  But since his offer this morning, there still has been no response from Payne or Twitter.

    For a site that wants to be more attentive to its developers and users, Twitter seems to be dropping the ball in this case, repeatedly ignoring requests by the community to help in the efforts of developing the OpenMicroblogging spec.  Since they have a near-monopoly, can you blame them though?  Or perhaps it's because their time is being spent elsewhere.

    Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.
    TwitterAPI
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