Post to ping.fm from your widget dashboard | jyoseph.com
Smart combination of Safari 3’s built-in “create a Dashboard widget out of whatever I select in this window” feature with Ping.fm’s native ability to pop out a posting window. Seems to work just fine for me.
The Mac has prospered because of quality. Both in terms of Apple themselves and 3rd-parties. The iPhone is at a dangerous point right now. It’s on the verge of becoming commoditized and so is the 3rd-party software on it. And the VCs are right there behind this and will probably drive it if the market lets them.
via LKM’s stuff
Chyrp is a blogging engine that surfaced earlier this year with a focus on being lightweight, flexible, and very plug-in-able. Already it has a respectable list of add-ons (though not too many available themes), and a new 2.0 release has just emerged from a beta period with a RC1. See the 2.0 announcement post I linked for the most thorough list I could find of what’s new.
Matthew Buchanan has improved upon an iPhone UI for Tumblr blogs that Tumblr Hacks developed. Now, you can redirect your visitors to http://tumblephone.com/<username>/ and they’ll see your tumblelog rendered like mine looks below:
Tumblr offers its own built-in, generic mobile view for blogs by default, but this of course plays much better on iPhones.
I know the title’s snarky and that there are some genuinely useful reasons for letting PDFs display ads (after all, a URL isn’t the only way to visit a commercial publication). Still, seeing this headline got a knee-jerk “wtf” reaction out of me considering all the crap, especially Flash, that Adobe is dumping into PDFs these days.
About half a year or so ago, I switched my Mac OS X Dock to the right side of my screen since most of my daily activities involve reading vertical pages of text. I also chose the right side of my display instead of the left because Mac OS X is designed to place any connected drives and new files (downloads, screenshots, etc.) over there. Less mouse traveling between the left and right sides of my display, whether on a 13-inch MacBook Air or my Mac Pro’s 24-inch display, makes me happy. But there’s a subtle catch to moving the Dock to the right side of the display, and I forgot that I discovered a very simple fix for it a few days later.
Right after you move your Dock to the right side, you’ll probably notice that it overlaps any drives and icons that Mac OS X has already aligned over there. While you can manually move and realign those files, I found that right-clicking the desktop and choosing Clean Up to be more efficient. Not only will this command do all that tedious work of realigning your icons for you, but it seems to make Mac OS X take notice of the Dock’s new position and size, and remember it in the future. New files you download or otherwise place on the desktop should obey the new boundary and stay out from underneath the Dock, and you get less mousing to do between your most frequently used apps and desktop items.
Not doing anything to help my blognundrum, I just stumbled across an appetizing new iPhone app this evening called Tumble. Yes, that light tingling feeling somewhere in the back of your head is right: this is an (unofficial) app for posting to a Tumblr blog, sans audio and video posts for obvious reasons. It’s free, and I’ll be trying it out soon.
I’ve posted thoughts about a blognundrum I consider myself to be stuck in over at my Tumblr blog, sometimes also referred to as my linkblog. Mind sharing your thoughts on my predicament over there?
It’s about darn time. The new WordPress themes directory is great, and is a much more trustworthy place to find themes. Should also serve as a beacon for theme authors now that it’s coming from the lion’s mouth.
Just be sure to click through to a theme you’re interested in if you want to see a preview before downloading. A “preview” button isn’t linked on this main page, but each individual theme page has one.
FriendFeed is, of course, a clever service that lets you aggregate all the content you create at various sites into one single lifestream. Basic social networking features allow users to follow each others’ streams, and comment on each item in a stream. Simple enough.
Something has bothered me about FriendFeed ever since I began tinkering with the service, and recently it finally clicked: In addition to aggregating all the stuff a user creates at various communities, FriendFeed should also aggregate the conversations happening around these items from those other communities.
A while ago there was a lot of talk about services like FriendFeed and Twitter hijacking “the conversation” because things like comments on blogs and Flickr photos are moving to these new, simple services. As FriendFeed, Twitter, and their lifestreaming and microblogging competitors increasingly become places for discourse about media published elsewhere, they can dramatically increase their value both to users and visitors by bringing all those external conversations along for the ride.
For example: when you publish a photo to Flickr, a thumbnail and link appear in FriendFeed. Perhaps someone shares a link to the photo on Twitter, most likely doing so with a TinyURL to leave room for their own comment in Twitter’s SMS-friendly 140 character count limit.
People can comment on the photo at Flickr, on the FriendFeed entry, or reply to their friend on Twitter who posted the TinyURL link. The conversation about that photo is in at least three places now.
FriendFeed, or a more useful competitor that has yet to emerge, could offer a major value to users (and perhaps charge a nominal “pro” account fee) by harnessing comment RSS, website APIs, and some clever Twitter magic to aggregate all these conversations. They could be syndicated and linked on each content entry, along with any other comments that users leave.
We already have more than enough lifestreaming services to chose from. Which one will be the first to add “convo-streaming” as a feature, and do it right?
Linkblog
2 days ago 