Crowdsource Software Payments to Reward Alert Developers

Not all software is free, and not all of it should be. Unless you are the type who can break out your C and Python manuals with ease, the time may come where you have an idea for a great application, and you're going to need someone else to do it. Why not leverage others who have the same need, and combine to provide a bounty, by which, if your solution is delivered to satisfaction, the developer or developers can reap the rewards directly from the end-users who will benefit from their product?

As a visible, active, FriendFeed user, I grew jealous by the success WordPress bloggers were having with Glenn Saven's nifty plug-in to show if items had received comments or "likes" from the popular social lifestreaming service. He had single-handedly developed a tool to unify conversations from disparate sources in an elegant way. But, for me, a long-time Blogger user, I was basically faced with a rock and a hard place. Migrate to WordPress, or keep my conversations separate.


This clearly wouldn't do. So, on May 25th, I said I needed a solution, writing:

Needed: FriendFeed Comments + Likes for Blogger (Old and New)

Thomas Hawk and I need your help. The WordPress bloggers are having way too much fun with getting FriendFeed likes and comments into their blog, and we using Blogger (both the old or new) can't yet do it. I am offering a $250 bounty to the developer of a solution good enough I can integrate into my blog. This would not replace Disqus, but go alongside it, as seen at the Inquisitr. Thomas and others, feel free to add to the bounty...

As much as the WordPress advocates wanted me to just switch blogging platforms (and I respect their views), I was looking for somebody to develop a solution that could help other FriendFeed users in the same predicament I was. After all, what was more likely? That you would see a lot of people make an exodus to a new platform for want of a widget, or that many people on Blogger would find the FriendFeed widget useful? I was willing to pay $250 to make this happen, and I wanted others to pay as well.

By June 16th, Pat Hawks had a solution worth paying money for, and Thomas Hawk agreed. He wrote, "I'm good for a match."


In the space of less than 30 days, I had helped spur an alert developer to create a fantastic solution which I have in place today, and one that continues to improve. Pat, for his efforts, not only gained at least the $500 from Thomas and me, but now has a great deal more awareness and respect across the FriendFeed community and the blogosphere at large. I bet that with platforms like FriendFeed, Twitter and others having direct, immediate, connections to people on the "demand" and "supply" side of the fence, this won't be the last time you see a crowdsourced method for getting software developed.


I am all too happy to give Pat $250, and I'm headed to PayPal now. In this age when you have developers trying to compete with free software and Web services, why not encourage them to build something that you would use, and offer them real cash? If you get enough friends together, you could end up with a serious code competition on your hands.

See also: WinExtra: Crowdsourcing a tech interview

FriendFeed Friday Tips #5: Bringing Comments Back to Your Blog

By popular demand, I've been asked by other FriendFeed users to highlight how I use the popular social lifestreaming site. So far the series has covered the "Hide" function, the bookmarklet, advanced search, and how to integrate with Google Talk. Today, I'm going to talk about how you can bring comments from FriendFeed to your blog, capturing the conversation.

While FriendFeed has gained considerable praise from many corners of the tech blogosphere, one place where they have been maligned is in how conversations that take place on the site aren't immediately ported back to the original blog. These "fragmented conversations" have flared up as major issues every couple of weeks, and while I've personally never had a problem with it, and have actually seen comments on my own site grow, even as I've used FriendFeed, many are hoping to keep control over the conversation and keep it on their site.

While FriendFeed hasn't yet introduced an initiative to defragment these conversations, in their place, independent developers have designed tools that will bring comments from FriendFeed back to blogs, including Wordpress, and as of today, Blogger, both the "new" and the "old" versions of Blogger. You can even see the brand-new tool for Blogger live on my site already.

Bringing FriendFeed Comments to Your WordPress Blog

WordPress has gained a lot of traction in the blogosphere, in part due to its wide library of available third-party plug-ins. Only a day after FriendFeed released its API, the entrepreneurial Glenn Saven debuted announced a plug-in that pulls back comments and likes from FriendFeed and displays them on your site.

As he writes on the plug-in page:

"The plugin ads a template tag called , which you can drop onto your template somewhere inside "the loop" so it can access the post’s details to match it up with the FriendFeed data.
Unzip the plugin into your plugins folder & activate it. You’ll then need to go into the options (or settings if you’re running WP2.5) and click on FriendFeed. Put your FriendFeed nickname in & save and you’re done with the setup. All the other settings in there are optional. You then need to place on your template file(s)."

The result is a two-way box that shows how many comments and likes an item received, as well as the avatars of the poster, and has the option to add a comment yourself, back to FriendFeed, assuming you know your user name and API key. You can see it installed at my fellow B-List blogger, Steven Hodson's site, at WinExtra. The below screenshot is from his post Some thoughts on a Microsoft after Gates.



Not having installed WordPress myself and tested this, I'm no expert, but from what I've seen from Steven's site and Duncan Riley's work at The Inquisitr, it works very well.

Bringing FriendFeed Comments to Your Blogger Blog

The argument could be made that Blogger's not the most robust platform out there. It certainly hasn't been the most reliable. And its lacking plug-in architecture has made it a less-preferred choice among the with-it digerati. And for the last three months, as WordPress users have enjoyed Glenn Slaven's solution, we Blogger users have been in the dark. Until now.

Pat Hawks posted code using Yahoo! Pipes, which delivers a lightweight JavaScript based solution, bringing FriendFeed comments back to the originating blog. See: FriendFeed Comments in Blogger.

Rather than copy the full code from Pat, I recommend you visit his page if this is important to you. Still being on the "old" Blogger, I saved my Blogger template (just in case), added the new code, just by adding the JavaScript code after where Blogger concludes comments, and before my already customized Disqus code. Now, when people (including me) comment on my FriendFeed items, I can see the comments here as well, as well as those from Disqus. It's now one great big conversation.



This, for me, is an exciting development. On May 25th, I offered a $250 bounty for the first solution good enough to integrate into my blog that shows both FriendFeed likes and comments. Now, Pat has delivered on comments. So... should I pay up now, or wait for likes to be supported as well? Either way, this is a great add.

On another solution? TypePad, for example?

I don't yet know of a way to get FriendFeed comments back to TypePad, the third leg of the blogging platform triumvirate. If somebody does have a solution, or is in the process, I'd love to hear about it.

So what comes next?

I expect this issue of comment fragmentation to fade away pretty quickly. It might not be long until there are solutions that support commenters, aggregators and publishers, all in one. But until then, these new ways to bring FriendFeed comments to your blog are a great solution. Leave a comment here (or on FriendFeed) if you've got one of these solutions running. I'd love to see it.

Google Blogger FTP Publishing: Out for 12+ Hours

I hadn't planned on making my blog a sounding board for all products that have had significant downtime, but this one has certainly hit close to home.

Starting yesterday evening, around 8 p.m., I have been completely unable to add new posts to the site, making it appear that I am asleep at the wheel. The culprit? An issue with Google's Blogger service, which has blocked the ability to post via FTP.

This is not the first time Google's Blogger has had a outage of significant length here, and also, not the first time they have completely ignored a throe of user complaints and support requests on their site.

At a time when Wordpress and other platforms are gaining significant momentum, and can tout "5 minute" upgrades, the temptation to move, assuming the site structure and comments are retained, is extremely high.

I'd have thought Google's acquisition of Blogger via Pyra Labs would have provided the team with significant experience in growing a scalable, trouble-free infrastructure, but from conversations I've had with people close to the team, it seems that the most infrastructure-focused employees at Blogger had stars in their eyes around Google's other products, and Blogger has suffered from neglect.

Something is Broken indeed.

Update: Finally acknowledged on Blogger Status and FTP is starting to flow. But this is ... bad.

See Also:

Google Blogger: Something is Broken!
http://tinyurl.com/5sejhy

Thomas Hawk Cites Blogger Outage on FriendFeed
http://tinyurl.com/3p96y8

From August 9, 2007:
Google Ignores Users During Major Blogger Outage
http://www.louisgray.com/live/2007/08/google-ignores-users-during-major.html

Disqus' Excellent Customer Service Enables Comments Integration

Disqus is seeing a meteoric rise as the default comments management system for the Web, enabling bloggers to deliver threaded comments, and track their own commenting activity throughout the blogosphere. Recently, Disqus has made a lot of headway through integration with popular social networking tools, including RSSMeme, ReadBurner, Fav.or.it and Plaxo.

But while I had tried earlier this month to get Disqus up and running, the way I use Blogger, with a customized template, along with FTP publishing to louisgray.com, got in my way. But overnight, with some incredible help from Disqus' Daniel Ha, the site now features Disqus comments for all posts, without losing the existing comments from previous conversations.

Disqus is designed to offer bloggers simple installation, be they on Wordpress, Blogger or TypePad. But by default, it assumes a user has upgraded to the newest edition of Blogger, featuring greater widget control, customized layouts and templates. As I have made numerous changes to my template in raw HTML, I haven't made this change, and Blogger hasn't made it easy for me to move to the new service, not making it available for FTP-hosted blogs like mine.

So essentially, I thought I would remain Disqus-free, saying so last night on Twitter. But showing incredible awareness, Daniel Ha of Disqus, said "How can we make it easier for you?"

We traded direct messages and e-mail, and he quickly understood the issue, offering to patch it manually.

Daniel came back with his first solution this morning, but that solution wouldn't have displayed old comments, which would be a showstopper for me, so I balked, asked for him to keep working on it, and again, he said he'd give it a shot. He wrote, "I will take a look into how to display the comments for older articles and let you know ASAP."

Just seven minutes later, he sent me an updated template, which now lets all blog entries, such as this one, use Disqus for comments. And all previous posts will also display Disqus comments, underneath existing conversations. At the moment, this change makes it look like the posts don't have existing comments, but they do, and over time, the Disqus comments will populate the data here, instead of Blogger's comments.

If Daniel hadn't been listening, and willing to give my "corner case" some real effort on a Saturday morning, we wouldn't have been able to get Disqus up and running. This is a great example of next-generation customer service, and engaging. Of course, if you see any oddities related to the new Disqus usage on louisgray.com, please do let me know. I'm listening, and so is Daniel...

Profy Rolls Out Combined RSS Reader, Blogging Platform

Profy wasn't satisfied by simply rolling out a brand-new online RSS feed reader to challenge the established leaders, including Google Reader, NewsGator and Bloglines. With one massive update, the new service, launched in beta yesterday, not only gives Web users a new option for RSS feed consumption, but also, a new blogging platform, with interesting features that integrate the two, as well as linking in to other Web services, including Blogger.

While the world isn't lacking for RSS readers, Profy's combined offering is very interesting. With some fine-tuning as the company moves out of the beta process, the service could be very compelling to both established bloggers and new ones looking for a simplified platform to get started.

There are a few facets to Profy to focus on, including the "Feed Reader", the "Blog", the "Dashboard" and their messaging system or "Inbox".

The Feed Reader operates much like others out there. I imported my 260 or so feeds from Google Reader, and Profy recognized the folder structure. The Feed Reader is laid out cleanly with multiple tabs, enabling me to select from "Posts", reading the available items, "Feeds", showing me the name of the feed, its URL, and giving me the option to make edits, and "Folders", matching those I had in my OPML file.

I can read posts in list view, showing the source, feed name and author, or I can select expanded view, showing the entire post in the reader. Those are the basics. And aside from adding keyboard shortcuts, like Google Reader and AssetBar, there's not too much to demand before the company hits 1.0.


In the Feed Reader, I can "Add Star" to highlight a post, E-mail it to a friend, add tags, or most interestingly, I can hit "Blog It!", which pre-populates a post in my complementing Profy blog, including the full text and links of the post. Profy essentially copies the full text and headline of the post in my own blog, with me as the author, leaving the deleting to me. It's a cool tool, but one I could see abused by spam bloggers, should they ever get into the system. In my testing, it was easy to use, and I could simply post a Facebook story as my own (See the below screenshot). Profy does give credit to the source in the bottom right corner of your own post, but I expect it'd be a bit better to tweak "Blog It!" to instead focus on the headline and URL.


The Feed Reader also offers some strong flexibility. I can search my feeds for keywords, and I can look at the "Subscribers" link on any feed to see if other Profy readers are subscribed to that same blog. From those results, I can even "Add to friends" to get connected to similar Profy users who like reading what I do.


The Blog operates like those in TypePad and Blogger. There are a wide array of blogging templates provided by Profy, and you're given a Profy URL, like TypePad, with your own username: (For example: louisgray.profy.com)


Once you've selected a blog template, you can edit the layout of your blog, make new posts, or further down the road, read or moderate comments on the site.


Posting to Profy is simple for any TypePad or Blogger user. There's the option to post in either WYSIWYG or HTML, and you can use helpful buttons for styling or for adding images and YouTube video.

But most interesting to me is the ability to cross-post to Blogger or other platforms from Profy. If I were to move to Profy as my RSS reader or blogging platform, I wouldn't have to change a thing on louisgray.com. I wouldn't have to move files from the FTP site, or tweak Blogger in any way, as Profy could cross-populate both the Profy.com hosted blog and my own, just by linking the two. In testing, it was transparent to me that both posts from my Profy blog hit the louisgray.com site. To be honest, I was hoping to make it less transparent, so I could "push" individual posts to louisgray.com or Techaiku, instead of it happening automatically, but I expect either I was missing a step, or they'll make that option in the future by the 1.0 release.

Once the Feed Reader and Blog are up and running, you can manage all activity via Profy's Dashboard. From the Dashboard, I can view blog posts, read feeds, see comments made on my blog, or exchange messages with other Profy users. And any friends I've found through Profy automatically populate my Network, which assuming service growth, would expand over time.


Click for larger Dashboard image
For a beta product, Profy has done a solid job in introducing a lot of good functionality not usually found even in some of the more established feed readers, or blogging platforms. The idea of linking the feed reader and blog, while not abandoning existing services, is a good one. Obstacles in their way, aside from the usual efforts of growing awareness, and keeping up with user expectations, would be to follow the lead of Fav.or.it or others to enable commenting from RSS feed readers to the original blog, integration of Disqus in either area, and the ultra-important area of keyboard feed navigation.

The question is, can Profy rise up, in 2008, to challenge the established leadership of TypePad, WordPress and Blogger? The big three hold a commanding mindshare and user base, which is formidable. But so long as Profy makes it transparent and easy to move data into their service from others, and continues on the path of innovating and linking their disparate services, they have as good a chance as any.

If you're interested in getting your hands on Profy, it is in limited invite-only beta. I believe I have five available, but with any luck, I can get more. Let me know if you're interested!

Google Update Breaks Embedded Shared Links

Often in engineering, a new feature comes with a tradeoff - new bugs. It appears that with the introduction of the new Google Reader, all bloggers who embedded their "Shared Google Reader Links", as I did, have seen their links disappear.

The ability to easily display my shared items from Google Reader in my Blogger template is one of the best features of Google's RSS feed service. Rather than updating my blog manually with each new shared link, the code was automatically refreshed through JavaScript. But as I noted on the Google Reader support forum, "something is broken", and there's nothing I can do to restore the feature.

As another avid Google Reader user writes, "Please fix this ASAP cause i have big community of bloggers internaly connected with this and it would not be nice to tell them all to change the code."

Just when I thought Google Reader was ready to turn the corner, and graduate from Google Labs, I found out this happened. We'll see how long it takes the company to respond. Previously, they haven't been fast at all in responding to user complaints and outages.

Google Ignores Users During Major Blogger Outage

Last night, when I tried to make two posts to the blog, Google's Blogger service stalled out, saying "your publish is taking longer than expected." But try as I might, repeated attempts went nowhere. Turns out FTP Publishing through Blogger was seriously broken, and not just for me, as a well-trafficked Google Groups support board shows.

Starting around 4 p.m. Pacific Time on Wednesday, Blogger users who utilize the FTP Publishing option, as I do, were unable to post new stories. And while they tried to contact Google through the company's own Google Groups service, the company made absolutely no response. You can see the frustration mount...

• Two hours in: "I'm seeing the same problem. Frustrating, isn't it?"
  
• Four hours in: "blogger just sits and spins without successfully publishing anything"
  
• Five hours in: "This is a serious problem! I can't believe it. Blogger should do something ASAP"

But Google didn't respond, and the service stayed down, driving users nuts.

• "Google's customer service is abhorent. These treads are full of issues that are never resoolved" (sic)
  
• "7 hours have passed since i first noticed FTP publishing was down..."
  
• "What happens now? Do we just discuss the problem amongst ourselves until a Blogger technician takes pity on us, or what?"

For many, it seemed incredulous that a company like this would be completely dark when all of us were affected.

"It is pretty unbelievable that it has been down so long without any kind of acknowledgement or statement from Blogger. Take 30 seconds to post an update!"

"Come on Blogger? What's up? Anyone got a update for us? Anything? It's 4:24pm (CST) here, and we're well over 24 hours into this issue with no resolution, nor any Google/Blogger response"

Meanwhile, the company's Blogger Status page never updated, nor did the Help site or the Known Issues page. Google never acknowledged a problem, nor did they come to the discussion board where those seeing the issue were asking for answers.

At some point mid-day today, the issue cleared up, but instead of an apology or an explanation as to what happened, or why it won't happen again, the company's users were ignored, expected to accept the level of downtime. I know it certainly threw a crimp into my schedule, and I'm not all that happy about it. It's enough to make me once again make sure I have all my data backed up and can change platforms (again) if necessary. I hope that won't be the case, but to answer a serious outage with silence doesn't fill me with pleasure.

Power Outage In Palo Alto

Just before midnight tonight, all our lights went out here in Palo Alto, where Kristine and I are housesitting and watching over our dog, and the homeowner's dog and cat. Being a high tech Silicon Valley house, we have been stumbling about by the light of our cell phone, letting the BlackBerry guide us to matches and faux candles.

As usual, there is no known cause of yet. There has not been any inclement weather, and police sirens immediately following the outage have me thinking some car found a power pole instead of staying within the lines. But who knows?

All I know is that it's very dark, the animals are confused, and the BlackBerry is our only source of light, phone and link to the outside world. What a good device! While our laptops, cable TV and all other power sucking utilities are dead, or won't reach the Internet, the BlackBerry enables us to both see and hear.

The Blog from e-mail function from Blogger is pretty cool too, as I guess you can tell. We'll see if the lights come on sooner, rather than later.

My Web Widgets: The Why and Where

I vacillate between wanting a spartan blog that loads quickly and looks sharp, and one that features all sorts of widgets that increase interactivity, community and information. A Web site owner can easily overdo the use of widgets, and relying on many third party sites for functionality can serve to slow the user experience, as browsers are forced to make calls and retrieve data from multiple points. But despite this, I've implemented a few widgets worth highlighting.

1. Recent Comments (from Storago)

Google's Blogger platform doesn't offer an easy way to highlight recent comments, so after searching the Web for options, I added a tool from Storago.com that highlights the five most recent comments on the right sidebar of the page. The widget says when the comment was made, by whom, and on which post. This way, if somebody finds a post from the archives worth commenting on, I don't miss their note, even if its off the front page.

While I don't get dozens of comments a day, I do get some regulars, including Tony Chung of Geekwhat, Gal Josefsberg from 60in3 and Erin Gurney of Ballhype. Others of note include Webomatica and Galeal Zino from NextBlitz.

2. Recent Shared Items from Google Reader

There are a lot of great bloggers out there, far too many for me to post about each day. I've subscribed to more than 100 RSS feeds, and read more than 500 items each weekday. Those which I find most interesting, I'll share via my link blog from Google Reader. Google has made it very easy to share this in Blogger, which you can see on the right sidebar.

Google Reader Trends says that in the last month, my most frequently shared bloggers were TechCrunch, Robert Scoble, Mashable!, Engadget and Read/WriteWeb - all outstanding blogs.

3. ZoomClouds

ZoomClouds takes tagging to a new level. Rather than asking me to proactively tag each of my posts with a specific topic or set of topics, ZoomClouds watches what I write about and reports the keywords, in descending order of use. The larger the font, the more frequently I blog on that topic.

It should be no surprise that my top 5 topics, according to Zoomclouds are: Apple, Google, Microsoft, TiVo and iTunes.

4. Technorati

Despite some criticism of the site's uptime, and continued competition with Google, Technorati is well integrated with the blogosphere, offering tools that summarize a site's Web influence, tagged as "Authority", with the option to read a blogger's profile, add to favorites, and search previous posts. Over the last few months, I've seen my blog's authority jump all the way from the mid-50s in late March to almost 100 today. While some of those counts may be spam blogs, I know Technorati is doing a great deal to avoid overcount.

Technorati tools: Blog Summary, My Profile and Blog Reactions

5. MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog, now a Yahoo! property, showcases icons that display recent visitors, and gives a better sense of a site's community. Even those of us without thousands of visitors a day can get an understanding of who visits the site, what other topics they like, and when signed in, let other bloggers know I've been visiting their site. Depending on site settings, MyBlogLog will add me to a community based on how many times I've visited their site. The service also tracks site visitor traffic and popular outgoing links, though I can honestly get that data in a multiple of other places...

MyBlogLog: Join the Community View the Community and View My Profile

Other widget-like details in the sidebar are gussied up links to LinkedIn for professional networking, and signups for my RSS Feed from Feedburner and blog by e-mail from Feedblitz.

While not fully comprehensive, there's a lot here. What other widgets do you use on your blog and think I should look into?

Google User Experience Study Promises No Electrodes

They say that Google strives to "Do no evil", but as the company comes under increasing scrutiny for having a monopolist's share in the global search market, and others are growing more distrusting over the company's motives, in light of the Feedburner acquisition that expanded Google's ability to track user behavior, it's no surprise they have to remind people now and again they're not Big Brother.

Users of Google's Blogger service, the service powering this Web site, are invited to undergo a user experience study testing new features. Applicants may even get paid, upwards of $100, the company promises.

But clicking through to learn more about the opportunity led me to a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page detailing what would be expected. While it's no surprise that you could "try out a prototype" and give feedback, the third question could be seen as a surprise, reading: "Does it involve having electrodes attached to my body?"

The answer? "No. Sorry."

Apparently, not only does this question come up a lot, but applicants appear to have been disappointed by the lack of electrodes. An odd group, to be sure.

Also of interest, the FAQ dictates that you would have to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). While that's no surprise in the trade secret protecting Valley, for Google to expect bloggers who use their Blogger service to be the shy, quiet types is unlikely. It would be like telling a 15 year-old girl a juicy secret, sending her to a slumber party and expecting your confidence to be iron-clad. Not a safe bet, unless you were eavesdropping, and she were wired to electrodes...

I Stayed Up How Late to Get This Done?

It took the better part of 2-3 months to migrate all 643 posts from RapidWeaver to Google's Blogger engine, but once I saw the end in sight tonight, it didn't really matter how late I had to stay up, or how much other work I needed to be doing - so after hundreds of "Command C, Command V" routines, I am happy to report that the migration is complete.

As a result of the move, the new site look and feel should have been imported, with a very familiar side bar. The old RSS feed should also be working and load from the same URL.

Comments from the last year are no longer tied to their equivalent posts. You can see them as running in parallel, as the original site is still hard coded to its original URLs. New comments to all posts will stick on the new engine. We will also be watching Feedblitz closely to see if that process is working well, though I expect we will learn that on Thursday morning.

With it being nearly 2 a.m. now, I can rest peacefully, knowing that this big undertaking, for now, is over. Find bugs? Let me know.