What’s New: Blog’s FriendFeed Alter Ego & Intrasite Tag Search Goodness
My Dominant Hemisphere now has a FriendFeed! Follow along!
Hello everyone!
Just a couple of quick updates about the blog:
- Having just read some of Lorelle’s excellent advice on the use of Categories and Tags, I’ve decided to implement an intrasite tag search at the bottom of every post. Clicking on any of these tags will automatically return items from the blog that are tagged with these words.
I’m using the following re-hashed bookmarklet (thanks to Lorelle and Rakesh) in order to put them in my posts:javascript: ( function() { /* Technorati Tag Book Marklet 0.3 Created First By: Lorrell <http://lorelle.wordpress.com> Later Modified By: Rakesh <http://rakeshkumar.wordpress.com> Last Modified by: Firas MR <https://mydominanthemisphere.wordpress.com/about/> */ var a=''; var t=prompt('Enter Tags separated by commas',''); if(!t) return; var tr=t.split(','); a+='---<br /> <img src='+unescape('%22')+'https://mydominanthemisphere.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/gravatar2.png'+unescape('%22')+' align='+unescape('%22')+'left'+unescape('%22')+' />Copyright <a href='+unescape('%22')+'https://mydominanthemisphere.wordpress.com/about/'+unescape('%22')+' title='+unescape('%22')+'Copyright Firas MR. All Rights Reserved.'+unescape('%22')+'>Firas MR</a>. All Rights Reserved.<br /> <br /> <em>"A mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam."</em><p><br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <hr /></p><p><code><font size="-1"><strong>Search Blog For Tags: </strong>'; for(var i=0;i<tr.length;i++) { tr[i]=tr[i].replace(/^\s+/,""); tr[i]=tr[i].replace(/\s+$/,""); var tag_text=tr[i]; tr[i]=tr[i].replace(/\s+/g,"-"); if(i > 0){ a+=', '; } a+='<a href='+unescape('%22')+'https://mydominanthemisphere.wordpress.com/tag/'+tr[i]+unescape('%22')+' rel='+unescape('%22')+'tag'+unescape('%22')+'>'+tag_text+'</a>'; } a+='</font></code></p>'; prompt('Copy this html code, Press OK, Then Paste into your blog entry:',a); } )() - I’ve cleaned up and organized the Post Categories into a hierarchy for easier navigation.
- The blog/website now has a detailed About page that’s worth checking out!
- I’ve also added a new favicon for the website.
- Also new is a Subscribe by Email link, the option to receive RSS via Feedburner, and a FriendFeed microblogging site with an accompanying widget that goes into the sidebar for shorter updates.
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Copyright Firas MR. All Rights Reserved.
“A mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”
Search Blog For Tags: friendfeed, tag bookmarklet, technology
My Dominant Hemisphere 
I must say that is a very nice about page.
Did you just join FriendFeed ? I’ve been there since launch day It’s a great tool. But never really used it – infact I cleaned it up.
I even cleaned out my identica – I fail to see the point of using it besides being open source. (any ideas ?)
I found Tumblr suitable for my side-blog needs however.
I think tags + search is a great idea.
Jaffer
November 11, 2010 at 1:45 pm
Thank you Jaffer!
Actually, I was on FriendFeed before. But deleted all unnecessary accounts including Twitter, etc. I’ve made a separate FriendFeed account for the blog. The reason I decided on FriendFeed was the profile URL. Twitter has a shorter word limit for the profile URL and http://www.twitter.com/mdh looked cryptic, besides sounding like an Indian spice/masala company I’m aware of! I’m going to experiment with Tumblr, haven’t really thought about it. Does it have a character limit on updates like Twitter and FriendFeed? It would be a nicer option in case it doesn’t have one.
I was all rad about identi.ca when it initially came out. But their privacy policy is insane! They’ve always focused on popularizing the laconica software platform, rather than providing a usable Web 2.0 experience.
Firas MR
November 11, 2010 at 3:53 pm
Hahaha … MDH masala … we get them here too … along with Shaan and Mehran and National… too funny !
Tumblr is like Posterous & Amplify. They sit somewhere in between a Blog and a Micro-Blog.
Tumblr has a heavy focus on visual art such as pictures & video as well as audio.
Lots of photographers and amateur film makers prefer Tumblr’s format.
But ofcourse you can have text posts and mixed content – there is no word limit.
I use it to post Videos and pictures that are worth sharing – but not as a full blog post.
So I pull the Tumblr feed to my sidebar using SimplePie.
I think the main reason Identi.ca survives is the ‘Open Source’ culture.
They say you can mod it using PHP and use it on your own domain. So it may be useful for some companies – much like Yammr.
Jaffer
November 11, 2010 at 7:36 pm
Yea I know 🙂 …
Ok so I fiddled with Tumblr a couple of hours ago, and it seems like there isn’t really a good widget I can use for it at WordPress.com . I’m sticking to FriendFeed for now.
About sharing videos and pictures, I used to shy away from embedding video, etc. into my posts, thinking about Copyright issues. Finding permissively licensed picture content to embed/display at a blog is much easier. But I recently read this blog post that talks about how to think about copyright and embedded content. And now I feel much more confident about the rules. One common error that it says people fall into is that by embedding or even linking to content from a producer that does not have rights to it, they’re complicit in the sin of “distributing” that content. Which makes them liable. Do give it a read, as it has very useful info on this topic!
Firas MR
November 11, 2010 at 8:20 pm