September 14, 2005

Replacing Trackbacks with Google References

You may have discovered by now that Google recently released their new Blog Search beta. So far, as always, I've been impressed. I'm experimenting with replacing the concept of trackbacks on my blog with Google References (see the "References" link in the post footer). This should use Google Blog Search to find all the blogs that link to specific posts of mine. Maybe a few people will link to this post as a good test case. I wonder how long it will take Google to index the references.

If you're interested in doing the same thing, just check out how the link URL is constructed, and it should be pretty clear. If you're using Movable Type, here's the code:

<a href="http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=link%3A<$MTEntryPermalink archive_type="Individual"$>">References</a>

Posted by cantrell at 10:38 AM. Link | Comments (11) | References

July 11, 2005

Macromedia Product RSS Feeds Restored

A little over a year ago, the Macromedia Developer Relations team introduced the Macromedia Product RSS feeds to help our community keep up with product updates, security bulletins, tech notes, and Developer Center articles. We took them down for about a week as we began migrating community services from the old markme.com server to the new Macromedia weblogs server. I've been getting several emails a day from people wondering what happened to the feeds, so I decided my priority for the day was to get them fully migrated (it wasn't just a matter of copying the files over -- we also switched to a new system for generating and maintaining them). Anyway, I got it all done, so all the product feeds should be working again. Please let me know if you notice anything screwy.

Posted by cantrell at 05:36 PM. Link | Comments (2) | References

June 29, 2005

Developer Relations Podcast in iTunes

I finally got the Macromedia Developer Relations Podcast submitted to iTunes. The documentation Apple provides for the special iTunes meta-data tags has some inconsistencies, and I found at least one major bug in their submission process, so it took several hours for me to finally get it submitted. In case you're having problems, as well, it seems you can't add iTunes category tags at the channel level (even though the docs say you can). For some reason, if you use bogus or incorrect categories, the feed is accepted (but the categories ignored), but if you use real and current categories, you get back an error saying that the iTunes Store is experiencing technical difficulties, and to try again later. The work around seems to be to remove the category tags at the channel level altogether (they seem to work at the item level), and just pick a category and sub-category through the feed submission interface.

Anyway, the feed hasn't shown up yet. After you submit your feed, it tells you that it may not show up right away, and it might need to be reviewed or something, so I'm not sure how long that will take. If anyone notices that it has been added, please drop me a comment. It's in the category "Technology" under the subcategory "Developers".

In other news, I'm about to move yet again, so I'm going to be offline most likely until next week. This is the third time I've blogged about moving in about 2.5 years, which isn't a good sign. I'm staying in San Francisco, but moving from a rental into a house that I bought, so hopefully I'll actually plant some roots and stay in one place for a while.

Off to finish packing...

Posted by cantrell at 12:20 PM. Link | Comments (2) | References

June 09, 2005

Introducing MXNA Flash Services

MXNA web services have been around for a long time, but they won't work everywhere. For instance, Flash Lite applications can't use web services. And sometimes web services can be overkill for small amounts of information that you want to retrieve, parse, and render very quickly. The answer is the new MXNA Flash Services.

Flash Services are very much in alpha, but they seem mature enough to start playing around with. Rather than using XML, Flash Services return data as query strings, or application/x-www-form-urlencoded which means they work perfectly with the Flash loadVariables function, and with the LoadVars object. Flash Services are primarily intended for Flash Lite applications, but can be used by any client preferring a more streamlined data service.

Check out the Flash Services documentation for more information, and let me know if you have any questions or comments. And keep in mind that I will be making changes to the APIs based on feedback, so anything you build could get temporarily broken.

Posted by cantrell at 04:59 PM. Link | Comments (1) | References

May 18, 2005

Google to Place Ads in Feeds

Google AdSense is now offering authors of syndicated content a way to monetize their feeds through the new AdSense for Feeds program (in beta, of course). So if you use an aggregator to help you get away from the clutter of internet advertising, sorry, but you'll have to think of something else.

I'm not criticizing the program, though. Nobody has to put ads in their feeds, and nobody has to aggregate feeds with ads. And I'm all for website owners generating a little revenue (or a lot) from the sites they put so much time and energy into. I just think it's a little humorous how whenever something starts to take off, it's only a matter of time before it is infused with advertisements. I predict in six to nine months, the majority of feeds you aggregate will be showing ads, just like Slashdot is already doing, and I further predict that the majority of those ads will be served by Google.

So how many of you will put ads in your feeds? Will you continue to aggregate feeds with ads in them? And what impact will this have on web-based aggregators like MXNA? I'm going to have to give this some serious thought.

Posted by cantrell at 04:38 PM. Link | Comments (6) | References

May 17, 2005

NewsGator Acquires FeedDemon

Nick Bradbury is reporting that his FeedDemon and TopStyle applications have been acquired by NewsGator. Congratulations, Nick! Sounds like a good opportunity for him, and for FeedDemon users.

Blogging (and blog aggregating) is becoming big business. First, Ask Jeeves acquired Bloglines, and now this. Let the mergers and acquisitions begin!

Posted by cantrell at 09:49 AM. Link | Comments (2) | References

May 16, 2005

My New Weblog

I haven't posted for a couple of days because I've been in the process of migrating my weblog. In fact, all the markme.com weblogs are eventually migrating over to weblogs.macromedia.com, and to a new version of Movable Type. I wanted to migrate mine first to get some experience with the process, and to get any issues/bugs worked out. If you see any problems, let me know.

The biggest challenge has been redirecting from old post URLs to the new ones (since the new version of MT generates different types of URLs). Anil Dash set me up with some MT code to generate an .htaccess file to make Apache do most of the work, but there are tons of other things to consider when migrating a two-year-old weblog (images, feeds, go URLs, and other files).

Over the next couple of months, I intend to update my templates, but for now, I'm using only a slightly modified version of the MT default. My stylesheet is pretty standard, as well, with only a couple customizations. In fact, I've heard it referred to as "nice, but unoriginal." True. I'm not much of a designer, though, so if you have any suggestions, let me know.

Technical details first, aesthetics later.

Posted by cantrell at 03:29 PM. Link | Comments (7) | References

May 04, 2005

Use MXNA Reports to Optimize Your Posts

Note: It looks like the What's New contest is over now, so I can go ahead give away one of the answers. Mike and I will be announcing the winners shortly.

As a blogger in the Macromedia community, how do you know what kinds of posts are more likely to get people's attention? How do you know how your post on the object oriented nature of ColdFusion components compares with your post examining the merits of crunchy peanut butter versus smooth?

The new MXNA 2.0 Click Reports chart the popularity of your last 50 posts. Take mine, for instance. I can see that my post on Internet Explorer 7 was the most popular in recent memory with a couple of posts on JavaScript and AJAX close behind. It looks like I should clearly be spending more time blogging about web technologies rather than new search engine features, or talking about PDAs. And apparently only about 8 people care that I've returned from TODCON. Thanks a lot, everyone!

The blue bars on the chart indicate clicks (along the Y axis), the red line is a moving average based on your last five posts, and the green line is your overall average. To find your feed's Click Report, go the the MXNA 2.0 list of feeds, and click on the "Click Report" link next to your feed's name.

You might also want to check out the new views we've added to the "Most Popular" pod. Now you can view the most popular posts of the last day, week, month, year, and of all time (and get them in RSS).

Posted by cantrell at 07:47 PM. Link | Comments (6) | References

MXNA 2.0 Feature Contest

As Mike Chambers recently posted, we did a new MXNA 2.0 installation last night with a few cool new features. If you can find them quickly, you can win a nice Macromedia Timbuk2 bag. Check out Mike's post for details.

Posted by cantrell at 02:23 PM. Link | Comments (2) | References

April 26, 2005

MXNA 2.0 Reports

In case you haven't noticed, the beta version of MXNA 2.0 is being rolled out incrementally. Today's increment: MXNA 2.0 reports.

Mike Chambers and I have been working on and off on the new MXNA 2.0 reports, along with a general reporting framework, for a couple of weeks now, and I think they turned out really well. We used Flex and the Flex charting components for the graphs themselves, and AJAX (JavaScript) to load and render post data without refreshing the page. The charts are populated with data through the MXNA 2.0 web services, and can express that data in a variety of ways as the user interacts with them. And when the user clicks on certain parts of the chart, the relevant posts are rendered below using AJAX, almost instantaneously. The whole experience allows for a great deal of interactivity without a single page refresh, and with almost no waiting.

We feel that combining Flash and AJAX in this instance allows us to get the best of both worlds, and really gives the user a unique and immediate user experience. Flash/Flex were perfect for the charts, and really allowed us to focus on the data and the presentation rather than the mechanics of the charts themselves. Using AJAX to render the post data allowed us to reuse the exact same rendering code that the rest of the application uses when displaying posts, and because it is HTML, it allows for things like shift-clicking on links, and native browser scroll bars.

We have several more reports in the pipeline, but we probably won't be launching any more this week since I'm in Las Vegas as TODCON. If you have any ideas for specific reports that you would like to see, let us know. We want to make sure we are presenting the community with the most useful information we can.

Posted by cantrell at 02:30 PM. Link | Comments (2) | References

April 19, 2005

MXNA 2.0 Requests on Hold

If you've sent us any email regarding the MXNA 2.0 beta, or if you've submitted your site recently, you have probably noticed that we haven't gotten a chance to respond. Don't worry -- we will get to every email and every submission very soon. As you might imagine, we have been very busy for the last couple of days, but things should be back to business as usual by the end of the week.

Anyone out there going to be in Vegas for TODCON next week? If so, drop me a line. I arrive Sunday night.

Posted by cantrell at 06:15 PM. Link | Comments (2) | References

April 12, 2005

MXNA 2.0: Added Language Navigation and More RSS Support

Macromedia developer Deng Jie recently made a post asking us to add language navigation to MXNA 2.0. In other words, he wanted a list of languages along the right-hand side (just like categories and Smart Categories) that you could easily click on to browse the most recent posts in that particular language. Seemed like a good idea to us, so we added it. Check it out.

I also added some additional RSS support in yesterday's build. Now, whenever you are looking at a set of data that is available as RSS (which is pretty much everything), you'll see a little "rss" link next to the page title. MXNA 2.0 also supports auto-discovery, so if you're using Firefox, you'll notice the little RSS icon in the status bar.

Posted by cantrell at 04:58 PM. Link | Comments (2) | References

April 07, 2005

MXNA 2.0 Pings

For those of you who ping MXNA to let us know you have made a new post, you can now update your ping URL to point to MXNA 2.0. Your old ping ID will work, so all you need to do is change the host and domain from "www.markme.com" to "weblogs.macromedia.com". (If you have any problems, let me know). If you don't know your ping ID, but would like to start pinging MXNA, you can send email to mxna@macromedia.com to find out your ping ID. If you want to ping MXNA, but you can't set up your blogging software to ping automatically, you can use the MXNA 2.0 ping form to do a manual ping. If you have no idea what a ping is, check out the MXNA 2.0 FAQ.

Posted by cantrell at 05:58 PM. Link | Comments (0) | References

April 06, 2005

MXNA 2.0 Beta: Day 2

I want to thank everyone for all the feedback we've gotten on the MXNA 2.0 beta so far. We had about 50 additional feed submissions, some great feature requests, and even a few bug reports. MXNA 2.0 automatically emails errors to me as soon as they occur, usually with enough information that I can get them fixed pretty quickly, and you guys helped me uncover a couple good ones faster than any QA team could have.

I installed a new build last night with the following changes:

  1. Added the Danish, Turkish, and Indonesian languages.
  2. Fixed a bug in mobile smart categories. If you've been trying to view smart categories on your mobile device (I know you're out there because I saw the bug reports), they're working now.
  3. Fixed a bug in the search term RSS. MXNA 2.0 lets you create custom RSS feeds from aggregated data, including feeds based on search terms. Yesterday search-based feeds were broken, today they are not.
  4. Added the number of feeds being aggregated in the header. Expect that number to continue to rise, especially for non-English feeds.
  5. Removed the code that automatically focused the cursor in the search box so you can now use the space bar or arrow keys to scroll down without having to click on the page first.
  6. Fixed a bug that was causing the application to fail when rendering pages that we can't translate yet. Yesterday, I added our first Russian weblog which threw things off a bit since MXNA 2.0 does not support Russian translations yet. Anyway, I fixed the bug on our end, and will add support for Russian translations as soon as it's supported by Google (our translation engine).
  7. Added about 50 new weblogs, most non-English. I'm really glad to be able to include the rest of the world in MXNA 2.0.
  8. Worked out some kinks in the ping mechanism. After you make a new post, be sure to ping MXNA 2.0 so we can aggregate your work right away. You can configure your blogging application to do the ping automatically, or you can easily do it manually just by typing in your site's URL.

I think that's all. Anyway, on to today's list of updates!

Posted by cantrell at 05:00 PM. Link | Comments (1) | References

April 05, 2005

Yahoo! 360 Beta Plea

Does anyone have any spare invites? I'm dying to get a look at it.

Update: Thanks Bryan Rieger, Danger, and Oscar Trelles for the invites!

Posted by cantrell at 09:05 PM. Link | Comments (6) | References

MXNA 2.0 Public Beta

I'd like to invite you all to participate in the MXNA 2.0 beta.  MXNA (Macromedia XML News Aggregator) 2.0 is a complete rewrite of the original version of MXNA with several new features including:

  1. Smart Categories.
  2. Support for non-English feeds.
  3. Localization support.
  4. Self-service site submission.
  5. Improved ping support.
  6. Ability to translate posts (using Google's translation engine).
  7. Ability to generate custom RSS feeds from MXNA 2.0.
  8. Improved search including an advanced search option.
  9. Huge performance improvements.
  10. Improved (we think) interface.
  11. New design (thanks to Josh Dura).
  12. Much better web service API.
  13. More powerful mobile interface.
  14. Atom support.
  15. Pre-fetching and caching of top rated items.

You can find the new version of MXNA here:

http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna

If you are not already aggregated by MXNA, you can submit your feed here:

http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna/SubmitFeed.cfm

If your language is not listed, let us know, and we'll add it. All languages are supported.

Keep in mind that this is a beta, which is fancy way of saying that there are bugs to be fixed, and kinks to be worked out. Please email any issues you find to mxna@macromedia.com. Some additional notes:

  1. The original version of MXNA will remain active for the time being, but eventually all MXNA traffic will be redirected to MXNA 2.0. You might as well start updating your bookmarks now.
  2. All new weblogs will be added to MXNA 2.0 only.
  3. The MXNA 1.0 web service API will be deprecated eventually in favor of the much more comprehensive 2.0 API.
  4. If you have a ping URL, you will need to update it by replacing "www.markme.com" with "weblogs.macromedia.com". Eventually pings will be redirected, but it's still best to start using the new URL.
  5. Some non-English feeds are not parsing correctly for some reason which I think has to do with character encodings. The majority are working fine, but some are not readable. If you have any insight into what the problem might be, let me know. Otherwise, I'll get it figured out and fixed during the beta period.

Thanks for helping us test, and let us know what you think.

Posted by cantrell at 03:25 AM. Link | Comments (11) | References

March 23, 2005

MXNA Java Category

I'm thinking of adding a Java category to MXNA. Anyone have any favorite Java blogs?

Posted by cantrell at 06:25 PM. Link | Comments (4) | References

March 18, 2005

New Aggregator in Testing

Thanks to a comment left by Roger Benningfield in response to yesterday's post, I am evaluating Shrook. So far, I'm very happy with it. It has a very iTunes-like interface with a library containing all your feeds which you add to one or more groups (like playlists). Below are the features that really set it apart from other aggregators I've used:

I need to exercise the application for a few more days before shelling out the $24.95, but so far, it has made a very good first impression on me. In the meantime, I'll try some of your other suggestions, as well, just in case.

Posted by cantrell at 02:46 PM. Link | Comments (0) | References

March 17, 2005

I Need a New Aggregator

An unfortunate thing happened to me this morning. I have an old evaluation of NetNewsWire installed alongside the free version of NetNewsWire Lite which I use(d) extensively on a daily basis. This morning, when using Quicksilver to open NetNewsWire Lite, I accidentally opened the old expired evaluation version of NetNewsWire. For some reason, it overwrote all my NetNewsWire Lite feeds with the default list of feeds that come with the application.

This is very much not a good thing. I'm sure I had well over 100 feeds pertaining to everything that interests me (mostly technology, but also some personal weblogs, watch weblogs, etc.). I have a backup from November that will allow me to recover many of my feeds, but my collection was constantly evolving and being refined, so the last four months of tweaks are gone.

Anyway, enough lamenting. I'm looking at this as an opportunity to start fresh with a new collection of feeds, new organization, and certainly a new aggregator. I really like(d) NetNewsWire, but I don't think I can bring myself to use it again. Additionally, I'm tired or waiting for the 2.0 version just to get Atom support (it's been in beta for a very very long time).

So my first question is what aggregators are Mac users out there using these days? I'm willing to go with either local or web-based. Once I settle on a new aggregator, I will then ask people to post some of their favorite blogs. I'm pretty sure I can have all my old feeds back with a couple of hours of searching and surfing, but I'd like to use this opportunity to find some new, more obscure feeds worth aggregating. That's a question for another time, though. First the aggregator.

Posted by cantrell at 01:43 PM. Link | Comments (16) | References

February 18, 2005

Google's Answer to Comment Spam

Eron C. left a comment in response to my post Sorry, No Trackbacks Today pointing me to Google's answer to stopping comment spam. Basically, Google says to automatically add the attribute rel="nofollow" to any link automatically generated from a URL entered by a reader (usually through a comment or a trackback). I like this approach, and I'm glad to see that Google stepped up so quickly and confidentially. The idea is not to stop the spam itself (as I've been trying to do), but to stop its effectiveness -- basically, to remove the incentive.

I'd seen this post on the Google Blog a while back, but when I followed Eron's link are re-read the post, I found it had been updated to include an additional 16 blogging applications that now support Google's recommendation for a total of 26 (probably more at this point). Of course, now other search engines have to sign on, as well. I know it's hard to believe, but there are actually other search engines besides Google out there, and according to my access logs, a few people even use them.

Anyway, I will be implementing Google's recommended change in the near future, and I'm wondering how many others have implemented it, as well. I'm speaking specifically of those who host their own blogging software, and either need to hack the code, or update to a new version. Also, has anyone heard of other search engines supporting Google's recommendation?

Posted by cantrell at 11:51 AM. Link | Comments (7) | References

February 14, 2005

Sorry, No Trackbacks Today

Macromedia weblogs get spammed like you wouldn't believe. Or if you have a high profile weblog yourself, you actually might believe it. We have several mechanisms in place to prevent spamming (while still making the weblogs easy and friendly to use), but it's turning into a ridiculous game of cat and mouse where as soon as we patch an opening, spammers start looking for another. We will be putting some pretty heavy duty protection in place in the coming months, but for now, the game continues.

This morning, one of the biggest spam attacks I've ever seen was launched against our weblog servers. I refer to it as an "attack" because in addition to leaving huge amounts of spam (which is promptly deleted, so it does the spammers and their clients no good whatsoever), it also serves as a denial of service attack which sets off all kinds of alarms. Anyway, this morning's attack was bad. It was a sustained and relentless trackback spam attack, so I finally just ended up denying access to the trackback CGI script at the Apache level which ended it instantly. A few minutes later, all the spam was delete, and it was like it never happened. But there won't be any trackbacks for the rest of the day, and perhaps for the next couple of weeks while I work out a better long-term solution.

A word of advice, not to the spammers out there, but to the people who hire them. At least with Macromedia weblogs, you're wasting your money. Google's ranking algorithms take into account the ranking of the sites which link to the site being ranked which means it makes the most sense to spam weblogs with high rankings. The problem is that the higher a site is ranked, the more likely that site is to have anti-spam measures in place, so even when the spam gets through (which is a miniscule percentage of the spam attempts), at least with Macromedia weblogs, it's promptly deleted. In other words, you're paying for links that only exist for a few minutes at most -- not nearly long enough for them to affect your ranking. So rather than paying for spam, you might consider putting that money into actually creating a decent site that people would actually want to link to.

I'm not naive enough to think I'll actually change anyone's mind with this post, however, so the spam game continues.

Posted by cantrell at 11:24 AM. Link | Comments (2) | References

January 21, 2005

Free Blogs!

I'm playing catch-up with email and weblogs right now, but in case you hadn't heard, Sys-Con publishing is giving out free weblogs. I haven't tried their interface, but Simon Horwith has, and he seems impressed. If you have something interesting to add to the software development blogosphere, go have a look.

Posted by cantrell at 12:53 PM. Link | Comments (4) | References