Abused Web Applications

Posted on April 14, 2007 at 10:30 pm | 22 Comments
Filed under Internet Insanity

No, this is not a meme. I’ve decided to make this entry so I can share to you, my dear readers, some of the web applications (or simply webapp) available for free usage that I’ve been using. Dunno if you’ve heard of them, but still, let me write about them.

Google Analytics

This is one of the services available in the internet that stores your web statistic by just inserting a script on your code. But I don’t think it’s reliable because the script that you’ll add is JavaScript powered, so if your visitor has deactivated JavaScript, he or she won’t be recognized as a visitor. Oh, well, this service is for free, why not abuse it?

GMail

After I’ve got an invitation to join it, I left Yahoo Mail forever. Why? Gmail has so many features available free of cost. What’s more, it offers a whooping 2.8 GB (and counting) of storage. You would surely not need to delete anything for a long period of time.

Google Reader

This is my favorite service that Google offers. So what is this Reader? It’s a web-based feed aggregator. That means, when I subscribed to your feeds and when you publish a new entry, I’ll see and can read it in Reader without visiting your site.Great, hu? It helps me to tract those blogs with new posts that I still haven’t read. I really recommend this to all bloggers. You can subscribe to my feeds by clicking the “Subscribe to RSS” link that you can find at my footer.

Google Maps

No, I’m not a real user of this service. It does not give me any help as of the moment because the Philippines is not completely mapped. You won’t be able to see even just the main roads here in the Philippines. I hope in the near future, the Philippines is fully mapped so I can use it to get directions. That would be very great!

Flickr

This one is owned by Yahoo!. I’m new to this service. This web application is best if you can get a pro account (the paid one). Nevertheless, there are so many cool photos there (you can even do derivative works with some). This is must-subscribe-to if you’re a photographer or even photographer-kuno. From now on, I’ll get there the photos that I may need to use to create my layouts.

del.icio.us

Another web application owned by Yahoo!. This enables you to bookmark any page in the internet. Because of this web application, you can now see your bookmarked web pages anywhere, just be sure you have a computer with an internet connection :P .

FeedBurner

Oh, I really like the services that they offer. Because of this, I can save a little of my bandwidth. It gets my feeds, and then, it’ll do the rest of the work for me. It sort of republishes my feeds. That’s why if you have subscribed to my feeds you would see extra links below each post. It also gives me a statistic how many people have viewed my feed and my site.

DeviantArt

You’ll find great works here. From photography to painting. If you need some inspiration, this one is a great site to start with.

Friendster

Have you heard of the news that Filipinos have dominated Friendster? Lol. When it was still new, that was in 2004, I really got addicted to it. But now, it has lost it’s magic. The whole concept is now boring. But it amuses me that some senatoriables uses it, like Chiz Escudero, Trillianes, and Sharon Cuneta’s husband, Kiko Pangilinan for campaigning.

Technorati

I’ve been visiting this site more than the usual lately. Basically, for the sake of bloghopping. It’s also one way to tract what is the hottest topics in the blogosphere. It also tracts your blog’s rank but Shari says it’s not reliable.

That are just only ten of the numerous web applications that I’m using. If I would put all of them here, this might get really long and I don’t want you to get bored with all of these1. Do you know any web application that you may recommend to me?

  1. And if you haven’t noticed, I haven’t included WordPress. But do I still need to include it? [↩]

22 Comments

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Sharing Feeds in Your Blog

Posted on March 4, 2007 at 6:33 pm | 8 Comments
Filed under Boggling Blogs

Months ago, somebody asked me how do I display the latest posts of the people in my reading list. During that time, I was using Google Reader’s feature to put them here in my site. Personally, I don’t like it because it’s customizing options are limited. What’s more, it’s not XHTML valid (I’m not sure though if this was already solved).

I tried looking for a plugin to do this, but to no avail, I did not succeed. The plugins that I tried were not the plugins that I was looking for.

And now, I have finally found the solution. Yes, I’m sharing it to you.

So what you do now is to subscribe to the feeds that you want in Google Reader (but that does not mean that we will use Google Reader to republish your feed to HTML). Make sure all the feeds that you want to share are tagged with a common tag. After doing so, click “Options” (in Google Reader), go to the “Tags” section. Share that tag that you want to share. From there, you can click the “add a clip to your site” to start sharing the feeds that you’ve selected. As what I’ve said, its customizing options are limited. So read on.

Now,click “email a link,” you’ll find there the URL of the feed of that particular tag. It compiles all the feeds that you specified and it publishes all the posts in a single feed. It’s being published in Atom.

If you’re using WordPress and have the plugin Widgets installed, you can log to your WP admin panel. From the “Presentation” tab, select “Sidebar Widgets” and change the settings of a RSS widget, you can put there the title of the feed, the URL of the feed and how many entries it will display. Word of caution: it will render wrong URLs for the posts. I don’t know if this is a bug in WP. Besides, the feed that Google Reader provides is Atom, not RSS, right? Don’t worry, there is a solution to this.

(I don’t know if there is a site out there that do something like Google Reader but publishes the feed directly in RSS. Technorati does this, but it’s not reliable.)

FeedBurner can convert the format of your feed, so use it. Burn the Atom feed (the one Google Reader has provided) in FeedBurner. Once done, go to the “Optimize” section of the settings of the feed, disable “SmartFeed”. After that, select “Convert Format Burner,” from the drop-list, choose “RSS 2.0″ and activate it.

Luckily, FeedBurner also has the feature like that of Google Reader that republish your feed back to HTML, and hey, it has more customizing options. It also render correct and valid XHTML. The catch: there is this annoying banner of FeedBurner (this is true for free accounts, I’m not sure with the paid accounts). And I know, you don’t like that. This feature of FeedBurner is called as “BuzzBoost” and you can find it at the “Publicize” tab.

For WP users that has the plugin “Widgets” installed, you can prevent the banner from displaying by going to the “Sidebar Widgets” (in your WP admin panel) and supply there the URL feed of the feed that you created in FeedBurner.

If the URLs don’t work (and you think you followed everything in this post correctly), just wait for a few moments and the URL will be corrected.

I hope this has helped you. If you’re looking for the finish product, you can find it in my sidebar (the one with the RSS icon). Sorry for those people who don’t understand this (talking about the newbies).

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