SiftLinks: Links sifted out of Twitter and into an RSS feed for you.

There’s a couple of things I’ve been wanting to play with recently – the Twitter Auth protocol (and subsequently the Twitter API) and MongoDB. There’s also been something bugging me about Twitter recently.  I follow a few interesting folk who post a lot of interesting links.  But sometimes I disappear for a few days for work or for fun and despite seeing these links on my iPhone, I don’t really get the chance to properly read the articles.

What i needed was a way to strip out Tweets with a link in them and pick those links up in my feed reader when I get the chance to catch up with whats going on in the world.

And so I combined the aforementioned desire to experiment with new stuff and the need for an rss of my tweets with links in them to build SiftLinks.  It’s still in the testing phase and I’m making various optimisations as I go along – but it works.  If you have a need to extract links from twitter then give it a go and let me know how you get on.

Facebook Connect Library for ColdFusion

I’ve dropped an initial release of the Facebook Connect library for ColdFusion I built onto my GitHub account. It works perfectly under the limited testing i’ve actually done.  I’ve only tested under Railo 3 but dont think there’s any real reason why it won’t work fine in the Adobe CF server.  There’s no documentation yet but i’ll get to that eventually as well.

Rich Snippets for STV Local

Over on STV Local we’ve added support for Google’s rich snippets on search results using the hreview-aggregate microformat.

Soon (hopefully), the search results for places like Piece will have extra information like the number of reviews, the average rating and (where available) the average cost of a meal for 2.

X-Factor Finalists on Muxster

Muxster is getting closer and closer to a stage where we want to start user testing and as part of the testing process we’ve set up a bunch of Mux’s for the various X-Factor finalists to demonstrate some of the features.

• Danyl Johnson
• Jamie Archer
• Joe McElderry
• John and Edward
• Kandy Rain
• Lloyd Daniels
• Lucie Jones
• Miss Frank
• Olly Murs
• Rachel Adedeji
• Rikki Loney
• Stacey Solomon

The various illustrations you’ll see were done by the very excellent illustrator, Claire Murray.

You should follow Muxster on Twitter to keep up to date with what’s happening and to let us know if you or your band are interested in doing some testing for us.

Update: None of these links work now. Now that Muxster has been launched we decided to remove the test accounts we set up and start afresh!

Preview Video of Muxster

As some know I’ve been working on a project for a wee while now called Muxster.  We’re almost at a stage where user testing of the Beta version will begin but for a wee preview of whats going on check out this video that Andy put together.

Raw Notes from Future of Web Apps London 2009 – Day 2

Again these are just the short(ish) notes I made during the conference on stuff that caught my imagination, made me think or make me want to do more research on.

Future of Frontend Engineering

Hasn’t said anything whatsoever.
Twitter Labs launching
Open source stack
Build an API NOW

Future of the Cloud

Transition
Confusion managements trust security transparency
Lack of transparency – need to know whos providing layers
Cost of not using vs risks of using
commoditisation is driving towards a service based economy
too many providers at the moment to allow secutriy and interoperability of the platform
ubuntu supporting ec2 api and have ubuntu distro that provides same api
standardisation will happen
cloud not green
enterprises not ready
standardisation will lead to more innovation

Rails 3 and the Future of Agile

Defer decisions to the last responsible moment
Rails makes it easier to experiment with other techs
Ruby Rails Agile – yay

Mobile Widgets – meh

jil.org/vodaphone/appstar

Yahoo Geo

Border info and historical data. Removal of Vapids (Paris Hilton, Lewis Hamilton etc.)

Accessibilty

http://blog.gingertech.net/2009/08/03/aspects-of-video-accessibility/
Chrome Frame – accessibility black hole
Using s screen reader is tough

Marketing

Believe in your product. Best experience.
Not just founders and CEOs – whole company.
Consitency is state of mind
If you build it they will come is bullshit.
Be real. Be human. Admit mistakes – people will forgive you.
Qype have meetups – get their community involved – take them out and reach out to users – get all folk who’ve been to bars or vegetarian restaurants and invite them out.
New restaurant opens – email biggest reviewers. Then show this on the site?
Local as a platform. Needs to evolve.
Chilango had a buritto eating competition – awareness.
Create new identity from what your team values

The Future of Print Journalism

Fastcompany.com – launched on Drupal
Print – an elitist commodity – will cost more.
23 of 25 top news papers numbers decined
Craigslist and google killing print?
SodaHead – social news. Promoting news
Huffington Post – high FBConnect integraton
Digestable news
Glam Media – Tinker – apps for top conversations from twitter and facebook
Picure the impossible – newsy, get video for websites – service modes
Engagement new revenue streams
Where are kids viewing content?

Startup Metrics for Pirates

Keep it simple & actionable
fast, frequent iteration (& feedback)
measure conversion
focus on user experience
Progress is not equal to features
Acquisition
Activation
Retention
Referral
Revenue
Product / Market Fit – if we took a feature a way would it matter?
Focus on critical few actionable metrics
Focus on stuff you already have – be brave enough to kill shit features.
Kill a feature every week. Iterate on the stuff that visitors really love.
Make a good product
Market the product
Make money
“You probably cant save your ass and your face at the same time so choose carefully.”

Practical Advice for Managing the Growth of your Web App

Efficiency != Scalability
App will eventually become i/o bound – cpu, db, disk, netowkr
Scalability means overcoming i/o boundries in financial terms
Working on scability is always beneficial – optimisation is sometimes beneficial
Premature optimisation is the root of all evil
Steve Souder books
Smaller – focus on scalability
Larger – focus on optimisation
Process 250k feeds every 45min
Adding hardware to go faster is trivial (but costs)
Could be more efficient (but resources best used elsewhere)
Facebook saved money by changing to commodity storage systems – efficiency savings implemented once implemented
Hal Henderson – Building Scalable Websites
Scalable Internet Architectures

http://go-test.it/fowa – > testing script

Raw Notes From Future of Web Apps London 2009 – Day 1

As the title says these are my raw notes that I jotted down in Evernote while listening to the presentations at Future of Web Apps London 2009 on day 1.

I’ll need to distill them into something meaningful on Monday for my colleagues to read but for now they’re here in all there messy glory.

Anything thats missing I either 1) Didn’t hear anything interesting in or 2) Had arrived late due to travelling from Glasgow in the early hours so missed .

3 Vital Marketing Items

Don’t build what you don’t need to launch.
Tracking system – build one right at the beginning to ensure you know exactly whats working for you.
Sometimes GA cant give you as much data as you need so build custom metics to know exactly what your users are doing.

Future of Javascript Design Patterns

“meta programming is like trying to do crack cocaine responsibly.”
Use relevant frameworks – simpler tools for specific reuirements.
small taks
seperate business logic
Checkout:
Dean edwards Base
Dan Webbs Low Pro
Avoid over abstractions
Trust your code – dont bloat with error and type checking.

Passion and Paychecks: Opensource

Communication
sell brain trust
community
free time built in
clients pay top dollar for passionate people who know their shit
work atmosphere makes people not want to leave – lullaby. find good passionate people and pursue them
passionate people – hiring people not positions
keep people passionate or they’ll leave and go somewhere else
let people kick ass

Atlus

280atlus.com – $20
Cappucino – server agnostic
Cappucino server – running javascript.
RESTful interface for accessing server side.

Go Niche, Get Rich and go Mainstream

Revision 3
New generation of consumers have abandoned tv and traditional media.
Digital natives.
IPTV – what you want, when you want it.
City Sourced – allow users to report problems about a city. GPS location, direction, photo – crowdsourced IPhone app
Low budget & targetted approach – lower cost/ higher return – hit evngelists

Yahoo: Place not space, geo without maps

Can use yql to parse bad html and get back proper html
50k input limit
http://isithackday.com/hacks/placeearth
http://github.com/codepo8/placeearth
geoplanet -> information from woeid -> children, area codes, postcodes, neighbours, parentage, belongs to (local geography), poi’s geographic features, streets (coming),
http://slideshare.net/vicchi
http://ygeoblog.com
2010 – add places, providing minimum information. update place with correct information.

Paypal X

Boosters size -> rail -> trams -> wagons -> chariots -> horses asses
Innovation enables new monetisation models
Social networks will redefined ecommerce
Mobile ecommerce – unprecedented takeup of ebay mobile app – $350m paypal transactions through it in the last month and a half.
Paypal platform launching November 3rd. Send money, payments etc. paypal.com/innovate2009

Web App Marketing Strategies

Spymaster?
Build a great product
Passionate Community
Engage with the community
Incentivize users to market for you
Empower your heaviest users.
Usual stuff

FB Connect

Registration
Interaction
Social context – friends
Fan box, comments box, live stream box
Live feed on big news items? Live stream on live tv shows?
traffic – share link
engagement
registration peronsalisation – activity of friends – what have your friends done?
Huffington post traffic referrals increased 300%
Translations app released
Wizard for setting up connections.

Typepad

Motion – like an easy to drop in twitter (js based) Open source – for building communities.
Developer.typepad.com
Run on Django / Python
University session tomorrow.

HTML 5

Yawn

Guardian – Stacks for a mutualised newspaper

Mass media does not have bi-directionality
Be part of disruption
Mutualisation – linking consumer with the journalists – everyone has a means of production
Consumers asked to provide footage thats used to generate stories – reaching out to audience to help co creation.
Co-fabriction and co-distribution – XML JSON ATOM of over 1m articles. Datastore – excellent datasets that can be used- weave the guardian into the fabric of the internet
data.hmg.gov.uk – 1000 datasets
People make amazing things with open data
Promotion of the Guardian outside the uk.
Guardian app gallery / store – community
Guardian data blog
Flickr group showing data use
Django framework – scaleable – used for Guardian app for analysing expenses
Rapid turnarounds
1 dev / 1 week
1 designer / 2 days
Deploy on EC2 for limited time
Collating conversations of journalists
AppEngine task queue
Guardian as a platform not just a publisher
@jaggeree
http://www.slideshare.net/openplatform/building-the-stacks-for-a-mutualised-newspaper

STV Player Launched

Over at STV we’ve just launched the STV Player.  Similar to the iPlayer it offers 30 day on demand catchup of channel 3 networks shows (ITV in England, UTV in N. Ireland and STV in Scotland) such as Coronation Street, Emmerdale and Taggart.

Have a look and let me know what you think.

Hosting Sites with Heavy Traffic on Amazon EC2

I mentioned previously that I’d been looking at Amazon EC2 as a solution to host a site that underwent heavy bursts of traffic for only a couple of hours a week. The expected traffic bursts were 10-15k visitors in a 2 hour period and unfortunately a small EC2 instance just wasn’t enough. The next trial was with a large EC2 instance, with Apache tweaked to allow more simultaneous connections. Results went better than first time but I ended up having to bounce Apache a couple of times during the time frame to get it back up and running.

So fast forward to this week and it was time to try again. This time I went with an Extra Large instance running a stock 64-bit Ubuntu 8.04 and Lighttpd instead of Apache. And this time there were no problems. For the full 2 hours the site remained up and responsive, and because I could time the instance to come up just before the additional cost was negligible.

To give you an idea of the kind of traffic it had to deal with, the site took in just over 25,000 unique visitors in a 2 hour time frame. Glad to get the problem solved and now I know what to do next time I need some heavy traffic handled.

Encoding Flash Video (FLV) in Ubuntu 8.04 using FFMpeg

Recently while helping a friend with their website I required the need to convert any video file uploaded to FLV and have that display on the site.  My first instinct was to set up a conversion pipeline using FFMpeg on the Ubuntu server and have that convert the videos as required.  Unfortunately there seems to be an issue with the standard FFMpeg release on Ubuntu as it has issues attaching the sound when converting to Flash video.

Luckily it can be fixed fairly trivially by installing FFMpeg from Medibuntu.  Turns out the FFMpeg is in Medibuntu as some of the encoding libraries it use may violate some patents.

To get things up and running start by adding Medibuntu to your sources lists

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

and then add Medibuntu to your sources keyring

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update

Finally, install FFMpeg and its related tools

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
sudo apt-get install libavcodec-dev libavcodec1d libavformat-dev libavformat1d libavutil-dev libavutil1d libpostproc-dev libpostproc1d libswscale-dev libswscale1d

And now when doing conversions with FFMpeg on Ubuntu the sound should be properly encoded as well.  This information was grabbed from the Ubuntu Forums.