Hot Dorkage

If only Ning were as easy to hack on as WordPress!    Ning is a different animal in that you can’t just throw a Ning up on your own hosting like you can with WP.   All Ning social networks reside on Ning’s servers.  They can’t be deployed elsewhere because they rest on  a proprietary inner core (written in Java)  that Ning don’t give out.     When we say hacking Ning we have to specify our level of involvement.  It can fall anywhere from superficial to committed.
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I’ve recently encountered two metablog sites, Blog Engage and Blogatiser. One of them specifically requested a review. What is striking about these two sites is how similar they are. Pretty much everything I say here applies to both sites unless specifically noted otherwise. If I were still a computer science lecturer, I’d think these two lads copied each other’s homework or something. In the real world, it’s called forkage, and it’s considered “building upon the work of others,” It’s OK as long as the “others” are OK with it.

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Warning:  If you are not a Wordpress blogger who can install your own plugins you might wish to skip this post.

Bloglines is my feed reader of choice because it’s simple and hierarchical. I’m going to show you a neat little trick I did on a wordpress blog to make a compact, organized, and best of all automatically updating blogroll. If you are a wordpresser you know that you have links, but who the heck wants to put them in one by one?  What I’m going to show you is how to leverage Bloglines to do your blogroll for you.

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…and probably other things are wrong with you as well.  Got it from xkcd.

For those who have been asleep, educate yourself on Ning, the up-and- coming social network platform. It allows anybody to create their own free full featured network and it’s no harder than creating a blog on blogger. Of course, as people find out, the mere act of creating a ning space doesn’t mean you will instantly be the monarch of a thriving community, any more than creating a blog guarantees that you’ll have thousands of adoring fans worldwide and rake in the chips. Ning is in its infancy. I built a Ning network a few months ago with a local focus, but it wasn’t my primary focus, and I’m not stupid enough to have expected it to grow exponentially without serious marketing. My primary focus at the time was my own home-grown calendar aggregator.

But then everything changed…

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For today’s hack let me say for the record that I am into automation.  I hate doing boring things over and over.  Once I’ve done something once, it should be a macro and I should just be able to invoke the macro.  Like brushing my teeth….. um…. never mind, let’s not go there.    With all the Twitter clients out there someone should have written one to inform Twitter whenever you update a blog post.  Why should I have to manually tweet whenever I update my blog? In an earlier post I stated why I’m not that big a fan of Twitter as a social medium to begin with.

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What is it with me and Text-To-Speech? Just fond memories, I guess. At one time I had a TalkR widget in my Blogger blog. It had a list of all the posts and it would speak whichever one you picked. It must have worked at one time or I would have never published it. I followed the directions at radio.talker.com to create one for this blog. The widget looked just fine but it didn’t work. In fact that entire widget seems to have gone south in general. So I’m not putting it here.

I also had a hack in the post template of my Blogger blog that would read each individual post but its code was blogger specific.

Good ol’ Wordpress to the rescue with a plugin for TalkR. I installed the TalkR plugin, registered the feed and now it is putting a little TalkR link at the bottom of every post. I had to install a codec in Firefox (Ubuntu) on the clientside to get it to stream mp3, but now it seems to work for me.

There is concern expressed in the ranks about the flakiness and spotty availability of TalkR. I removed both the widget and the individual post hack from the Blogger blog because, if I recall correctly, if TalkR went down the blog wouldn’t load. If it does that to Hot Dorkage I’ll have to disable the plugin.

The hacker in me is rearing it’s head. I want to hack something cool. A true hacker hacks for the challenge. The other day I was browsing Google Gadgets and I found a Text-to-Speech gadget from Vozme that touched on a subject that’s dear to my heart. I did some of my best work in the area of Text-to-Speech many years ago. (See the patent post for a good story about that.) Next thing I noticed was that it can generate Spanish. Woohoo. Spanish. That’s my language! What to make it say? Dirty words, of course! That gets people’s attention. So the goal is for this post to blast out a few vulgar expressions carefully selected for their exceptional insult value. In Spanish. And I wanted it to be as user-friendly as possible.

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Some people are cavalier about giving out their credit card number online.   “Oh well,”  they think,  “it’s bound to get stolen some day….”  The other end of the scale is the “better safe than sorry” people who refuse to buy anything online ever because they don’t understand  it and can’t tell the safe from the scary.   I hope that after reading this post you’ll be able to tell the difference.

Here are the key aspects of credit card security:

• Encryption
• Certificates
• Gateways
• PCI Compliance
• AI in the credit card companies
• Data validation
• What should be added

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Well there I am, summarized for all the world to see into a neat little bar graph. If you want to see how you stack up, go ahead and click the widget. It will take you to mypersonality.info where you can take the test yourself. It’s fun, fast and free and you’ll get a nice little widget souvenir like mine for your own blog. Continue Reading…