MMMeeja

blog :: social

Import Your Muxtapes Into FriendFeed

Posted on 02 Jul 2008 by Andy

Great excitement over at FriendFeed when they added an an integrated MP3 player for RSS feeds that contain enclosures.

The FriendFeed media player

Sadly, few feeds make use of enclosures (maybe this will change with FriendFeed’s new support) and one of the notable sites that could really benefit is Muxtape, a site that lets you create your own online mixtapes. So, since my last Yahoo Pipes creation was so successful, I set out to remedy this using another Yahoo Pipe.

The result is probably my most complicated pipe to date but it works pretty well. It uses the excellent Seeqpod music search service to try and find matching MP3s anywhere on the web. You need a Seeqpod API key to use the pipe, so sign up for an account and edit your profile to grab a key, as shown below:

Seeqpod API key

Next head over to the the pipe and enter your muxtape name and Seeqpod API key. You should get a nice RSS feed that can be imported into FriendFeed as a blog. You can see mine in the MMMeeja FriendFeed room but I don’t have too many entries in the muxtape yet.

If the music on your muxtape is quite obscure, it is possible that Seeqpod won’t be able to find it. In that case the entry remains but it doesn’t get an enclosure so you won’t be able to play it in FriendFeed. Similarly, sometimes Seeqpod returns MP3 URLs that are no longer valid. Not much I can do to fix that, I am sorry.

Those of you that really want to add some noise to your FriendFeed, I’ve also created a similar pipe for last.fm recently listened items here.

0 comments, add yours.

Plot Your Twitter Followers On A Map

Posted on 17 Jun 2008 by Andy

Yahoo Pipes are a pretty cool way to create mashups fast and this post will teach you how to plot your Twitter followers or friends on a map and embed it into your blog in less than five minutes!

Yahoo Pipes logo

Yes, five minutes, set your stopwatch running... now!

There are two pipes to choose from, one for your Twitter followers and one for your Twitter friends. The first one requires your Twitter password (and sends it over an unencrypted connection) so it might be best to try the one for your friends first.

Click the link and enter your Twitter username. Click “Run pipe” and wait a few seconds...

Can you see a map?

andymurd’s Twitter friends

Great! Look above the map, at the left and click “Get as a badge” link. Choose settings to match your blog (you can adjust the size too) and follow the on-screen instructions. I was impressed by how well the Yahoo team had integrated with Blogger, TypePad and iGoogle - less impressed for WordPress but that needs a theme edit to embed it into your sidebar.

And here are the finished results:

Feed viewers, to see the map, you’ll need to click through to the article.

1 comments, add yours.

How To Drive Traffic From Facebook To Your Blog

Posted on 11 Jun 2008 by Andy

First of all, apologies for not posting for a couple of weeks but I had a lovely holiday, thank-you for asking. Back to posting now with this great article on funnelling visitors from your Facebook profile to your blog with a simple hack.

Facebook logo

Facebook is great for the less technical amongst my friends, it is email and instant messaging in one handy package. For the rest of us, it’s walled-garden approach can be annoying. I wanted to tell my friends about new blog posts as they happen, much the same way that techies would use an RSS reader.

The answer to this problem is to use Facebook’s Notes application to import an external feed but not to reproduce the content in it’s entirety, just provide a link to entice facebookers to your blog. The results are not great from a usability point of view but they show up in your news feed and people do click through - I think that the less technical are happy to click two or three links to get to their destination.

Here’s an example from my news feed:

A new blog post shows up in my Facebook news feed

I created a Yahoo Pipe to turn this blog’s RSS feed into a much simpler feed that just announces each new post and then imported the results into my Facebook profile. If you want to do the same, it’s easy - the pipe is published and to use it, just enter your blog name and its feed URL. Then grab the results URL and import it into your Facebook profile.

This technique could be adapted in lots of ways - alert your friends when you publish new photos to Flickr, for example. Just be aware that Facebook will only import a single feed via notes, but using the power of Yahoo Pipes, you can easily merge several feeds into one.

0 comments, add yours.

FriendFeed Rooms List

Posted on 27 May 2008 by Andy

FriendFeed launched thier new rooms functionality on Thursday and users have been busy playing with the service to see exactly how best to use it. The seems to have been a bit of a goldrush for the good names and Corvida of SheGeeks rightly pointed out that there is a danger of rooms dividing the community.

FriendFeed logo

A common request has been for a list of available public rooms, a feature that I wholeheartedly agree with. So I hacked around with a bit of perl and came up with the following list via the Yahoo Search API. It is by no means complete and probably out of date as soon as I post it, but it is a start. Enjoy.

UPDATE: I’ve re-run the query and Yahoo has indexed a load more rooms, so the list has been updated. Andy Beard has chimed in with a google query that returns FriendFeed rooms.

So, there you go, 77 107 786(!) rooms so far and no doubt more being added everyday. If you have a public room on FriendFeed that you would like to publicise here, please leave a comment below.

3 comments, add yours.

Is Your Blog Creating A Buzz On Social Media?

Posted on 22 Apr 2008 by Andy

Early warning radar

Lots people use social media to find new and interesting content nowadays and clever blog authors can monitor those networks to find great promotional avenues for their content, join the discussion or react to head off bad publicity.

Social media moves fast, very fast - digg has around 100 popular posts per day - so you need to react quickly to catch the buzz before it moves on. This post will explain how to monitor some of the more popular social networks for your blog and get notified quickly.

RSS

The secret sauce for this technique is RSS, a protocol for managing streams of information. As a blogger, you probably know all about RSS but if you’re not using it yet, get to it!

Almost all social media sites provide RSS feeds, some more comprehensive than others. This post shows how to monitor feeds from Technorati, FriendFeed, Reddit, Digg and del.icio.us.

First you’ll need an RSS reader or (better still) account with a feed agregator, Google Reader is perfect and it’s free.

The Internet Is A Series Of Pipes

Luckily, engtech over at Internet Duct Tape has done a lot of the hard work for us in the form of two Yahoo Pipes.

The first will monitor Technorati for recent mentions of your blog. Just enter your blog’s URL, run the pipe and subscribe to the feed.

The second pipe check Digg and Reddit for mentions of any URL in your domain. Very cool stuff. As before, enter the URL, run the pipe and subscribe to the feed.

FriendFeed Makes It Easy

It makes good sense to monitor FriendFeed for mentions of your blog because it incorporates information from many sources, like Stumbleupon and Tumblr that are not covered in this post and can be difficult to get information from.

By contrast, it’s a piece of cake to get the information you seek from FriendFeed. Just follow these steps:

  1. Go to the public tab.
  2. Enter your blog name in the search box at the top-right.
  3. At the bottom of the results you will see a label “Other ways to see this search” with an RSS icon next to it.
  4. Click the icon and subscribe.

Nice and easy.

A del.icio.us Pipe

Another Yahoo Pipe is used to find pages of your site tagged on del.icio.us, this time by Adam Boulton over at iCrossing.

The pipe can be found here and it works in the same way as the others - enter your domain, run it and subscribe.

Four Social Sites Tracked In Three Feeds

Warning light

Now you have your site and/or brand monitoring setup, you can check the resulting feeds daily or even create a early warning system with Twitter. It’s nice to watch an article become popular on one network (and thank the original Stumbler/Digger/Redditor, of course) and you can be drafting a follow-up whilst it is hot.

Missed One!

How could I miss out the wonderful TweetScan?

TweetScan gives you a feed of any mentions of your name/brand/blog on Twitter, the microblogging runaway success.

Any more services that you think I’ve missed? Let me know in the comments.

Photo credits to Brian Harrington Spier and Aubrey Arenas respectively.

0 comments, add yours.

del.icio.us Can Be Used To Bookmark Colour Palettes

Posted on 20 Apr 2008 by Andy

I’ve been hunting down some del.icio.us power users to try and learn some new techniques with the tool and they seem to be a bit trickier to track down. I did discover one cool feature from kikipedia that was completely new to me - you can store colour palettes!

A colour palette in del.icio.us

The process uses an extension to the URL format - specify a protocol of “color:” instead of the usual “http:” - and then the rest of the URL is a comma separated list of six digit hex colour codes. Here is the URL for the palette shown above:

Adding a colour palette in del.icio.us

You’ll be prompted for a description and can add tags as normal.

This is a great feature but I could find no mention of it of the del.icio.us blog. I’d like to see ColourLovers add this functionality to their application too, and maybe integration with the Palette Grabber or ColorZilla Firefox extensions.

So, I found one hidden feature of del.icio.us, do you know of any more? Do you know of any applications that use del.icio.us to store colour palettes? I didn’t test with Adobe Kuler because I hate Flash applications. Comment below if you have anything to add!

0 comments, add yours.

How To Use Twitter, TwitterFox, TwitterFeed & Google Reader As An Early Warning System

Posted on 23 Mar 2008 by Andy

There’s more to Twitter than chat. Thanks to its API, loads of third party applications can interact with your information stream.

This article will show you how to use Twitter to alert you to new output from any web service that provides an RSS feed. I use it to check my hosting and page validity as I described in an earlier post.

If you are not already a Twitter user, I suggest you sign up and play around with it for a while as some of the steps involved in the article are a bit involved. If you’re already happy with Twitter and concepts like RSS, then let’s go...

Ingredients

For this howto, you will need:

Step One - Mix All Your Feeds Together

Create a new category in Google Reader and add all of your monitoring feeds to it. If you are familiar with Google Reader, this should be old hat but if not:

  1. Click the RSS icon RSS icon
  2. Select “Add To Google Reader”
  3. When Google Reader displays the feed, use the “Feed Settings” pulldown to add it to a new folder

Repeat these steps for each feed you want to add.

Step Two - Make Your New Folder Public

The folder in Google reader provides its own RSS feed of all the items mixed together but it needs to be public before TwitterFeed can process it.

To do so, go to Google Reader’s settings and choose the tab marked “Tags”. Find your new folder and click the broadcast icon to make it public. A public feed

Finally, click the “view public page” link and locate and copy the URL of the feed for that category. We’re now finished with Google Reader.

Step Three - Create A New Twitter User

We want to create a new user for Twitter that will only ever tweet items from your feed. You’ll later follow the new user from your regular account.

Create your new user in the normal manner but there's no need to find any friends and you might want to make the new user’s feed private. Now, we need to get your regular Twitter username to follow your feed user.

  1. Log into Twitter using your regular username
  2. Point your browser at http://twitter.com/<feed-user-name> and request to follow
  3. Log out of Twitter and back in again as your feed user. Accept the follow request
  4. Log o