I'm not sure I've even mentioned CoComment before, but I've been trying to play with it a bit lately. It doesn't work very well with Maxthon or (for me) Internet Explorer (it says cookies aren't enabled or not stored properly, and that I'm not logged in over and over), but it does work nicely with Firefox. Finally - a good way for me track comments. But there's a problem - it only works well with certain blogging platforms. And they have a solution - you can manually integrate your own blog.

There were no samples for b2evolution, so I decided to go ahead do it. For others who use b2evo, below are the instructions to integrate CoComment into your blog.

First, you need to edit the /skins/_feedback.php file. Most of the changes is adding a section of javascript, but there is one line that has to be modified. Look for a line that?begins with ?'<form action', then a bunch of other stuff, and finished off by a '>'. Now, add 'name="commentForm"' (without the single quotes) inside the final '>'.

Then, you add this chunk of javascript:

   1:  <script type="text/javascript">

   2:      var blogTool              = "b2evolution";

   3:      var blogURL               = "<?php $Blog->disp('blogurl', 'raw');?>";

   4:      var blogTitle             = "<?php $Blog->disp('name', 'htmlhead');?>";

   5:      var postURL               = "<?php $Item->permalink(); ?>";

   6:      var postTitle             = "<?php $Item->title(); ?>";

   7:      var commentTextFieldName  = "comment";

   8:      var commentButtonName     = "submit";

   9:      var commentAuthorLoggedIn = <?php if(is_logged_in()) { echo "true"; } else { echo "false"; }?>;

  10:      <?php if(is_logged_in()) { ?>

  11:      var commentAuthor         = "<?php $current_User->prefered_name(); ?>";

  12:      <?php } else { ?>

  13:      var commentAuthorFieldName = "author";

  14:      <?php } ?>

  15:      var commentFormName       = "commentForm";

  16:  </script>

That's it. Now, you can add one more line to active CoComment automatically, but I didnt' go that far.

The cool thing about CoComment is that now, I could put up a display of the places that I've commented at recently, so then people can see other places that I'm involved in the comments. Plus, since I don't offer per comment feeds, if everyone used CoComment, then it wouldn't be needed.

Technorati Tags: CoComment | b2evolution

After promising it months ago, Carl Franklin has released an initial alpha release of Pwopcatcher. I am definitely going to check it out. My current podcast subscription process has one major flaw: torrents. Pwopcatcher works in conjunction with uTorrent (my torrent downloader of choice anyway), and by doing so, can automatically download MP3s from a torrent feed.

Since I switched to FeedDemon and FeedStation, I've been much happier with my podcasting download solution because I can have podcasts downloaded automatically and maintain my subscriptions all in one place. This is why I hesitate to start using Pwopcatcher - there's only one thing I need from FeedStation to eliminate my need for another program.

Here's the deal: In FeedStation, you can set up a folder to use as the root for all podcast downloads. In uTorrent, you can set up a folder to monitor for torrent files. Any torrent file dropped in that folder will automatically get picked up and get downloaded. Sounds like a match made in heaven, right? Not quite. One of two things needs to happen: Either FeedStation (or FeedDemon) needs to allow me to override the folder that a feed will be stored in (or let me store all podcasts in one folder - no subfolders), or uTorrent needs to look for torrent files recursively.

If either of these things happened, then I could maintain all of my feeds in one place (the Newsgator family of products) and still be able to download any type of enclosure automatically, including torrents!

Until then, Pwopcatcher will probably be a great substitute for any torrent feeds.

Technorati Tags: podcast | BitTorrent | Pwopcatcher | FeedDemon | FeedStation

At 10:45, I posted about the Vista delay, and by 11:00 PM, my link was up on tech.memeorandum. I wonder how the indexing happens. Does it look at the info from the other blog search engines? Or does it index on it's own? My guess is that it watches some of the search engines looking for recently updated blogs to determine what stories are linked to, and if it reaches a certain threshold, it hits the front page, and it pulls in the links.

Technorati Tags: Memeorandum

When TailRank first launched, I jumped on board and signed up, uploading my OPML. I questioned why I did so at the time, since it didn't give me anything.

Well, they've redesigned and obviously added some new features, and the end result: It rocks!

Why? Short version: it shows what's interesting to your network. Long version: you can filter by your subscriptions and see what the blogs in your network are linking to. But it goes beyond that because you can then filter further by the number of links. I'm not sure what the appropriate number for me is, but I'm pretty sure it's not the default of two - with over 700 subscriptions, finding two posts that link to the same thing is pretty common. Now, if I up that number to 10 or 15, then I start to get a pretty good look at what's important to my network. This is exactly what I talked about doing using the Newsgator API.

Now, here's how this could be better and more useful for me. First, I imported my Newsgator OPML file, but I am constantly updating that with new subscriptions and (now that FeedDemon makes it easy to find dead feeds) removing old feeds. It would be nice if I could tell TailRank to remember my information and pull down my updated subscriptions - it doesn't have to be every time I access the feed or page, but once a week or even once a month would be nice. Keep the subscription list relatively accurate. Second, show me who in my network is linking to it. If there's 17 links from my subscription list, I'd like to know who they are, as well as who else in the blogosphere is linking to it. Or, let me upload multiple OPMLs and base feeds based on subsets of my list.

Still, the more I use TailRank, the more I like it.

One note: I tried to subscribe to my 10 link personal filter, and got errors. The feed link points to:

http://rss.tailrank.com/posts/filter?min_ranking=10/handle/RossCode

but that link doesn't work. Until the issue is resolved, you can fix it by moving the /handle/RossCode to right after filter, like so:

http://rss.tailrank.com/posts/filter/handle/RossCode?min_ranking=10

Obviously, if you're using for your own feeds, substitute RossCode with your own TailRank ID.

Technorati Tags: TailRank | OPML

I've harped on Visual Studio 2005's website projects quite a bit lately, and I'm going to move to the web application model now that it's been officially released. But, I did want to talk about one last issue I've seen, because it's a doozy.

Some background: We have three projects that we're building and deploying. One is at the root of the website, and the other are sub applications (virtual directories) under the root. Of the two sub applications, one was set to compile all of the code into one DLL, and one was left like it was - compiling each code file into a randomly named DLL. The root site used the default compilation, but that part didn't seem to matter, because we changed that to compile to one DLL and still had the same issue that I'm going to lay out.

Basically, whenever the root application was deployed, it broke the sub application that used the default compilation model. We got errors saying it couldn't find the necessary DLLs. The sub app would remain broken until I uploaded the same exact files again. I don't know if this is a problem with ASP.NET 2.0, something we were doing, or possibly WebHost4Life's shared hosting environment.

What led us to fault the default compilation model? Well, the other sub application was unaffected by deployments of the root application. So our solution was to switch the problematic sub application to compile to one DLL. Once we did that, our issues went away, and I stopped trying to figure out what was going on. But if you ever run into this, now you'll know how to fix it!

Technorati Tags: Compilation | Visual+Studio+2005 | ASP.NET

There've been reports all over the place today that 60% of Vista is going to be rewritten before it's released. Scoble has already refuted the claim, but he did it through Microsoft's PR firm, so people are still questoning it.

Seriously though, let's take a step back and think about this: if 60% is going to be rewritten, then how could they ever expect to get it out by January? Vista has been on the horizon for a couple of years now, and has been probably been actively developed for at least a year beyond that. So it's taken 36 months to get to where we are, and Microsoft is going to throw away more than 21 of those months. Not only that, but then rebuild it in eight months? Remember, Vista is slated to be released to volume customers in November. With Microsoft's focus on security, there's no way they could ensure that this new code is secure, let alone stable.

Personally, I'm with Scoble on this one...

Technorati Tags: Vista

First, I picked UConn to win it all this year in the NCAA tournament. So, if they lose tonight, I'm going to feel responsible.

Why? Well, I picked Duke, Gonzaga and Boston College as my other final four teams, and, well, you've seen what's happened to them...

Technorati Tags: NCAA | March+Madness | Duke | UConn | Gonzaga | Boston+College

You know, the Midwest is just a technology hotbed! First Grand Haven (which is about 5 minutes from my house) launched one of the first city-wide wireless networks (and goes something like 5 miles out into the Big Lake). Now, it looks like the whole county that I live in may be going wireless. But not via WiFi, but using a 3G network (yeah, cell phones). One tower can reportedly cover a three mile radius - the whole county could be blanketed with about a dozen towers. Prices sound reasonable too - $14.99 for 1.4 MB/s per month is much less than I'm paying now. Of course, it's probably per computer, which might get expensive for someone like me, who has five computers running on my home network, but the mobility factor might be worth it.

[found via The Wireless Report]

Technorati Tags: Municipal-WiFi

I've been looking at a few different design patterns, and one of the popular ones among TDD evangelists is Inversion of Control, or Dependency Injection. Both sound complicated. Or did, until I saw this from James Shore. Bottom line from James (literally and figuratively, in this case): "Dependency injection is really just passing in an instance variable."

He's able to break down exactly what it means, and give you a simple example. Then he goes on to show why it's an important concept for unit testing.

Of course, if you want the meaty details, go to the source: Martin Fowler has a very long and very detailed article about Inversion of Control that actually makes more sense once you read James' post.

Technorati Tags: Dependency+Injection | Inversion+of+Control | Unit+Testing

Nick Bradbury has been a busy man lately. 2.0 RC1 just came out, it seems, and already RC2 is out.

I've downloaded and installed it already, and I'm impressed. It's not that it's that much better than RC1 or the betas, but it's an overall thing - this software impresses me. All of the issues that I had with the earlier betas have been taken care of - no longer do I lose news bin items on a crash (come to think of it, I'm not totally sure, since it hasn't crashed in a long time), and RC1 finally reintroduced the option to prevent items with no descriptions from opening the link automatically (that annoyed me - delicious feeds were the worst offenders). The synching is much, much faster now that it synchs with Newsgator Online, and since RC1, the software just seems snappier.

I can't wait for the final release, although, I'd be happy using this for a while too!

Technorati Tags: FeedDemon | Newsgator