OK, I thought there would have been a whole lot of documenation on this, but I’ve been trying to crack this for a while (read: find something useful from somebody clever online).
I’ve tried a few implementations of PHP and XML-RPC myself, with probably the closest approach being using Keith Devens’ XML-RPC classes using this Sitepoint article. However, I wasn’t getting much back from Wordpress.
All that changed when I finally stumbled on this wonderful code snippet courtesy of Sniptag. It uses the Blogger API and you just need to change the settings to those of your Wordpress blog. Great for dumb/newbies like me.
So if you want to build simple PHP scripts to post remotely to Wordpress, you should find your answer in these links.
BTW, if anyone knows how the code should look for the MetaWeblog API I’d be happy to know. I’m definitely no expert on PHP structures.
Ouch. Just judging by the comment threads on this blog you can see that this really has touched a nerve. You can read Todd Wilkens full visceral post here:
http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2007/07/17/why-usability-is-a-path-to-failure/
The basics are this - in art we look for moments of wonder, not that just the mundane prerequisites have been met. A book should be ground-breaking, not just readable. The problem with usability is that it concentrates too heavily on the ‘readable’ at the expense of the ethereal.
This seems to have incurred the wrath of a large sections of the usability crowd.
If asked a month ago, I would have agreed wholeheartedly with Todd. One of the most popular sites in the US has one of the least usable interfaces - I’m thinking of Myspace. Google was also championed as a usability leader, although to my knowledge, when Google began, they did little in the way of a usability study - they just decided to keep things simple. That interface has hardly changed since it’s inception (although now Google does have a more robust usability team). By contrast Yahoo was using usability advice to work in all the myriad apps it wanted to become a portal - an approach which finally cost it, in terms of rankings as a leading search site.
One thing has changed my previous standpoint - the growth of Facebook over Myspace. Although there are key features that separate the two social networking sites, surely one of the factors that has led to Facebook’s rise must be the easy of interface and the way you can quickly create a good looking profile. Let the usability debate flame on…
I have to say that it is unprecedented in our house. My wife goes dozily gets there even before she’s cracked open Gmail. It sounds like she’s not alone if new figures on the use of Facebook are anything to go by.
More than 31 million active users, and the number is going up by 100K users per day. It’s incredible to see the viral growth of social networking sites in today’s connected world. Notably it’s also one of the most popular photo-sharing apps on the web today. What does that mean for Flickr? That also makes me wonder what’s Facebook’s shelf-life? I’d give it until the next internet phenomena appears, which these days is about as long as it takes to get ranked by Google (for the non-Googlelizers that’s less than a year).
You can find all the figures via Marketing Vox although interestingly enough there’s nothing about whether Facebook has dented Myspace’s popularity since its advent in September 2006. I’d kind of expect it to, given that the core internet users that make up the traffic on these sites don’t have infinite amount of time, even though it often seems that way. By spending 20 minutes a day scouring Facebook walls is surely usurping the time that had been spent vanity-posting on Myspace.
So what does Facebook have that the other big players don’t? For me one of the interesting facets that makes Facebook different to almost every other social networking site is that it doesn’t integrate well with search. Whereas Myspace, Flickr, Wikipedia and to a limited extent LinkedIn have all relied on the major search engines (read Google) for a spot in the limelight and the reams of traffic that follows, Facebook is a walled garden whose login system helps keep things private. And that seems to be the key. It’s more networking than publishing. I’d venture to say that it could be the replacement we didn’t know we needed for personal emailing. Attractive because as yet there isn’t much junk. That and the countless applications that exist on top of the Facebook platform.
It’s also done away with camel-case - note it’s not FaceBook but Facebook. A new era?
So, you’ve got your beat-matching all figured out but occasionally still throw the odd clanger when trying to blend a couple of tracks. Chances are you’re putting one key on another that just don’t go.
Unless you’ve got Stevie Wonder’s ears, you may have a few problems trying to figure out what key a particular track is in. Fear not, oh digital DJ because now there are tools that can help you on your way.
Mixed in Key
For a little over $50 this smart little app will scan mp3 and wav files and show you which songs are harmonically-compatible. They also provide an excellent how-to guide that talks you through the basics.
Camelot Sound
Slightly different approach here. This site maintains a database of tracks together with their harmonic key. Great for the more mainstream end of the spectrum.
More resources from the Whippinpost
Latest developments in this area and some links to further resources.
This just came up as an issue in a meeting I just had - brought up by a developer who works in Web 2.0 community development. He had heard that due to the low quality of posts, Google was not ranking blogs so highly these days.
I had to say I haven’t heard anything along these lines. It did seem kind of strange given the nature of blogs - sites with regular, fresh content that link to each other. Also, how easy is it to say what is a blog these days, especially when so many news outlets are using this kind of format for their content.
Searching around I found this specific example from Common Craft (OK, that’s also where I found the videos I talked about earlier:
http://entrepreneurs.about.com/cs/marketing/a/blogvisibility.htm
One of the key things here is that Common Craft have managed to get top rankings by carefully choosing the categories. It seems to have worked like a treat because they’re still coming up for terms they ranked for 4 years ago. Time for me to do some category restructuring…
Is it just me, or is the quality of video content on the rise? I need to spend more time around YouTube and Blip.tv.
Recently I came across these nuggets from Common Craft - a site dedicated to social design. Just in case you were wondering what social community sites are, or thought RSS was a speech disorder:
(Social networking in plain English)
Here’s another low-fi quickie:
(RSS in plain English)
It’s funny the speed at which ‘buzz’ moves these days. About two weeks ago I’d only vaguely heard of the Facebook social network. Although by not being one of the heavy Slashdot/Digg consumers it’s true that I hear about a lot of things late. But all of a sudden there was talk of Facebook from all directions. First, I found most of the youngbloods at the search marketing agency I used to work for were on it. Next, a journalist pal tells me he’d had a lot of people asking him about it. And now the clincher - there’s talk that Google is trying to get a piece of the action and is rumoured to be in talks with this Web 2.0 babe.
Most of these rumours have recently come true (think YouTube, DoubleClick) so we could hear something more concrete quite soon. Parallels are being made with Google’s overtures towards Myspace, now owned by Murdoch. Although as far as I can tell, there are some stark differences between the two platforms, especially as far as Google is concerned.
Facebook is more of a gated community working on the network-building idea whereas Myspace is open - closer to the publishing model. Just check out their homepages: http://www.facebook.com/ vs. http://www.myspace.com/.So the tie-up with Myspace seems more natural, given that Google can only really display open content.
So when it comes to adspend and the Google Adwords model, how much can Google really make from Facebook? However, there is the other side of Google’s current development push which we tend to hear less of - that of the web document system - the online challenge to Microsoft Office. One of the powerful aspects of editing and storing documents on the web is the idea of collaboration. Perhaps this is where Facebook comes in - an existing network ripe for the injection of some cool online editing tools?
Although this could all be a bit premature - it is after all only a rumour.
So, you’ve got a great new product and you have to figure the best way of getting news about it out there, and getting people to use it.
A good approach demostrated by Google is to get a developer involved in the project to talk about why they built it and what the key features are.
Check out the demo for the Google Reader.
