Born On The Web

After I learned how to use PHP to move files to S3. I was looking for a way to do this in a transparant way, so you’ll still be able to use your own domain name when storing your files on S3.

Twitter uses S3 for storing its user avatars, try loading the timeline and you’ll see the amazonaws.com url coming up in your browser status bar. While this is just a small and visual annoyance, it becomes an issue when people start linking directly to your files stored on Amazon S3. The direct link to a file on S3 will look something like http://aws.amazonaws.com/your_bucket_name/your_file_name . This is not exactly pretty and you’re missing out on a lot of Google juice. In this post I’ll show you how to avoid this in a few simple steps. Only thing you need is an S3 account and access to your DNS config file.

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I’m explaining this to a lot of people recently so I guess it was time to make a blogpost about it.

I manage a few domains, mostly for myself, but also for a couple of friends. I do this because my hosting packet is pretty extensive, it doesn’t cost me more if I add extra domains to  it.

The only thing I found that was a pain, was managing dozens of emails for each domain. Most hosted mailboxes get pretty spammy after a while and have a limited storage. So for me, google for domains really came as a solution, and now I use it almost exclusively for handling my emails. Here are a few reasons why :

• It provides unlimited storage , well not unlimited, but I haven’t met anybody who came close to the limit.
• It has a nice and lightning fast interface (a real upgrade for users who are used to work with squirrel mail)
• It supports imap and pop3 access
• It’s free
• It can be accessed on a mobile phone.(via web or a mobile tool)
• Easy to use control panel to create new users, you can create extra administrators, administrators can create aliases for email addresses. (so most of my friends can manage their emails themselves)
• Easy to create mailing lists
• Possibility to use more than only email: docs, chat, sites, …

However changing email provider without any problems is considered impossible. Since I’ve done it a few times now, I think I’ve found the best way to do it. Without loosing any mails.

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Well the future lays in the browser, everybody knows that. And that is the exact reason that from today on, I’ll change my standard music player on my computer. I’ve been long with Winamp. It is fast, responsive and has an incredibly cool classic skin, which I’m sure going to miss. But times change, just as my listening behavior has changed. I find myself listening less to my personal music library and more to last.fm radio, shoutcast stations or StuBru via streaming.

So since a few months I’ve been playing with Songbird, the music player based on Mozilla Firefox, which actually makes it a browser that can play music. And I have to say the more I use it, the more I really like the flexibility and openness open source alternatives bring. Just like Firefox their is an add-on ability. Where I recently found some cool powerfull add-ons.

But the real power of Songbird is in the way how it can handle online music. It plays MP3’s as good from a website as it can play them from your hard-drive. Songbird is native web player. This allows you to just use the internal Skreemr MP3 search engine and start listening to your favorite band. Every time songbird finds a link to an audio file on a webpage it will automatically put it into a playlist. Which means you can immediately start listening, without downloading.

And the future of Songbird lays in integration with webpages. If you take a look at the functionalities of their webpage API. You’ll see the direction they are going. Via Songbird, you will be able to play music from webpages but also the other way around. Webpages can get to know what you’re playing. And for example give bring you other related music. (There’s even a business model in that one)

Songbird, the music player for the net natives. Bright future ahead…

The times of crappy-mostly-failing web uploads seem to be completely gone. I’ve made some screens of the best examples I use:

1. Vimeo, great how you can add metadata to the video while uploading.

2. Flickr, Jay!, multiple file upload. Incredible valuable for a photo sharing site.

3. Facebook, the max file size on facebook is 300 MB, that’s a lot !!

Scoble has a very nice blogpost on Zooomr its recent problems, I don’t know if you followed the story. But after releasing its next big update to the site it went down for 2 weeks. Be sure to read to the end and see the embedded youtube… inspiring.

http://scobleizer.com/2007/06/04/zooomr-next-big-inch/

I’ve always liked the way flickr build their URL’s. Now that they just launched geoRSS feeds, it will show you how the URL of a service has become a kind of command line for that service.

The URL is structured in the following way:

flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/ countrycode / province or state / place

It will get clear if I give you some examples:

• http://www.flickr.com/service/feeds/geo/ will give you all geotagged photos from all over the world.
• http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/BE/ will give you all geotagged photos from Belgium, (BE is the country code).
• http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/BE/vlaams-brabant/ will give you all the photos from the province “Vlaams-Brabant “in Belgium.
• http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/BE/vlaams-brabant/Meise will give you all the photos from a town called ”Meise” in the province of Vlaams-Brabant, Belgium

Cool huh! But that’s not all. Now surf to google maps and just copy past a flickr geoRSS(a click for the lazy people). It should display the images nicely on the map. This is what interoperability between to services is all about.

Great work !

Well this is a nice site to kill some time … movies and shows everywhere. I wonder how long it will last.

A sentence on the homepage really made me smile:

VideoHybrid is currently working on a corporate advertising system such that content owners will be able to benefit from the site.

Good luck and stay out of Hollywood :-)

Dear mister Telenet,

I really like that you’ve put hotspots all over the Belgium. Especially in the train stations this is really useful, but I was wondering: Shouldn’t it be nice to have access when you’re in the train on the rails?

So if the train stops in a railway station you just have the time to send and receive your mails. Now it only seems the station building is covered.

Thank you and do carry on wifi-ing the country,

Jesse

When I first heard of openID, I taught, great that’s going to come in handy. But when you think about it the possibilities are much more than just a way to skip the register page. It makes your network of trusted people (friends) much usable in every web applications. I’m going to show you what the real power of openID is, using my wordpress blog as an example.

This is an example how a new technology like openID can have huge online social consequences. I like that! :)

But cut the crap let’s get our hands dirty:

1. the problem

Well everyone has a lot of comment spam, the longer you blog, the more spam you get. Askimet catches lots of spam, still this remains a huge problem.

2. the solution

Social Whitelisting (idea from Tom Coates):
I trust most of my blog readers, because I know them and they hate comment spam as much as I do. I want them to be able to moderate comments on this blog. If they see a spam comment, they should be able to delete it. So now my readers can sign in to my blog with their openID. I get an email, I check if I know this person and if I trust him. If yes, I give him the rights to moderate comments. It’s as simple as that. So if you like to test it out, simply login and I’ll give you the rights to moderate my comments. Just to give you something extra, you will also be able to edit my published posts, jep, I make a lot of spelling mistakes ;-) AND make drafts.

3. How ?

I used 2 wordpress plugins:

1. openID plugin
2. role manager plugin

It still needs some tweaking. The role manager plugin is acting a bit strange. But I’ll figure it out.

4. Next steps

This is great and it works, but still I need to approve every new member manually. I want to be able to have a list of people who I trust, not only to moderate my blog but also to view my private photos at flickr for example. How can I do this? Well I can make a list of people who I always trust by making a group on jyte, people in my group will always be given the correct rights.
This is a plugin I plan to write, when somebody signs in on my blog with an openID, I check if he’s part of my network of trusted people (with jytes API) and give him the permissions he needs to moderate comments.

With jyte you get the possibility to decentralize your friends list. Make your friends list cross-platform and give them the permissions they need to make your life a bit easier.
It’s one step closer to a decentralised social network and that, my friends, is the real power behind openID.

Resources:

• six cool things you can build with openID
• social whitelisting with openID
• Simon Willison’s talk on FOWA