Last weekend I was at the music hack day in London, organised by Dave Haynes and James Darling: a two-day event where software developers met up and wrote music-related software (or built hardware.) Instruments, a distributed content resolver, various SoundCloud tools, etc. Although the event attracted lots of interesting people from all over the planet (well, Europe) I ended up coding most of the weekend instead of talking. (On that note, I'm still amazed by the amount of time coding requires, even after you learned how to channel your ambitions more efficiently. Software development is still a painful process.) I …

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Since there are so many announcements about OpenID these days I decided it's time to actually have a look at the OpenID 1.1 spec. Turns out it's a light and fairly quick read, and its authors paid delightful attention to some crucial details. I especially liked this: The main advantage of [OpenID's delegation mechanism] is that an End User can keep their Identifier over many years, even as services come and go; they'll just keep changing who they delegate to. And was impressed to see stuff like this in the spec: It is RECOMMENDED that the form field [for the …

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I just found that StrategicBoard offers their keyword search results in an OPML format that contains feed URLs -- which can be a remarkable tool in a number of situations. Such a service is an essential prerequisite for feed grazing, i.e. subscribing to blogs temporarily while they're writing about stuff that you're interested in. (Feed grazing typically is part of automated processes, e.g. of simple news recommendation engines or topic exploration algorithms. Some desktop aggregators seem to support it already, unfortunately NetNewsWire isn't one of them.) Here's the URL for such a search query: http://www.strategicboard.com/index.php?fr=o&s=your_keyword ...and the result is an …

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Did you notice Sam Ruby's new preoccupation with ETags? When he's talking with founders about their new web services, "the first thing I ask is; 'do you support ETags?'" I'm so glad that he's doing that, and talking about it publicly. I've been a web developer for a number of years now, and from the beginning I knew about some basic caching issues and about the HTTP 304 (Not Modified) response -- but it took me a while to figure out that in my scripts it's my responsibility to send this header. Request caching on this level is simply something …

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While reading this: Google built a feed platform that is freely available for any user with a Google account. ... and re-reading this: The data technologies powering Google Reader can easily be used and extended by third-party feed aggregators for use in their own applications. ... it struck me: centralized aggregation, decentralized delivery and UI the hardest part in a reader (IMHO) is aggregation, because it offers a lot of pitfalls with little reward for making it "just work" more interesting: the visible stuff solves bandwidth issues for everybody solves stability issues for everybody saves costs for the developer/hoster (these …

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del.icio.us apparently has just added a feature that I've been wanting for a long time: It's now very easy to see the history of bookmarks for a specific URL without having to bookmark it yourself. Here's an example of such a bookmark history page: del.icio.us bookmarks for mailfeed.org. I regularly check these URL bookmark histories on del.icio.us, because it can answer all kinds of interesting questions, e.g.: How popular is this URL? Since when have people known about this? Who bookmarked this URL first? What are their comments? I imagine this caters to a small audience, but it's a …

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I've been submitting feature requests and bug reports to the NetNewsWire forum -- Brent Simmons seems pretty responsive. I'm looking forward to an application update, it's been months since 2.01 was released, and I'm wondering what Brent's working on (probably mainly NewsGator integration, which at the moment is of little use to me.) The more I'm using the application the more I'm finding its limitations -- it's still the best aggregator for the Mac (though Vienna is getting closer and closer), but sometimes I'm a bit envious of the Windows world where FeedDemon is making great strides lately. I'm …

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I just had a couple of wonderful days of being busy deploying a new site, MailFeed.org. The site is a public service derived from the mailfeed.rb script posted earlier: you send email to an address at mailfeed.org, and it shows up in a public feed. If you don't know it yet have a look at the site, and then come back. Originally the idea for this arose of a nuisance a friend wanted to get rid of: that there still are people sending out email newsletters instead of writing feeds. But during the last couple of days I found that …

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A friend has asked me for a way to read email newsletters from within his feed reader, and after some digging around I found it's straightforward enough to access POP3 mail from within Ruby, so I created mailfeed.rb. mailfeed.rb is a Ruby script that generates an RSS 2.0 feed from the content of an email inbox. This can e.g. be used to read email-based newsletters from within your feed reader. (See also: MailFeed for PHP, pymailfeed for Python.) It's really a pretty simple script, so there are a number of caveats -- e.g. there is no limit on the …

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For the last two weeks I've observed SearchFox RSS's list of "Topics I like" to both find out how it's working and to see if it accurately reflects my taste. See my earlier article "SearchFox Rocks. But Where Are the Web Services?" for a little context. Random observations: The keywords are indeed ordered by rank, the first keyword being the most highly ranked. You can deduce this by comparing the keyword movements at the start and end of the list over time: lots of movement at the end of the list. Easy come, easy go. The list actually reflects what …

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This is an update on my ongoing series on web service client authorization ([1], [2]): exciting times ahead! To reiterate: there are more and more sites appearing that provide means to connect to them to read and manipulate data you have stored on their servers via web service APIs. This enables the creation of third-party applications and services that build upon these sites and enhance their services. E.g., there is an iPhoto plugin for Flickr, lots of alternative interfaces to your del.icio.us bookmarks, etc. The problem: nearly every one of these services requires you to give up your username and …

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SearchFox is really great. It's a web-based feed reader (currently in beta) that watches you reading feeds, and which uses this attention data to improve your reading experience. After you have used it for a while SearchFox develops an understanding of the things you care about, and presents these accordingly (feed articles are sorted by ranking, not time). How SearchFox works There are several ways to tell the application that you like a specific feed article: by reading the article (in SearchFox you are presented with a list of headlines and some metadata, and have to click a link to …

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Take a look at this very strange del.icio.us account: http://del.icio.us/cuthu -- I stumbled upon this user while datamining my own del.icio.us account with simple Ruby scripts and an SQLite database. His account shares three bookmarks with mine (covering three very distinct and arbitrary topics), and it only caught my eye because of the very strange appearance of its bookmarks. So I took a look at the user's del.icio.us page. Excerpt from the page (sans formatting): http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/05/Sep/fema4.html [nitrogen:#geeks] http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/05/Sep/fema4.html to nitrogen #geeks ... on 2005-09-27 ... copy this item http://qdb.us/48067 [prj:#geeks] n2: http://qdb.us/48067 to prj #geeks ... on 2005-09-27 ... copy …

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I've been using modified del.icio.us bookmarklets to feed my del.icio.us account, and thought I should share those. More experienced users will find nothing new here, but it's just as likely that it will interest some people. del.icio.us already have a list of bookmarklets for various browsers, and I started from there. I have made two additions to the default bookmarklets: a faster way to enter an extended bookmark description, and the ability to add a predefined tag. This is my generic "add to del.icio.us" bookmarklet, "add bookmark": javascript:location.href='http://del.icio.us/new/martind? url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href) +'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title) +'&extended='+encodeURIComponent(getSelection()) Note the code after "extended=" -- this tells the …

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Visit my Flickr photo stream for more abstract eye candy. I'm having a series of conversations with Falko Schmid about current interfaces to structured information, and about using existing web services to build all-encompassing information structure and search facilities. Our conversation started with the realization of a problem: apparently nobody can build a single system that integrates all information. There have been many attempts to accomplish that (Google and Wikipedia being the most prominent and successful) -- but if the last years have shown us anything it's that there is no way to define a stable content structure that …

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Visit my Flickr photo stream for more abstract eye candy. In my earlier article, "Connecting Web Services: Inherently Insecure", I commented on the sad current state of security in connecting public web services like Flickr, del.icio.us, last.fm and others with specialized client software. In this article I'd like to make suggestions as to how this current situation could be improved. So as a follow-up to my complaint above, this is a proposal of a simple method to provide more secure web service client authentication that should adress most of my ealier criticism. Let's start with a scenario that illustrates …

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Visit my Flickr photo stream for more abstract eye candy. During the last couple of months I've been using more web-based services like del.icio.us, Flickr, last.fm and others, and while I like the growing availability of web site APIs I'm often wary when testing out the possibilities, e.g. when testing a new client software: They usually require that you hand out your full login data! Consider this: I like Flickr's ability to group photos into sets, but their current Flash-based Flickr Organizr, to be honest, sucks. It's bloated, and while it imitates native applications in its user interface, it …

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last.fm remote control is a client for the last.fm stream webservice, implemented purely in html+javascript. this means that you can control your last.fm radio stream with an html page, with some limitations. it has the big advantage that it's snappy. no sucky skinning problems, it loads in a breeze, doesn't crash or hang your pc. and you can bookmark radio stations! and: you don't have to give your last.fm-password to a stranger (i.e., me) in order to use this. all communication takes place between your computer and the last.fm-servers; I won't see your username, not even your session ID. this …

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"I Like This!" is a simple music recommendation plugin for the musikCube audio player. With this plugin musikCube users can recommend their favorite songs and net radio stations while they are playing in musikCube; all recommendations are then listed on this site. I's an easy way to share your musical taste with others, and to give others new ideas on what kind of music there is. It is also a proof-of-concept: an attempt to show how easy it is to develop a musikCube-plugin that uses xml-rpc to communicate with a remote computer. This opens up a whole space of new …

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