Web

Building a community site with Google Apps

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Several years ago I set up a community site for my condo using Drupal. Not too many people used it and eventually it was overrun with spam. The discussion forums were used for personal attacks & name calling. I finally got tired of dealing with the spam and cleaning up the forum, so I shut it down. Recently a few people started noticing it was down and wanted it back.

I didn’t want to keep using Drupal, since it’s unfamiliar for most people and can be difficult to maintain. I looked at Joomla, but it seemed a lot less flexible and even more difficult to maintain. Finally, I decided the best solution was to use Google Apps.

If you’re using Dreamhost, it’s very easy to set up your domain to use Google Apps; You simply click a checkbox in the domain setting.

The major features we wanted for our site are a calendar to post events, a place to post announcements, and documents for residents & potential residents to view & download. Google Apps can do all of those things very nicely. It’s a lot easier for staff & board members to simply upload a document rather than compose a post in Drupal.

The movie studios have their heads up their ass

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Via Macatron – Unleash Your Mac:

Movie piracy is a problem, but it’s not as huge of a problem as music piracy was this past decade. While certainly the size of the movie files and the need for fast broadband connections to get them in a reasonable amount of time plays into it somewhat, also helping is the fact that there are some fairly decent ways to get movies quickly, for a pretty fair price these days. And now Hollywood is apparently trying to change that.

The studios are starting to rally around a horrible new idea: Keeping new releases out of Redbox and more importantly, Netflix for 30 days. Let me repeat that: They think Netflix shouldn’t be able to ship many new movies to you until 30 days after they’re released on DVD.

Now, this doesn’t appear to be set in stone yet for Netflix, as the studios are said to be currently negotiating this with the company, but it is what the studios want. And the strategy is going forward with Redbox, which recently filed a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox over the same issue. And now, with Universal and Warner Brothers getting on board, another lawsuit seems likely.

And in a move that couldn’t be less surprising, Blockbuster is on the wrong side of this. Despite the company having a strategy to do a massive roll-out of kiosks like the ones Redbox has, it is all in favor of the 30-day window, based on comments CEO Jim Keyes made during its Q2 earnings call.

Here’s a revolutionary idea: let people buy movies as soon as they’re released and make it as easy as possible for people to buy movies legally. As Apple proved with the iTunes Store, if you make it easy enough to buy music (or movies) legally and keep the price as low as possible, there will be less reason to pirate music & movies. The majority of people will do whatever is easiest, as long as the price is reasonable.

Sure it will reduce the studios profit margins, but it will mean less piracy and more legal sales. They’ll have to learn to streamline their operation and reduce their distribution costs so they could still make a good profit.

Asides

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I’ve added a section called asides to the bottom of the right sidebar, which consists of the RSS feed of my Tumblr. Most of the items posted there come from my Google Reader shared items.

I’ve also installed the WPTouch plugin, so this blog will look a lot nicer on an iPhone.

NetNewsWire now syncs with Google Reader

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NetNewsWire has always been my favorite desktop newsreader, but as much as I love it, I really hated Newsgator Online, which it syncs with. I always preferred Google Reader and would rather sync with it. My wish has been granted – a new NetNewsWire beta which syncs with Google Reader was released today.

It’s a beta and it still has a few rough edges, but I’m thrilled to finally be rid of NewsGator and be able to use NetNewsWire with Google Reader. This change was necessary since NewsGator is discontinuing NewsGator online for end users on August 31.

NetNewsWire for iPhone will also be updated to use Google Reader.

Things Ripoff

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There’s a new web app called 2dooo Things which is a direct ripoff of Cultured Code’s wonderful Things task management application. In fact their home page shows a screenshot of the actual Things app.

2dooo Things

If you actually sign in, you’ll see that the main screen is identical to things on the Mac. For some strange reason, a new account gets 6 items in the trash.

Things desktop app
Things 		2dooo Things web app
2dooo Things Main Screen

If Cultured Code isn’t involved with this and didn’t explicitly give them permission to copy Things, they should take action against 2dooo.

Ning allows spammers to abuse their system

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Several times a week I get crap like this from someone who set up a Ning site for the sole purpose of sending spam. Even though I have my privacy settings to NOT send email for any requests, I still get these. There’s no way to completely block invitations or messages from anyone not a friend.

From: Gidion Kalu
Reply-To: do-not-reply@xxx.ning.com
To: Mike Cohen
Subject: YOUR COMPENSATION OF $3.5M.

Gidion Kalu has sent you a message on gidion Kalu

Attention Please,

I am Barr.Gdion Kalu and I am very happy to inform you about
my success in getting that fund transferred.

Now I want you to contact my secretary on his email address below and
receive your compensation of $3.5M from him: NAME: Mr Chinedu Obi
EMAIL:chineduobi11117@yahoo.fr Kindly reconfirm to him the following below
information:

Your full name_________________________
Your address__________________________
Your country___________________________
Your age______________________________
Your occupation________________________
Your cell Phone number______________________

Note that if you did not send him the above information complete, he
will not release the cheque to you because he has to be sure that it
is you. Ask him to send you the total sum of ($3.5m )USD CASHIER’S
CHEQUE ,which I kept for you. Note also that I will not be reached by
email or phone for now because I am currently away in Japan for
investment purpose with my share and I will be busy till about six
months time or a year.

Best regards,

Barr.Gdion Kalu.

To join this network, click here: http://xxx.ning.com/main/authorization/signUp?emailAddress=xyz

—
To control which emails you receive on gidion Kalu, go to:
http://XXX.ning.com/?xgo=vzzzzz

Posting to Google Reader from NetNewsWire

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One reason I use Google Reader is to share interesting articles in my shared items page. However, I find that I’m more productive when I use NetNewsWire, since I’m in control of how & when it fetches new items, so I spend less time reading news.

I’ve been looking for a way to share items in Google Reader from NetNewsWire. One way I did it was by subscribing to my NetNewsWire clippings feed, which I make publicly visible in Reader. It doesn’t appear in my shared items, though.

I’ve found a better solution, although it still isn’t perfect. This AppleScript is based on Google’s “Note in Reader” bookmarklet. It should be placed in NetNewsWire’s script folder. You can then choose ‘Post to reader’ in NetNewsWire’s script menu to open the selected news item in Safari and open a box to post it to your shared items.

tell application "NetNewsWire"
	set u to URL of selectedHeadline
end tell
tell application "Safari"
	make new document with properties {URL:u}
	delay 2
	do JavaScript "var  b = document.body;
var  GR________bookmarklet_domain = 'http://www.google.com';
if (b && !document.xmlVersion) {
    void(z = document.createElement('script'));
    void(z.src = 'http://www.google.com/reader/ui/link-bookmarklet.js');
    void(b.appendChild(z));
} else {}" in document 1
end tell

Another way to block the Digg Bar

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A lot of developers don’t like having their sites loaded into a frame with Digg’s new DiggBar, inspiring several scripts to get rid of the bar. John Gruber came up with a short PHP script that prevents the page from loading with a nasty message if it detects that it’s being loaded in DiggBar’s frame. Gruber’s script inspired Phil Nelson’s WordPress plugin, which adds that script to any WordPress site.

I decided on a different route, using JavaScript instead of PHP and reloading the page outside the frame instead of displaying a message. The result is my Undigg WordPress plugin, which you can download here.

My plugin simply adds the following bit of JavaScript code to the page:

<script type="text/javascript">if ((top !== self) && ((document.referrer+"").substring(7,11) == "digg")) top.location.href = self.location.href;</script>

This is very similar to a standard frame killer, except it only affects the Digg bar while letting other frames load your page.

To install it, unzip the archive, drop ‘undigg.php’ in /wp-content/plugins, and enable it in the plugins screen.