A lot of the news I post at MacMegasite comes from prMac. Until now I received the news articles via email and would clean up, reformat, and post the items manually. Recently the people at prMac released a Drupal module that automatically retrieves and post news. For the last few days I’ve been having it automatically post news, since I haven’t been available to post anything myself.
Web
Retaggr Enabled
Thanks to Chris Thomson I found retaggr, a web service which lets you create a profile card that links to all of your online profiles. I’ve also retaggr enabled this site, which means anyone who posts a comment will have their profile card linked if they’re registered on retaggr.
Here’s my profile card:
Trying SmugMug
I’m trying out SmugMug as a possible alternative to Flickr. They have a Flee Flickr 50% off deal, although I’m still on the 14 day free trial.
I’m not leaving Flickr, but with the co-founders leaving Yahoo, I want to be prepared just in case it goes away. I really hope Flickr survives, since it’s one of my favorite sites. I’ll most likely keep both services.
I really like SmugMug, although it still feels a bit alien. It doesn’t seem to have Flickr’s community-oriented features, but the galleries look gorgeous. Unlike Flickr, SmugMug lets you change the theme & layout of your galleries instead of always displaying your photos on a solid white page.
You can visit my SmugMug homepage at mike3k.smugmug.com/.
DreamHost discount invites available
I have 5 DreamHost discount codes available for my readers. These discounts will give you four times the normal disk and bandwidth, plus $150 off a five year plan or $200 off a ten year plan. Leave a comment or contact me to get one of the discount invites.
Plurk is not Twitter
Plurk is yet another site attempting to compete with Twitter. Although it has some interesting features, like the timeline view and the ability to share pictures & videos, it still seems lacking. Plurk doesn’t support SMS or IM, and the lack of an API means there’s no desktop client.
Twitter’s main problem is scalability and not being able to handle the user load. There’s no indication that Plurk or other systems can handle that load either. I’m more confident in Twitter’s ability to redesign, re-architect and scale their service, since they have the funding and bandwidth to support their growth.
MAMP vs standard Apache/PHP/MySQL installation
Since Chris24 twittered that he hates MAMP, I had to come to MAMP’s defense.
For a long time I never saw any reason to use MAMP, since I used the standard system installation of Apache & PHP with MySQL installed via mysql.com’s installer package. After using MAMP for a while I came to appreciate it and I finally upgraded to MAMP Pro.
With MAMP or MAMP Pro, you can start Apache only when you need it, rather than having it run all the time and waste memory. MAMP’s bundled version of Apache also takes less virtual memory than the standard 64-bit version.
One of the major advantages of MAMP over the system standard Apache/PHP setup is that it lets you easily switch between PHP 4 & 5 and enable Zend Optimizer with eAccelerator or XCache.
MAMP Pro also gives you a nice user interface for enabling & disabling Apache modules.
FriendFeed's room for improvement
FriendFeed has become very popular lately, in part due to Twitter’s unreliability. FriendFeed still can’t replace Twitter, since it can’t be accessed via SMS or IM, although FriendFeed can be more conversational, since you can comment on a particular item rather than just reply to the user as you do on Twitter.
A few days ago, FriendFeed added rooms, a good idea although it still seems a bit rough around the edges. The big limitation of rooms is that there’s no way to see a list of rooms or find a particular room unless you know the name, although Andy Beard found a way to find rooms through Google.
The API seems to be lacking some features needed to fully support rooms. In particular, it isn’t possible to get all rooms a user belongs to. You also can’t get messages from multiple rooms. I’m sure they’ll continue to refine this feature.
I’m trying to decide how to add room support to my FriendFeed iPhone app without making it too cluttered. I’d welcome feedback & suggestions on how the application can be improved.
APIs should be free & open
Many websites which provide an API require developers to register and request a key, while others like Twitter and FriendFeed are completely open. Flickery, a new desktop client for Flickr, demonstrats why restricted APIs are bad. Flickr decided to revoke the developer’s API key because it was causing too much traffic, causing the Flickery application to stop working.
Requiring developers to sign up for a key before they start developing applications for a website will stifle development and make it less likely that we’ll see new and innovative applications. Twitter has maybe hundreds of third party applications thanks to their open API, while Pownce, which requires a key (even though it’s quick & free to sign up), has very few.
Daniel's new venture
A very nice article in Mercury News mentions Daniel Brusilovsky and his new venture, Teens in Tech. Daniel is a 15 year old podcaster and blogger, who I’m proud to say is also on MacMegasite’s staff.
Daniel and his 14 year old business partner Richard Escobedo gave a talk at SDForum’s Teens Plugged In forum yesterday.
Daniel is the President & CEO of Teens in Tech, a community that hosts blogs, podcasts, video podcasts (vodcasts), or live streams for teens and by teens.
Another new sponsor
MacMegasite has another new sponsor, Second Gear LLC.