New Sponsor

MacMegasite has a new sponsor, Mac Poker. I’m not too thrilled about it, but their site isn’t objectionable and they paid in advance. Thanks to their payment, I increased the memory & cpu allocation for my virtual private server, which should make all of my hosted sites faster.

FriendFeed API

I’ve been playing with the FriendFeed API in Objective C, although I don’t have anything ready for public consumption yet.

Since the fetch methods basically work like RSS feeds, they can be handled easily using PubSub. Most of the code I had to write was to decode the entries returned into something more useful. The methods which require authentication turned out to be no big deal; it can be handled using PSFeed’s login property and the setPassword: method. My next step will be to tackle the publish methods, which can be handled using NSURLConnection.

To make time to work on this, I haven’t been reading my RSS feeds regularly (or checking Twitter). Setting NetNewsWire to manual refresh only is a huge productivity booster. I also haven’t been blogging regularly, as my readers probably noticed.

Facebook adds lifestreaming

Facebook has added a new life streaming feature which automatically adds your activities from other services to your mini feed. However, the only sites it currently supports are Picassa, Yelp, Flickr, and del.icio.us. I’m sure they’ll add other sites soon.

Facebook lifestreaming
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Stolen Content

Checking my Akismet queue, I found several trackbacks from spam blogs scraping and reposting my content. They all seem to be using the same template, usually starting with “(some blog name) wrote an interesting post today…”, always giving it some random name linked to my blog.

Stolen Content
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

I don’t mind my feed being included in an aggregator, but this is pure content theft.