Hackosphere

iMaze - My first iphone game

2008-07-09T20:41:00.001-07:00

Update: TechCrunch mentions about iMaze! iMaze is now the 4th most popular free game for iPhone.

I had written about my love for iphone last year. When Apple announced the SDK for iphone application development in March, I signed up for developer program immediately. I got the approval soon after that but I couldn't do anything worthwhile due to my workload. Last month, I found that I had time to develop for iPhone. I wanted to make an application that makes good use of iPhone's features like accelerometer (motion sensor), multi-touch etc. After considering a few ideas, I zeroed in on a maze application in which one guides a ball around a maze by tilting the iphone in different directions.

It was a bit hard at first because I was totally new to Apple's Cocoa development environment and it involved a new language called Objective C. Slowly, I got the hang of it. It was fun to play with accelerometer and tweak it for this purpose. The end product was satisfying and I decided to submit it to Apple for approval. Today, I got the approval and iMaze will be available in App Store which will open tomorrow or day after. As you might know, the new iPhone 3G will also be released on Friday. If you have an iphone or planning to buy the iPhone 3G, please check out this demo of iMaze. You might like what you see!

I'm on Twitter

2008-06-04T19:35:00.000-07:00

As if Twitter is not facing enough downtime, I am also on Twitter to increase its load. I haven't been actively tweeting (correct?) so far hoping to get back to blogging. I realized that I do get some random thoughts (mostly reflections on some news I read) but I am never able to sit down to write a complete post. So, I am going to use twitter actively. My inspiration is Aditya, who has been tweeting so often.

If you want to follow me, you can do so here.

Yahoo lost its exclamation mark

2008-02-08T08:54:00.000-08:00

Poor Yahoo.. After reading this TechCrunch post, I feel really bad for its founders and employees. I think Jerry Yang would be longing for those early days when the company was controlled by him and not external entities and shareholders. Looks like they have a tough decision to make today. "Should we sell our souls and succumb to Microsoft or partner with Google for search advertising which may also be shot down by DOJ?". Either way, it's not good for the employees because there will be massive layoffs. If they partner with Google, the remaining employees might feel good about the company and stay. Even though Yahoo is into so many things, it's fate is going to be determined by this search advertising alone. Man, the perils of going public...

If you are a Yahoo employee, leave a comment here about what you feel Yahoo should do now.

What can Semantic web do for you?

2007-11-27T23:57:00.000-08:00

Hello everybody! It's been a long time since I visited my own blog and I am happy that my 941 readers are still subscribed to my feed! It was one of my newly acquired interests (or should I say craze?) that brought me back here. It's called Semantic web. Some of you may have heard the term from the startups lately that claim to bring Semantic web to reality. I have been reading a lot about Semantic web until I felt enlightened! So, I plan to write a series of introductory articles so that you can also appreciate how it can evolve the World Wide Web to next level.

Semantic web was proposed by the granddaddy of WWW, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, way back in 1999. Though academics have been thriving on it since then, developing standards and writing research papers, it took so many years for business folks to assimilate his wild ideas and gather courage to start companies. So what was so wild about it? He was proposing that we should transform the web completely so that machines can browse and find answers to all sorts of complex questions like "How long will Angelina and Brad stick together?". Quite crazy, ain't it? But if you take a closer look, he isn't that crazy (I am talking about Sir Tim :)

Today's web is a large collection of documents that are linked to each other. The hyperlinks have keywords that help you find what the link is about. All he said was "Hey, let's do the same for all our data, that is, put them on the web in a machine readable form and link them together to form a Web of data". So, what can machines read and process? If you write "I am 20 years old" in your blog, only you and I can understand it. But if you use XML to represent it (for ex. <age>20</age>), a piece of software code could understand it. XML is good for representing structured data but it ain't good enough for Semantic web. Why?

Two reasons:
- XML does not clearly identify the subject and object of the fact that it is representing.
- XML does not have unique identifiers that can be used to link data from multiple websites.

To handle these shortcomings, Sir Tim and people who liked his idea proposed a standard called Resource Description Framework (RDF). Data about all kinds of resources like People, Places, Documents, Products etc can be represented in a "subject, property, object" triple format and each resource will have a unique identifier. For example, the sentence "Jane is located in Paris" can be represented by a triple (Person:Jane, location, City:Paris). Person:Jane and City:Paris are the unique identifiers. This is a fact that Jane can declare in her website using RDF.

Let's say another public service provides the mappings between cities and countries and it has the fact that "Paris is in France" (City:Paris, country, Country:France). Then a software agent that processes both RDF triples can link them together and infer that Jane is in France. This is just a simple example of linked data. There are a lot of such public data that can be represented in RDF. DBpedia is a project which extracts such data from Wikipedia and stores them in RDF and also links them to other RDF data.

RSS feed is one of the major advances in Web due to such machine readable common data format. Long gone are the days when you need to visit your favorite blogs and news sites everyday to check new content. With feeds, you are notified of all the new content in one place - your feed reader. This has been made possible because several blogging providers and webmasters agreed upon one format for syndication. That's the power of convergence that Semantic web can exploit further. Some of the semantic web software agents that you can expect in future are:

- a travel agent that can book your vacation package on your behalf by obtaining your favorite destinations, preferred dates, budget etc and automatically searching through online travel sites to pick the best deal.
- a shopping agent that you can personalize to search for products on your behalf. Once you provide your preferred brands, price range, features etc for, say, Camera, Laptop, it will search for matching products in various online shopping sites and notify you about them everyday.
- a dating agent that can help you identify your dream girl (based on matching interests, location, age etc) no matter whichever social networking site she is in.

Did I make you dream? Then, I have succeeded in my attempt :) Let me know your comments and opinions (I have re-enabled comments in my blog).

Next up: What can YOU do for Semantic web?

New look, new feature at Vibes

2007-08-01T00:30:00.000-07:00

Vibes is back in business with a new look and a new feature. The new look is inspired by Aditya's earlier work and I thank him for that. The new feature is Integration with Google reader allowing you to easily import your shared items into Vibes. The idea is to collect interesting news/blog items shared by everyone while reading their daily dose of feeds and bring out the items liked by many. For more details about importing, please read this. Please note that the previous method of submitting blog post URLs is also supported.

If you are using Google reader for your feeds, I encourage you to try this new feature and contribute to the website. In future, I will add support for importing Bloglines/Newsgator clippings and shared items from other feed readers which support sharing. Vibes can serve as a feed sharing portal by integrating with many feed readers.

Increase your subscriber count using feedburner redirection

2007-07-26T23:41:00.000-07:00

This is old news but I thought I will write a small post informing about this new feature in Blogger for the benefit of those who may not know about it. Even if you burn your Blogger feed to Feedburner, some percentage of your visitors may still be reading the Blogger feed. This could happen if they had provided your blog URL (instead of your feedburner feed) to their feed reader and their feed reader auto-discovered Blogger feed. The side effect of this is that your subscriber count will not be accurate.

The first useful development of Google buying Feedburner happens to be the new "Feed redirection" feature. Using this, you can redirect your Blogger feed to Feedburner feed. You can do this by going to Settings->Site Feed and providing your feedburner feed URL for redirection (as shown below).

I did this sometime back and my subscriber count increased from 700+ to 800+ the next day. You could try this too!

Bonus news: Amit informs us of another new feature - Comment Form message with which you can show a message in the Blogger comments page. I made use of it immediately!

Update about bvibes.com

2007-07-22T15:42:00.000-07:00

Update(7/24/07): I know that the website is down again. I am working with the hosting service on this. I will always remember the last few weeks of my internet presence :)

Yesterday, the incapable people at A2 hosting started cribbing again that their server is overloaded because of bvibes.com and disabled my account. Some of you might have noticed that bvibes.com was down again. I decided to put an end to this by cancelling their service and moving bvibes.com also to Yahoo account. I have never had any problems with Yahoo for almost an year because they seem to use a server farm and are capable of handling any load. I realize now that it was a bad decision to try these novices just for the php5 support they offer. Whenever something went wrong, they kept asking me to upgrade to dedicated server as if their whole aim was to make more money.

Thanks to the great tools like mysqldump and phpmyadmin, I was able to move over the database safely to Yahoo. From now on, bvibes.com will be redirected to anniyalogam.com. But, the redirection will only work after a few hours. Until then, you can access the website at anniyalogam.com. Your account and earlier submissions are intact.

Once I am out of these hassles, I plan to implement a useful feature. The idea is to make it effortless to share your favorite posts by integrating Google reader and bvibes. You just need to click "share" for the posts that you want to share and bvibes will pick them up from the feed provided by Google Reader. This way, you can share the posts you like while you are reading the feeds, without having to visit bvibes.com. More details on this coming soon (once I get it working :)). Let me know if you have any comments about this.

bvibes.com is up

2007-07-18T13:18:00.000-07:00

My website bvibes.com is up and running now. Please go ahead and submit your posts.

For those who reported that faded version of peekaboo posts is not working, it should work now if you follow my original instructions in this post. Those who reported non-beta peekaboo posts not working, can you try again now?

[If you are using Neo, check out Diddy's mod of Neo called EboNeo. Nice job, Diddy]

My account has been suspended

2007-07-17T10:10:00.000-07:00

Yes, it has happened. And they didn't even inform me before doing this. That's why bvibes.com is down and Neo template doesn't work. Neo users can pickup the entire Neo script from here, add it to your template and get your blog working. It will take some time for me to move over the bvibes database and code. So, it maybe down for a few more days.

How to get your blog posts read by 100 people?

2007-07-15T19:16:00.000-07:00

I am glad to announce that bvibes.com has close to 200 users after about 6 weeks of it's debut. I checked the statistics of the submissions today and looks like some posts that were submitted got 80-100 pageviews. Here's the top posts that got highest pageviews (you can see this by clicking the title of the statistics module in the sidebar of bvibes.com).

For those bloggers who want to promote their posts, joining the website will prove worthwhile. At this rate, I am expecting about 2000 users after one year. The community is growing. Are you in?

Hacks broken again: here's the fix

2007-07-12T17:21:00.000-07:00

Recently, I had relocated my script hackosphere.js. But my new account couldn't handle the load of hackosphere.js. So, peekaboo posts and other hacks won't work again. This script is used in close to 1000 blogs (my estimate) and whenever somebody accesses any page of any of these blogs, this script is accessed. That's what causes this enormous amount of traffic. Given that so many people have written about peekaboo posts in their blog and linked to my post, the traffic trend will only increase as more and more blogs start using it. My hosting provider might suspend the account if this kind of overloading continues because it's a shared server.

After thinking about it a lot, I think the only scalable and reliable solution for this is to include the script in your template itself. So, I am asking you to click here and copy all the code from that page to your template itself before the

</head>

tag. If you would prefer to upload the script to your server, use this code instead. This change is for the benefit of everybody from blogging community to make use of my hacks.

To get rid of the alert that you saw, please find and remove this line from your template (this is also important to help me retain my hosting account. thank you!).


<script src='http://www.anniyalogam.com/widgets/hackosphere.js'
type='text/javascript' />

If you are using my version of customizable recent comments widget (not Hans's), you should also goto this page and copy/paste the code before the /head tag. That should fix it.

UPDATE: Many of you have thanked me for providing a quick solution. There's a better way to say "Thanks" by adding a link to Hackosphere in your sidebar. When i visited some of the blogs using peekaboo posts, I didn't see any link to Hackosphere. Also, check out my new blog sharing website bvibes.com (if you haven't done already) where you can promote your posts and read/vote on other blog posts (it has 200+ registered users now).

Apology for the issues with my hacks

2007-07-11T18:30:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: This won't work anymore. You have to copy the script to your template as described in a later post.

I realized the real popularity of my hacks today when my new hosting service said it cannot handle the load generated by numerous requests to hackosphere.js. Here's the email I got from them:

"Currently your site hackosphere.bvibes.com (aka anniyalogam.com) is using too many resources on our server:
Excessive HTTP daemons due to high traffic
...
Your public_html directory has had permissions changed to 0000. Please do not re-enable it without first contacting us with a mitigation plan for your domain. Continued overusage of resources will lead to the suspension of your account.

A shared server will not handle the amount of traffic to one domain which your site is currently drawing without severely impacting the other customers. A Dedicated or Semi-dedicated hosting package will be required if this traffic pattern is normal for your domain."

This is something I never expected. Somehow Yahoo small business account could handle it without any issue. Since this new account was also a small business plan, I thought they could handle it but poor folks couldn't handle it. They have disabled the directory which contains all the scripts. Dedicated hosting costs 70-80 dollars per month and I can't afford it. Now, there are two ways you can get my hacks working again:

1. I have uploaded hackosphere.js to my googlepages account. So, you can add this line


<script src="http://rarunach.googlepages.com/hackosphere.js"
type="text/javascript" />

and remove either one of these lines that you have


<script src='http://www.anniyalogam.com/widgets/hackosphere.js'
type='text/javascript' />
<script src='http://bvibes.com/hackosphere/widgets/hackosphere.js'
type='text/javascript' />

2. Or you can copy/paste the javascript code directly to your template. The code is in http://rarunach.googlepages.com/hackosphere.js.txt. Disadvantage of doing this is that whenever I add new features or fix some bugs in my script, you will have to change to your template.

I guess Neo template will not work either. You have to use this new location for neo.js.


<script src="http://rarunach.googlepages.com/neo.js"
type="text/javascript" />

instead of one of these lines that you currently have


<script language='javascript'
src='http://www.anniyalogam.com/neo/neo.js' />
<script language='javascript'
src='http://bvibes.com/hackosphere/neo/neo.js' />

My sincere apologies for all this trouble. As such I am frustrated with this downtime too. I hope you will support me by changing your template and continue to use the hacks.

Anniyalogam.com relocating...

2007-07-10T12:58:00.000-07:00

As i had mentioned earlier, I am retaining anniyalogam.com but changing the name servers to point to the new location. I have initiated the name server change but it will take 1-2 days to propagate over the internet. I have confirmed with my hosting provider that there won't be any disruption of service during this time for those still accessing anniyalogam.com URLs. Just in case there's any issue, I have already told you what to change in your template. Once you make this change, hacks should work just fine.

For those using the fade effect...

2007-07-09T12:46:00.000-07:00

Few of you are using the fade effect for peekaboo posts. If you are one of them, you will notice that it doesn't fade anymore (it will appear instantly). This is because I have made some code changes to support both fade and non-fade versions with the same javascript file - http://bvibes.com/hackosphere/widgets/hackosphere.js. This is part of the transition from anniyalogam.com to bvibes.com. To get back the fading effect, you just need to add one more line as shown below.


<script type='text/javascript' src=
'http://bvibes.com/hackosphere/widgets/hackosphere.js'/>
<script type='text/javascript'>
var fade = true;
var peekaboo_bgcolor = '#ffffff';
</script>

I believe you won't have to make any more change regarding this :)

Please read: anniyalogam.com closing down

2007-07-08T23:05:00.000-07:00

I have decided to host all hackosphere related files in bvibes.com instead of anniyalogam.com as I don't want to pay for two hosting services. So, I have copied all the files, scripts etc from http://www.anniyalogam.com to http://bvibes.com/hackosphere. I wanted to give you all enough time to make the change in your template, so I will keep the current hosting service till the end of this month. All you need to do is goto your template and change any URL starting with http://www.anniyalogam.com/... to http://bvibes.com/hackosphere/... wherever it appears (it won't even take 5 minutes, just do ctrl-F to find and replace). If any of my hacks doesn't work properly after this change, please let me know soon. I want to resolve any issue before the end of this month. Thanks for your understanding!

Update: I plan to retain the domain "anniyalogam.com" but change the name server to point to the new location (I believe I can do this). This is because my hacks are being used in many third-party templates (like those of Protesto) and I don't want to affect the bloggers who don't read my blog regularly. But it's always a good idea for you to make this change now.

Pownce review: Messaging for web 2.0 era

2007-07-07T23:33:00.000-07:00

Pownce is the new brainchild of Kevin Rose and a few others. I recently got invited to try it out and I did (The video that you see above was captured using Adobe Captivate). When I first read about Kevin's cryptic definition of Pownce as "IM competitor", I wondered if there's any innovation left in the "beaten to death" concept of IM. After checking it out today, I don't think it is a direct competitor to IMs but I feel there is something that Pownce has got to offer. Inspired by the sharing spirit of web 2.0 (pardon me for the cliche), Pownce promotes a new granularity of messaging - send stuff to a "group of friends".

Traditional IM clients focussed on sending instant messages/files to one contact. Recently popular Twitter focusses on broadcasting status messages to everybody. Pownce focusses on sharing messages/links/files/events to all/subset of your friends (they could be online/offline). You can divide your friends into multiple sets and send appropriate stuff to each set. For example, you can form a set of local friends to send saturday get-together invites and another set of ex-collegemates to discuss about your common interests. Other granularities such as private (messaging one particular friend), public (shoutout to everybody) are supported too (except in the case of file transfer).

Pownce is available in the form of a web application as well as a desktop application (based on the cool-looking Adobe AIR platform). All the stuff you receive from your friends will be shown in this app (with auto-refresh) and you can send stuff too. You can also check your profile in pownce website to see all your stuff (private/public) and anybody can see your public profile which will only contain public messages from you and your friends. For example, here is Kevin Rose's public profile with all sorts of messages from his big list of friends.

Pownce has support for mass distribution like Facebook. When you receive a message/file from somebody, you can forward it to your other friends. It defaults to sending to "friends who haven't seen it" in this case (clever!). Once Pownce grows and has lots of users, I can imagine hot news spreading fast with this feature (the likes of 'Paris hilton phone hacked'). It also supports RSS feeds for following public profiles of your favorites using your feed reader. Another nice feature that will come handy if you want to find something amidst the big pile of messages is the filtering feature - you can filter and see only a particular type of stuff sent by your friends such as messages only, links only etc.

To summarize, Pownce is in a space that is complementary to IMs even though it is not jaw-droppingly innovative. If you are curious enough to try it out, I have several invites to distribute. Just send an email to and I will pass on the invite to you.

Special effects for Peekaboo posts!

2007-07-06T10:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I thought my most popular hack, Peekaboo posts, needs a makeover. A while back, I received a comment that the post expands too quickly when you click "Read more" link. I thought this could be something to improve upon. How about some special effect like Fade In/Fade Out? You got it! I have integrated the popular javascript effects library script.aculo.us with our peekaboo posts. You can see it in action in my test blog. If you click on "Read more", the full post appears gradually from nowhere and it fades in nicely if you click "Summary only".

You gotta have it in your blog, right? You can have it with very few changes to your template. I spent a few hours on this and surpassed some limitations of script.aculo.us and (bugridden) IE to get this working in Firefox, IE and Opera. Just follow these steps if you have already installed peekaboo posts in your blog.

Step 1: Add these lines before the /head tag.


<script type='text/javascript' src=
'http://anniyalogam.com/scriptaculous/src/prototype.js'/>
<script type='text/javascript' src=
'http://anniyalogam.com/scriptaculous/src/scriptaculous.js?load=effects'/>
<script type='text/javascript'>
var fade = true;
var peekaboo_bgcolor = '#ffffff';
</script>

If your blog's background color is anything other than white, you need to change the peekaboo_bgcolor appropriately for it to work properly in IE. Since most blogs have white background, it should work as it is.

Step 2: Find this portion of code and remove the line shown in red.

   <div class='post-body'>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<p><data:post.body/></p>
<b:else/>
<style>#fullpost {display:none;}</style>
 <p><data:post.body/></p>

That's it! Go ahead and impress your readers. Scriptaculous has many more effects like slide down/up, drap/drop etc which I will try to make use of in the future. If you liked this, help me spread the word about bvibes.com (which has 170+ registered users now) by adding the bvibes button to your sidebar as described here.

My iPhone experience

2007-06-29T22:53:00.000-07:00

After a long wait, humanity was blessed with iPhone today! I am not much of a gadget lover but I decided to visit the nearby Apple store to get a feel of this thingy. My first gadget was a Palm Visor that I bought several years back. It didn't have a color display but still i was crazy enough to carry it wherever I go, solve crossword puzzles (struggling with graffiti which would always misunderstand the letters) and so on. After a while, the craze went down and I don't even know where it is now :). As I sit in front of computer for the most part of a day, I didn't find much use for a PDA. Later, when everybody started talking about the ipod's quality and storage, I thought I should try an iPod shuffle. It was really nice to pack 100-200 songs in it when we go for a long drive and play them in the car stereo. For a while, I thought I won't be impressed by any new gadget (I chose to skip Zune too). But, once I saw iPhone ads and the way they flipped through photos, I felt my long lost itch for a gadget again.

So, with that flashback, let me tell you what happened today. I rushed my wife and son so that we can be there at the shop by 6 p.m. before they open up. But friday evening traffic delayed us. By the time we reached the shop, people had already started buying iphones. There was a queue but it was not as long as I was expecting (only 30-40 people). Many who had come to the mall were looking at the store wondering what on earth is happening inside. The store staff cheered and clapped for every single buyer and those who accompanied were taking photographs as the buyers walked out of the shop. It was as if they achieved something great! I took a video of the crowd and you can watch it here.

As I didn't want to join a long line, I decided to shop in the mall for some time and come back. When I came back at about 7:30, the line was short. Somebody announced that 8Gig models were sold out and only 4 Gig was available. My wife was repeatedly asking me if I am going to buy it today as she was concerned that it's too costly for a phone. I kept saying I just want to check it out and I might buy it. It was quite funny that they had employed a person to tell jokes and entertain those waiting in the line (he told something with monkeys and cigars which I wasn't really interested in). Finally, we were allowed in and I told them I want to check it out before buying.

My first impression once I held the iPhone in my hand was that it was very light-weight for something that has so many cool features. The screen showed a list of videos from youtube and i pressed one with my finger. It feels less clumsy (and maybe better ergonomically too) to use a finger than a stylus pen. The video started playing.. For a moment, I couldn't believe that I am watching the video in a handheld device and not a TV screen. It was crystal clear! Then i wanted to check out photos and so i clicked the start button at the bottom and it brought up all the nice little icons that mesmerized everyone in TV ad. I clicked on photos icon and experienced how painless it is to browse through photos just like turning pages in a book.

Then, I wanted to check out web browsing with Safari. Once i touched the address bar, the software keyboard popped up with thick and clear letters. I was able to type "hackosphere.blogspot.com" without many retries even though I was using my finger that is as wide as three of those letters put together. I think it is intelligent enough to pick the letter where the most pressure is applied. Ofcourse, my blog showed up with tiny unreadable fonts in that screen :) Before I could experiment the zoom in feature, somebody from the store asked me if I am going to buy it soon. The decision that I was postponing had to be made quickly :) I looked at my wife and she looked at me. Knowing that I would say 'yes' any moment, she pulled me away from the gadget and said "Let's go!". So, that's the end of the story. But, you never know, the shop is not that far from my home!

[Interestingly, I never bothered to try the phone feature. I wonder if anybody buys this thing mainly for being a mobile phone.]

Did your navbar re-appear suddenly?

2007-06-27T12:56:00.000-07:00

Mine did! Looks like Blogger now adds the following line before /head tag all by itself.

#navbar-iframe {display:block}

As my display:none instruction was sitting before this line, it didn't come into effect. I had to move the line right after body tag as follows.


<body>
<style type='text/css'>
#navbar-iframe {display:none;}
</style>

You could use this method if you have the same problem. By the way, I am going by Amit's word that it is OK to hide the navbar :)

Hackosphere sports a new look!

2007-06-24T19:34:00.000-07:00

I thought it's time for a new look for Hackosphere. As I am going to review upcoming websites and products, the new look is a bit more professional (main content to the left, mostly white etc). If you have any comments about the look or find any problems, let me know. If you want me to review any new invite-only or private beta service, drop me a word. I plan to review the technical aspects (wherever possible) in addition to reviewing the features. Believe me, it's gonna be interesting!

Microsoft Popfly - A use-case illustration

2007-06-23T17:39:00.000-07:00

From now on, I am extending the scope of my blog from just Blogger hacks to include technology reviews also. I am planning to sign up for invite-only and beta websites/services and write posts describing the usage of the website or service (with illustrations). This is to give you an idea of what they have got to offer early enough. To start with, I am covering the Microsoft Popfly Alpha mashup and website building service for non-techies. As the service is in private alpha, you need to sign-up with your email id and they send you an invitation after some time.

Once you got the invitation and logged in to the website, you will see three options:

Create a webpage with the wysiwyg editor (no html knowledge required)
Create a mashup using the various web services available (no need to code)
Share your projects with others in the community

As WYSIWYG website building is not something new, I will walk you through the mashup creation only.

Microsoft provides a list of pre-built blocks to create mashups. Predominantly there are two types of blocks:

Data producer blocks such as Flickr, Facebook, RSS that provide photos, feeds etc as output.
Data consumer blocks such as PhotoTiles, Slideshow, NewsReader that take the data produced and display it in a nice way using slideshows, tiled display etc.

Here, the use-case that I am going to demonstrate is to obtain photos from Flickr and show them in a nice tiled fashion. I first select a data producer block by selecting the Flickr block.

I get a red-colored box like this for flickr (which actually rotates upon mouseover!). The message "You have a key" below the box indicates that I have provided an API key from flickr to authorize my usage. Before providing the key, you will see an error "Missing key".

Click on the Missing key message and you will get this lightbox to input the key. You can use my key if you don't want to obtain a new one from Flickr (0659eaf9c8e9830405cd87f5ccfa7dcb).

Once the key issue is resolved, you can click on the tool-like icon to the right of the block to edit the settings of the block. You will get something like this where you can edit the text that you want to search with and the number of photos that you want the block to output. After editing, click the big-size tool icon to go back.

Next, I will add another block that will display the photos nicely. You can search the blocks with the term 'photo' and you will see a few blocks named Photoshow, Photosphere etc. The one I liked (and the one that worked well) is PhotoTiles. So, I selected it.

And the block shows up in the canvas. Ignore the default display in the background (they should fix it, it's annoying!).

And the way you connect them, is by clicking on the blue-colored output point of flickr block and then clicking the yellow-colored input point of PhotoTiles block. A line forms between them indicating that they're connected (I wonder how Yahoo Pipes did the same too! Maybe this is the most logical representation).

Now if you click on "Preview", you can see the final result of your mashup. It will be something like shown below. You can click on any individual photo and it will be displayed bigger. (Clicking on customize at the bottom will take you back to the canvas).

After saving the mashup, you need to share the mashup if you need options like "embed it in your website", "Download as Gadget" etc. It will provide you with an iframe code to embed your creation to your blog or website.

You can see the mashup embedded in my blog in the second column. This is very simple mashup that I created with Popfly. It is possible to combine the data from many services and create complicated mashups. Here are my opinions about Popfly based on my experiments.

Pros:

Stunning user interface using their Silverlight platform.
Once you create your mashup, you can create a website also with Popfly to embed the mashup in (I will check if there's anything to write about regarding the website building option).

Cons:

Pages load terribly slowly, maybe because Silverlight is heavy. They should really improve the speed if they expect serious development with Popfly. Even the popfly widget in my blog will load very slowly!
I don't see any equivalent for the built-in operations like Sorting, Filtering etc that are supported by Yahoo Pipes.

Coming soon:

Review of the beta release of MyLiveSearch, a new search engine effort claiming to be an innovative approach never done before.
Review of the beta release of Radar Networks' semantic web services product.

Need a favor from all those using my hacks

2007-06-11T18:19:00.000-07:00

Dear readers,

Thanks to design guru Aditya's help, we now have promotion buttons for bvibes. So many of you have picked up my hacks for free in the past and improved your blogs. Here's a small favor that you could do for me in return. As part of my efforts to promote my new venture bvibes.com, I found out that advertising in major blogs like problogger.net costs a lot (in the order of $1000 per month). So, I am asking you to add this small button to your sidebar and help me spread the word.

In Template/Page elements tab, click on "Add a page element" and add a HTML/Javascript element with this piece of code:


<style type="text/css">
.bvibes_img {
 margin-left: auto;
 margin-right: auto;
 float:center;
 display:block;
}
</style>
<a href="http://bvibes.com">
<img class="bvibes_img" src="http://bvibes.com/bvibes_button_ad.png">
</a>

Then you can move the button to wherever you want in your sidebar (preferably in a prominent position).

For those who have joined bvibes.com, don't you want to see more people reading your submissions? Here's a bigger button that you could add to your blog.

Just modify the img src line as follows to use this image:

<img class="bvibes_img" src="http://bvibes.com/bvibes_ad.png">

Thank you!

This week's top posts from bVibes

2007-06-10T11:28:00.000-07:00

Here are some posts that you might be interested in reading.

kundaistreet: Marlo and Horeshio

So Easy to Send Spam Using Google Alerts!

Transformers New Clips

My Blog Log: Copyright Explained

Muse: End of Times? Of Paganism and The Roman Catholic

Here are some updates about the website:
- Google analytics reports 5000+ hits to the website in the last 2 weeks!
- I have added a statistics module to the sidebar showing the number of users, links etc. I have also made the URLs search engine friendly.
- I have disabled anonymous voting as registration takes only few minutes. This week, everyone gets 10 credits.
- Self-hosted blogs are now supported well.

More details in the bVibes blog.

Now available: Facebook app for bvibes

2007-06-06T23:03:00.000-07:00

I believe many of you are on facebook (if not, you're missing out on the social networking revolution). And the fact that we have a facebook widget for bvibes so soon is a testimonial of how Aditya has geared up to develop for facebook. I just sent him an email this morning asking him if he could develop a facebook application for showing the posts that one has voted for (like they have for digg). He said yes and to my surprise, he had it ready within half a day! So, if you're on facebook, now you can show the posts that you voted for in your profile (including your own posts). This will show up in the news feed of your friends bringing attention to your blog posts (and bvibes could get more users which is again beneficial for everyone). Here's how the application will look like.

And if you are not yet on facebook, I would really suggest you to try it out. It's very easy to find your real world friends there and there are many networks/groups that you can join. Here's the bVibes application link and here's the link to my profile. See you there in Facebook.

New Tech news section in bVibes

2007-06-05T17:26:00.000-07:00

Here's an addition to make the website more interesting. Previous restriction to allow only posts from blogspot.com, wordpress.com and typepad.com has been removed. You can now submit hot Technology news from any website or self-hosted blog, discuss about them with others and vote. But still the focus will be on blogs and so, these news articles will be separated from blog posts and shown in the "Tech Vibes" section. Here are some articles that I have submitted to start with.

7 iPhone secrets revealed

Guy Kawasaki's experience in building Truemors.com

Google PageRank: How it works?