Disqus - Latest Comments for andymurd

Re: Chinese filtering move demonstrates futility of Australian censorship proposal

andymurd — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:09:42 -0000

Problem is, that after the Great Firewall of Australia is proven not to work, the tools to bypass it will be made illegal.

Re: Woobius Scribbles — Document control - how hard can it be?

andymurd — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 11:32:54 -0000

The only successful document control I've ever seen implemented was based around document reference identifiers. Every document (and piece of source code and email and so on) had a reference like this:

CO/PR/TY/00001/V

Where:

CO - company identifier (companies change names more often than you imagine)
PR - project identifier
TY - document type. There were about 200 different document types but most people only ever dealt with about 6 and we could remember those off by heart.
00001 - a "next-out number" taken from a big register kept for each project.
V - version number

The system was imple enough that it would work for paper as easily as electronic documents. People actually used because it was simple and they could immediately see the benenfits.

Re: Twitter Shenanigans

andymurd — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 17:54:35 -0000

Good detective work! I'd wondered the same thing but I soon worked out that the number of followers a person has is a very poor measure of their worth/interest.

It's more fun to find those people who are interesting but have only just started tweeting and then interact with them. They might get 4,000 followers in the next twelve months, but they'll remember that you're the nice guy who chatted when they were starting out on twitter.

Re: How To: Dynamic Slide Down Disqus Comments

andymurd — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 11:53:42 -0000

Hi Ben, I stumbled across your post quite late because I want to implement something similar. I notice a small problem on rssmeme.com:

If I open two comment iframes, by clicking the "contribute" links against two stories then click the Disqus "options" button against the second iframe it shows options for the first iframe.

Any ideas on how to fix it?

Re: Andreas Lanjerud › helloandy checked in @ Albano, Stockholms Län, Sweden

andymurd — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 11:15:29 -0000

Hello back! I'll run the BrightKite feed through Feedburner, that seems to be the preferred solution.

Re: Semantic Series of Tubes

andymurd — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:39:48 -0000

That's a great summary of where we all want Web 3.0 to take us.

I'd argue that "the improvement of advertising models" is not necessarily a downside to the semantic web. In my life, advertising models seem to be billboards, cold calling and mail drops. A smaller number of laser targeted adverts would be a welcome change - whilst saturation brand-building will only engender my enmity.

If I can ask my ad-manager-bot to recommend a bunch of $PRODUCTS meeting my requirements and ignore previously blocked advertisers, then great, bring on the semantic web!

APML seems like an excellent technology for ad servers to invest in but it would definitely need the ability to deal with temporal changes.

Re: My Links Are del.icio.us! | (jeff)isageek.net

andymurd — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 06:27:56 -0000

You're welcome, Jeff, and keep those links coming.

Loads of people had written blog posts about "10 people you must follow on twitter" or "FriendFeed A-Listers" and I just thought that good old del.icio.us needed a bit of love.

Re: Memo to online companies: Please Stop Georedirecting

andymurd — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:54:47 -0000

Georedirecting can also fail spectacularly.

A train company here in the UK provides free wifi on its long distance services, which is great but... the internet is delivered via a satellite link to a Swedish ISP. So, I'm sat on a train to London trying to decypher google.se.

Re: Pop Quiz 1: Know Your Google

andymurd — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 04:13:05 -0000

Excellent, look forward to the next post.

Re: Pop Quiz 1: Know Your Google

andymurd — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:47:54 -0000

Sounds fun, I'll have a go...

1. Robots.txt, meta noindex and webmaster tools
2. Had to look this one up, it's DMCA-agent
3. Webmaster tools
4. Google Alerts
5. Googlebot
6. NOSNIPPET
7. site:mysite.com

What do I win? Oh a link, cool!

Re: louisgray.com: SiteMeter's Attempted Challenge to Google Analytics Falls Flat

andymurd — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 05:16:52 -0000

The interface was very slow last night too.

A gradual rollout of the new functionality might have been more appropriate than the big-bang approach. Small changes are more manageable and mean that criticisms of new functionality can be addressed without degrading existing features.

Good to see Sitemeter trying to compete though.

Re: How to Avoid Some of the Problems in Writing a Working Recommendation Engine

andymurd — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 05:15:32 -0000

There's some good analysis of music recommendation engines on the Duke Listens blog at http://blogs.sun.com/plamere/. It's well worth searching out his analyses of the last.fm engine for some good detail.

Re: Compare Your Last.FM Music With FriendCompare

andymurd — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:51:13 -0000

I'll be trying out FriendCompare very soon, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

I've found Last.fm to be a great service but (like del.icio.us) very personal and not given to socialising, so 3rd party apps that make for a more social experience are welcome.

Oh, and I see my avatar up there too, *waves*

Re: Delicious 2.0: Who bookmarks any more?

andymurd — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:37:32 -0000

Agreed, delicious is hugely underrated as a research tool. What amazes me most is that bookmarking is an essentially selfish action - I tag pages for me, not for others - and yet it produces such astounding results.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

andymurd — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 05:10:22 -0000

That hardware advantage is huge.

I use OS X, Windows and Ubuntu and I find that I spend similar amounts of time tweaking Windows & Ubuntu but none on OS X. Apple's hardware restrictions mean that I buy far fewer hardware upgrades so that has a big effect.

That said, I've found that any Windows install seems to "rot" over time. Taking longer to boot, using more and more memory and gaining conflicting DLLs. This just doesn't happen with Ubuntu.

Re: louisgray.com: Twitter Finding New and More Creative Ways to Fail

andymurd — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:46:44 -0000

I guarantee that I didn't unfollow you Kim.

Oh, but you're just showing off with "Oooh, Louis Gray follows me, la la la". Louis, follow Kim again! Do I have to start a petition?

Re: louisgray.com: Twitter Finding New and More Creative Ways to Fail

andymurd — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 05:43:41 -0000

Agreed. Follower counts are nice but I can live with a few bugs there.

The interaction supported by Twitter is the key and they have really improved reliability in that respect. Thanks for your comment Mka, I was wondering if I am the only person that really wants Twitter to succeed.

Re: louisgray.com: Identi.ca Launches SMS Support, Sort Of.

andymurd — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:23:50 -0000

Mobile networks really need to get their acts together and provide a single, unified interface to SMS for web applications. They could make a ton of money (judging by the reported markup on sending an SMS) if only they would help us to increase their traffic.

Re: The inevitable ticking time bomb awaiting Friendfeed.

andymurd — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 06:00:33 -0000

When rooms were first announced there was quite a run of people registering spammy sounding room names (picked some up myself). Most such rooms are completely empty and were just taken to deny spammers a nice URL on a trusted site.

The thing that will save FriendFeed is its subscription model - you actively subscribe to people and very few users are going to subscribe to spammers. It's also really easy to block people so even spammers that are friends of friends disappear quickly. For FriendFeed's users, spam should not be much of a problem.

For the developers & admins, it will be a problem if automated submissions happen as the article predicts and swamp the servers.

Re: I wish FriendFeed or Google Reader would tell me who’s sharing my stories

andymurd — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:40:53 -0000

Thanks Eric, my use of RSS like this is far from original but it works well for me. I see RSS as a useful layer in an N-tier architecture. I think that architecture is missing really useful endpoints for RSS - widgets, tumblr, iGoogle, myYahoo! etc are OK but not *must have* yet.

It will happen though, FriendFeed is damn close to perfect but it's a service that you have to use before you love it. My boss is not convinced, nor is my mum - when they "get" aggregation the service that provides it will be huge.

Re: I wish FriendFeed or Google Reader would tell me who’s sharing my stories

andymurd — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 06:15:26 -0000

I do the same as Hutch & Colin, set up a who:everyone search in FriendFeed for your blog title. Then grab the output as an RSS feed and import into Google Reader.

I have similar feeds set up for del.icio.us, digg, reddit and the three major search engines. These get merged into a single "alert feed" and republished by Google Reader.

I also use TwitterFeed to alert me as soon as the alert feed gets updated. RSS rocks, you can do loads of cool things with it.

Re: andymurd's tumblog

andymurd — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:28:15 -0000

Yes, the tumblr RSS feed is run through feedburner (marked as a podcast) which provides the enclosures to show videos and MP3s.

Re: andymurd's tumblog

andymurd — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 06:12:19 -0000

It's pretty straightforward if you're happy with editing HTML. Just two lines to insert into the theme and it worked first time for me.

I'm happy to help if you want any assistance.

Re: andymurd's tumblog

andymurd — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:32:44 -0000

Testing out comments on my tumblog

Re: Display Your Twitter Friends on a World Map

andymurd — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 04:12:50 -0000

Glad you like it!