Matthew Botos

Syndicated feeds (RSS and Atom) make it much easier to follow your favorite sites and your friends’ activities; I’m also finding they provide some other amusing moments:

• I’ve been using FeedHub to suggest select entries from the many feeds I subscribe to; it uses a trainable recommendation engine to give you a feed of recommendations. The list of feeds it works off included a few of my own I added for testing purposes, so it’s alway fun to see one of my own posts get recommended back to me!
• On the more social side, I’m a heavy del.icio.us user and enjoy seeing what people in my network have been bookmarking & occasionally tagging bookmarks for them. It’s always rewarding to see them pick up things I’ve bookmarked, whether it was one for them or just one for myself.

I have a confession to make: I’ve actually been using Internet Explorer 7 for the last month at work. Though I’m a die-hard Firefox fan, I decided to undertake a little experiment when I switched jobs.

With tabbed browsing and search plugins, IE7 offers some familiar features, and even goes a step further by making it easy to create your own search plugins. Bookmark organization is a bit basic, as is del.icio.us integration, but usable. It’s also missing Greasemonkey, though I use fewer scripts at work than at home. Being that I do develop websites at work, though, the developer tools are a step down from Firebug, particularly when it comes to debugging Javascript.

The verdict: IE 7 is surprisingly tolerable, but still leaves power users hungry for Firefox and it’s rich collection of plugins.

After trying homebrew spreadsheets and Quicken to manage my finances, I decided to give mint.com a try. Pure viral marketing finally got me - I saw a friend declare himself a “fan” of the site on Facebook.

Setup was quite easy; it grabs account information with much less fuss than Quicken. It uses an established provider to this, which eases some of the worries that a web startup has all your banking information. From there, you get an immediate overview of your finances, and offers from their presumed partners on how you can save money. Not a bad business model, especially when you consider the email alerts and updates it sends to keep you coming back.

It does have a few shortcomings: it only pulls in your last month’s worth of information and doesn’t always set new categories successfully, making it more difficult to use the budgeting and analysis capabilities. It did turn up some good tempting deals, though it missed some of my current credit card rewards.

The interface is smooth, though, and with everything moving to the web, personal finance can’t be far behind - even Quicken is getting in on the game.

More professional sellers on eBay seem to be loading up their item descriptions with their own terms and processes. This flowchart takes the cake, though, and gets bonus points for not rendering correctly in Firefox:

You can now view my blog in an iPhone-friendly format thanks to the  iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme by ContentRobot. I also installed the WPhone Admin Plugin so that I can post from my iPhone. Both plugins were easy enough to install, though is iWPhone theme does require you to disable the WP Cache plugin.

I added a link to my photos to the iPhone theme, though the gallery will still render in normal format. The special theme is triggered by the iPhone browser user-agent string instead of the CSS rule recommended by A List Apart, so it didn’t show up in any of the iPhone emulators I tried. Even if you can’t enjoy the iPhone theme, hopefully this will enable me to post more frequently!

Mark Cuban has some interesting thoughts in My New Facebook Strategy and the FB Power Level on managing large social networks and the opportunity - and limits - of using those connections:

The 3rd layer is emerging as a very unique and interesting network in FB. Its what I will call “The Power Layer.” These are people who in whatever industry they are in , retain some level of power. Having them as FB friends, although very simple and non committal, gives me some level of access to them, and them to me. These are people that if they sent me a FB mail, i would certainly read and respond to , and I think they would do the same.

Its what I could also call the one shot layer. If you have an idea or thought, you get 1 shot, per year to get their attention. Anything more than that probably could and would get me deleted. Everyone at this layer gets pitched continuously. Myself included. If you abuse it, you lose it.

The idea behind Leverage, a site to manage and trade gift cards, didn’t intrigue me so much as how straightforward parts of the their business model are. They acknowledge it costs money to get customers, so they’re just going to pay out that to customers cost as quasi-cash quasi-interest on the cards you register. They’re also advertising-driven (seemingly the only successful Internet business model), so they’re going to target ads based on your demographics, but they’ll actually tell you on which demographics the ads are based. It’s refreshing; hopefully more customer-dependent sites will follow suit!

I’ve been quite diligent about tagging my photos, though with so many, even the “favorites” are up to 189 photos. So I finally went through those and tried to pick about 20 of my “best“. It’s all based on my opinion, of course, but nominations to add/delete any of them are welcome.

It’s also interesting to look at the most viewed photos as an exercise in popularity versus quality. Most of the heavily viewed photos come from search results for technical topics I’ve documented; eliminating those lets more”real” photos rise to the top, though still only a few I’d consider really good shots.

With an audience of search engine users instead of photography buffs, passive metrics like view counts aren’t as useful as they are for Flickr’s interestingness measure. It also affirms my decision to skip a ratings system. As I’ve noticed with some sites at work, low traffic and participation don’t make enough of a difference between the signal and the noise, and a single active user can control up to 10% of the votes. (Just one of the many ways in which I manipulate the corporate machine )

It doesn’t surprise me that someone is tracking bloggers by location, but I was a little surprised to see Why Boston is Bloggiest reveal Philadelphia as a very close second. I guess I’ve been doing my part!

I recently updated my Greasemonkey script Digg Top 10 Direct at Userscripts.org to use the Digg API, and was pleased with how simple it was. One of the reasons is that its a RESTful service, which when you put the technobabble aside, means that everything works the same way a webpage does. You want to read data, you get it like a webpage; you want to write data, you post it like a web form.

I work with a lot of systems engineers and architects who will literally talk for days about Service Oriented Architecture and SOAP vs REST and get nothing done. Meanwhile, it took me less than an hour to start using the Digg API in the above script, and only an afternoon to do a much more complicated integration with the del.icio.us API for a bookmarking tool at work. When your customer cares more about working software than hot air, is it any wonder REST is pulling ahead?