import – Climb to the Stars

A Mess of Facebook Pages, Groups, and Profiles (Part 1) [en]

[fr] 1er épisode de ma tentative de mettre un peu d'ordre dans mes Pages Facebook.

Facebook “Like” buttons are starting to spread and I think I’m going to add them around here. So, I’m wondering which “Facebook Like” WordPress plugin I should install, and also, trying to sort out the mess between my various pages, groups, and profile on Facebook.

I recently started importing Digital Crumble into my Facebook profile, a move I’m pretty happy about because it seems to be making my online wanderings more readily available to a bunch of personal friends of mine who interact with me online mainly via Facebook, Twitter and IM. But on the other hand, I wonder: am I drowning my Facebook presence in too much Digital Crumble?

I’m now wondering what feeds to import where on Facebook.

I’ve always been wary of sending my Twitter firehose into Facebook: not the same audience, and too much Twitter at times, to be honest.

Let’s start with what’s easy: Bagha. He’s got a Facebook page and a Twitter account (@bagha) which he doesn’t use much, and in his case I have no problem linking them. I’ve installed the Twitter Facebook app to do that. I tried to use MyFlickr to import Flickr photos of him, but it was such a pain in the neck (can’t figure out exactly how to use it, + timeouts) I gave up and am looking for another solution to import Bagha’s Flickr photos into his page. I’ve also imported CTTS posts mentioning Bagha (feed) into his articles (hmmm, maybe I should resurrect his Catster diary…).

Have to say, though, that Facebook is a pain in the neck: getting it to accept a feed takes multiple tries, and connecting apps like Twitter or MyFlickr to their respective external services is no walk in the park either. Be persistent!

Progress in Restoring CTTS [en]

[fr] Voilà, après la destruction involontaire de mon blog il y a une dizaine de jours, j'ai pu remettre en ligne tous les articles écrits avant le 25 octobre. Le reste suivra en cours de semaine.

After the big blogging disaster, I had a pretty busy week (it was a bad one too, but let’s not dwell on that).

I have now restored all posts and content published before October 25, the last post being about Qwitting Qwitter (remember that one?). Pages are back too, and I’ve put a Pages widget here in the right column so you can access them.

The rest of the content will follow, on Tuesday, normally. With comments.

One side-effect of the import is that I have also “recovered” (haha!) all the duplicate comments that the Disqus plugin inserted in my database. I removed them sometime in January, and this time, unfortunately, removal will not be so simple: the “DISQUS” comment agent I used to identify them got lost in the export-import process.

Ah, and it looks like my categories are an even bigger mess than before: most of them seem duplicated. Maybe it’s time to cut my losses, convert them all the tags, and wipe the slate clean.

Flickr and Dopplr: the Right Way to Import GMail Contacts [en]

[fr] Il est maintenant possible d'importer des contacts depuis GMail (ou Hotmail) sans devoir divulguer son mot de passe, aussi bien chez Flickr que chez Dopplr. Génial!

A few days ago, I saw this tweet by Matt Biddulph soar by:

Impressed by passwordless import at http://www.flickr.com/impor… – does anyone know if that’s a public yahoo API they use? want!

I immediately went to investigate. You see, I have an interest in social network portability (also called “make holes in my buckets”) — I gave a talk on SPSNs from a user point of view at WebCamp SNP in Cork recently — and I am also concerned that in many cases, implementations in that direction make generous use of the password anti-pattern (ie, asking people for the password to their e-mail). It’s high time for design to encourage responsible behaviour instead. As the discussion at WebCamp shows, we all agree that solutions need to be found.

So, what Matt said sounded sweet, but I had to check for myself. (Oh, and Matt builds Dopplr, in case you weren’t sure who he was.) Let me share with you what I saw. It was nice.

Go to the Flickr contact import page if you want to follow live. First, I clicked on the GMail icon and got this message.

I clicked OK.

This is a GMail page (note the logged in information upper right), asking me if Flickr can access my Google Contacts, just this one time. I say “yes, sure”.

Flickr goes through my GMail contacts, and presents me with a list:

There is of course an “add all” option (don’t use it unless you have very few contacts), and as you can see, next to each contact there is a little drop down which I can use to add them.

When I’m done adding them, Flickr asks me if I want to send e-mail invites — which I don’t.

Neat, isn’t it?

Well, the best news about this is that Flickr isn’t alone. Dopplr (remember Matt?) does the same thing — and also for Windows Live Hotmail now.

Note and question mark: I just saw Dopplr announced GMail password-free import back in March, before Matt’s tweet. Did Dopplr do it before Flickr? Then, what was the tweet about? Thoroughly chronologically confused. Anyway, passwordless import of GMail contacts rocks. Thanks, guys.

Update: Thanks for the chronology, Matt (see his comment below). So basically, Matt’s tweet was about the fact that though GMail and Hotmail allows services like Dopplr and Flickr to access contacts without requiring a password, Yahoo doesn’t. Flickr does it from your Yahoo account because they have special access. So, Yahoo, when do we get a public API for that?

Lijit Feedback [en]

[fr] Un peu de feedback sur Lijit, un moteur de recherche sympa qui s'organise autour du contenu en ligne d'une personne et de son réseau.

I lost the first version of this post in a Firefox crash while I was writing my post on structured portable social networks (that’s what I get for doing too much at the same time). With a bit of luck it will be better 😉

So, as promised, here’s my feedback to Barney about Lijit. First, for those of you new to Lijit, Stowe Boyd blogged about Lijit about a week ago, which is how I discovered it. (Yes, go sign up now, but come back here to read the rest of the post when you’re done. Thanks!)

Signing up must have gone reasonably smoothly, because I don’t have any screenshots of it — which is a good start. (When I bump into any interface problem or bugginess nowadays, I quickly grab a screenshot with Skitch and upload it to Flickr with a few notes. Photographs of my online life, if you like.)

I was disappointed that I could only add my del.icio.us and MyBlogLog networks. The latter is a good addition, but how about my Twitter network? Or a blogroll on my secondary blog? CTTS doesn’t have a blogroll (pure laziness). I tried importing my network from Facebook, but it was way too creepy, I disabled it as fast as I could. I got the feeling it was going to allow people to search through my friends’ notes and stuff — as well as mine. I do take advantage of the “walled garden” side of Facebook to publish slightly more personal stuff there than “outside”, and I know I’m not alone here.

What would be really neat would be if I were able to export just the connections I have to other people from Facebook, and if they are Lijit users, import their blogs and content into my network. Think portable social networks.

Being able to import the blogs I read (they’re my “network”, aren’t they?) directly from Google Reader (filter with a tag though, so I can keep all those naughty sex blogs I’m keeping track of out of the public eye).

I used Lijit twice to find the old posts I linked back to in the post above. First, on the Lijit website itself:

Then, using the wijit I installed on my blog:

That’s pretty neat. Lijit opens a “fake window” over the current page with the search results, and when I click on a link in the results, it loads in the initial browser window. Sounds obvious, but I like that it works — many ways it could have gone wrong.

I’m moderately happy about the space the wijit takes up on my blog:

I know companies are hungry for screen real estate (“make that logo visible!”) — but be less obtrusive and I’ll love you more! Notice that I now have Lijit search, normal Google search, and WordPress search. Way too many search boxes, but for the moment there isn’t one that seems to do the job well enough to be the only one. (Maybe Lijit, but I haven’t had it long enough…)

Stats page is neat, though I’m still totally unable to tell you what the two pie charts on the right do:

What on earth is Ma.gnolia doing in there?

There, that’s what’s on my mind concerning Lijit for the moment. Watch out for the screenshots if I bump into anything else!

Nokia 6280 compatible Mac :-) [fr]

[en] Nokia 6280 seems nicely compatible with OSX.

Faut que je passe annoncer la bonne nouvelle à MobileZone: mon nouveau téléphone (Nokia 6280) paraît joliment compatible Apple. Je découvre les joies de la synchronisation sous OSX avec mon MacBook: il faut brancher le câble (j’ai aussi relié les deux par Bluetooth, pas certaine que ce soit nécessaire), et sur le téléphone, choisir mode de connection par défaut pour le câble USB.

On peut ensuite synchroniser contacts (depuis Address Book) et calendrier (iCal).

Concernant le calendrier, j’utilise Google Calendar depuis un moment. C’est joli et on peut y accéder de partout à condition qu’il y ait un ordinateur connecté à internet à disposition. L’idéal serait de pouvoir synchroniser mon téléphone avec gCal, mais ce n’est pas encore vraiment possible (quoique… quelqu’un a le courage de tester GCalSync?). Voici comment je m’en sors:

je m’abonne dans iCal à mes calendriers Google (en read-only)
j’ai un troisième calendrier dans iCal que j’appelle “Phone”
dans les réglages de synchronisation, j’importe les événements créés avec le téléphone dans ce calendrier
de temps en temps, je l’exporte d’iCal, l’importe dans gCal, et transfère les événements sur les bons calendriers gCal (avant de vider le calendrier “Phone” dans iCal. A la synchronisation suivante, tout rentre dans l’ordre.

En choisissant le mode “Stockage de données”, on peut voir dans Finder le contenu de la carte Mini-SD. Du coup, voici la première photo publiée avec cet appareil:

Si vous allez voir la version originale de la photo, vous verrez que les bords sont un peu imprécis. Trop de compression ou bien (gasp!) zoom numérique à l’insu de mon plein gré?

PS: si vous n’avez pas encore de compte Flickr, c’est le moment de vous en faire un. C’est gratuit.

Wiki Spam on PhpWiki [en]

Call for suggestions for a new wiki engine to run SpiroLattic, victim of too much wiki spam.

Right, I could use some help here, particularly from those of you who are more in touch with the wiki-world than I am at present.

SpiroLattic is a very inactive wiki. However, it does contain some useful pages which are regularly visited, and I’m sick of removing wiki spam from it (the wiki-spam actually succeeded in wiping the Home Page, as the older clean versions of it are not in the database anymore).

I need suggestions for a wiki engine (PHP/MySQL preferred) into which I will be able to import my existing PhpWiki 1.3 alpha something pages, and which is not too vulnerable to wiki spam. I’d like to be able to keep the existing layout, but I don’t think that’s really an issue with today’s wiki engines.

Thanks for your help and suggestions.

Edit 18.12.04: Lazyweb, I invoke thee!