Analyze your traffic without you

Even when you have like a dozen visits a day, checking google analytics now and then is nice (hey! a vsitor from Belize!). However, it is nice to be able to tell what traffic comes from yourself and what comes from your two readers (if any). A bookmarklet can help you to enable a filter that will allow analytics to remove you from its stats, or even to track your own usage of your site.

Update: bookmarklet magic moved from the defunct googlepages to amazon s3 to http://code.verg.es/sharebookmarklet.html

Tag-decorated feeds

Tags should be a good cue to tell us if a blog post should be read or skipped. I find puzzling that most (all?) feed readers just ignore tags. Surprisingly enough, I could not find any feed decorator.

Yahoo! Pipes to the rescue: after some copy'n'paste, a pipe that decorates feeds appending to every post title its categories (for atom and rss 2 feeds), and also adds the tags to the top of the post: http://pipes.yahoo.com/xverges/tagsintitle

This one does the same, but also adds the results from Yahoo! Term Extraction to the top of the post. I just cooked it, so I am not really sure if the list of terms is a useful addition: http://pipes.yahoo.com/xverges/tagsandtermextraction

Annoying side effects: the feed name, url and description become those of the pipe, so a bit of manual work is required after subscribing to a feed. I hope they fix it...

Social Note Taking

I just played a bit with Ripplerap, a tool to take and share notes during conferences. Brilliant. If downloading and unziping is too much for you to get an impression, take a look at Phil Whitehouse's ripplerap-is-about-to-be-born post.

It is in its infancy, and there are several things that need some ironing, but I believe that its simplicity gives it a huge potential. Good news for us compulsive note takers and/or conference-life-blogging addicts.

And I must confess that I did not see much of a point in one of Ripplerap bulding blocks, TiddlyChatter...

Update: It is a funny coincidence that the very same day that I played with Ripplerap for the first time, fellow IBMer Sacha Chua - tech evangelist, storyteller, geek - made me aware of this collecton of tips for conference bloggers.

Sabelotodos

Ángel Expósito, en su Mirón Perplejo de hoy en La Vanguardia:

(...) que los periodistas sepamos tanto de todo. Absolutamente de todo. ¡Qué estupido es el mundo!, al no percatarse de que un solo tertuliano español podría ser secretario general de la ONU, director del FMI, seleccionador nacional de fútbol y número uno del ranking de toreros. Todos en uno.

Y quién dice un tertuliano, dice un blogger. ¿Por dónde debe andar mi traje de luces?

Shouting "fire" in a crowded place

Ian Hughes, on a comment to a post by Andy Piper announcing a blogging break:

“I am stopping blogging” is the Web 2.0 of shouting “fire” in a crowded place.

Man against Machine: Technorati ranks and spam

My (lousy) Technorati rank owes some points to splogs (spam blogs). It looks like some spam blogs are being created by posting whatever they get from subscribing to a google blog search. So far, I've been hit by two of them (sample, using tinyurl). According to an unscientific Technorati search, this particular spam amounted to about 10000 posts for December 8th. Yuk(*).

(*) Two posts in a row ending with "Yuk". Not good.

dW chats: Grady Booch on the latest Rational tools release

Another developerWorks chat that looks very interesting: Grady Booch answers your questions about this week's Rational tools release. On Thursday December 7th, at 4:30 pm his time or 10:30 pm my time.

I did not learn about this from Booch's blog itself, but from a comment by Ferran Rodenas to a post in Kelly Drahzal's blog. The interesting bit about this is that Ferran works for "la Caixa", a very important ibm client, and it is a very good thing for me and some team mates to be able to read his posts and keep track of his blogroll. Or explore his linkedin profile and our common connections. The openess that blogs and social software have brought rocks!

Comments/Sorolls/Noises/Ruidos

Posts in Google Groups

A javascript-based box from coComment should show my comments here and everywhere, unless

• you are viewing this in your rss reader (if you see the box, run fast to get a secure reader!)
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blogspot,tags,feeds

->

:-)

http://purplemoggy.blogspot.com/2006/09/adding-label-feeds-to-your-template.html
http://phydeaux3.blogspot.com/2006/11/label-feeds-come-home.html

¡Arriba los tags!

¡Qué convención más tonta que los tags estén después de lo etiquetado! Leo el título, leo los tags: decido si leo el resto o no. ¿No?

Unofficial PlanetIBM Search

Introducing... the Unofficial PlanetIBM Search, based on Google's Custom Search Engines and on the unofficial list of IBM bloggers maintained by Elias Torres. Search box in this blogs side bar.

I've set everything by hand now, but it does not look very hard to script it now that I've learned a bit about Google's CSEs. Lots of things pending: write the scripts to automate the maintenance, get a semi-decent logo, give more weight to the official unofficial IBM voice (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/, executives...), make visible what sites are searched and with what weigth (as now, everything in Elias list, with the same weight), check if I can get Google to be nice and avoid inserting ads from our competition in the results page...

And, why? Because I think that it is a good thing to be able to search what IBMers have been writing outside the firewall. (And because the procastinator in me thought that this was far more interesting than completing two pending assignments that I have from two friends... Cris, Rodri, ahora me pongo, de verdad...).

It is often said that it is better to ask forgiveness than permission. (Wait! Don't let my kids know that I agree with this!). So, without being 100% sure about this being the right thing to do, here I go.

Update. Re: reasons, permission and forgiveness. The main reason for doing this is shaking the tree and hoping that this can help to get in place sooner an official search, using IBM technology, a list of bloggers maintained officially, rss available on searches, no adds, nice integration with ibm.com... Based on what I experience in the IBM intranet, putting in place a proper solution should not be hard at all.