Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

I am wondering if I am not slowly but surely getting into problems. I like trying out things and there is a lot of great stuff out there. Aggregators of your personal life are starting to come up but this actually poses a problem.

I recently made a change in how I blog, twitter, tumble, the like. Real thoughts go in here, little notes go into twitter, which is more of a conversation. All the stuff in between now actually ends up on my Tumblr Blog. But the Tumblr Blog actually aggregates del.icio.us tags tagged linkblog, as well as flickr posts with tag moblog and my kyte.tv posts as well as qik live streams. It kind of aggregates my short thoughts.

Above that I also installed Noserub on my own server, for a large part because Dirk works at Ormigo and because I think it is one of the most interesting implementations in the open social graph movement. It aggregates all my accounts into one view. I can’t really have it aggregate my Tumblr blog because that would double aggregate a lot of stuff. It is actually more likely that I will remove some stuff and only have it take the Tumblr blog. That is actually more what goes on in my life that might interest other people than all the other stuff.

This is also one of the reasons I kept twitter out of the aggregation via Tumblr, because it’s kind of a different level that people have to be able to choose distinctly to follow.

What we really need is something that will aggregate all my feeds, and somehow allows my friends to selectively subscribe to that stream of my ideas, somehow only giving them what might interest them, maybe based on what they read. This would actually be a very fun project. There you go, another start-up idea for somebody out there. Even better would be if somebody would write something that extends Noserub to that extend. I am sure Dirk would not mind.

With that off my chest, on to some more work

Great ad!

Thanks to Feld for pointing me to (his investment) Lijit. Feld already invested early in Feedburner, now belonging to Google (thanks for making the pro stats free by the way ;)). Hence, I needed to at least give Lijit a try and I do like it. Install is easy enough, also on Wordpress if you know a bit of HTML (tiny bit) and the Lightbox version for keeping search on your site is great. The entire idea holds great promise. If you search on my blog via the Lijit search it will first go over all my blog posts, then include things like Bluedot and my OPML file from my RSS reader. Not sure how it all ties together as it should take the blogs from the OPML file and include results form those pages, which I presume it does. Above that it has my LinkedIn connection and Xing connection (but I would probably have to give up my login credentials) so it can (theoretically in the future) look at my network and see which people I trust, possibly knowing their Lijit accounts … and the list goes on. Very cool indeed.

One short request: Please give me the code to just add a search box with GO at the end without the bells and whistles as I would like to exchange the search box at the top of the blog too. And there should not be any Lijit there and such. People will see it soon enough when they search.

Akismet currently holds 34000 comment spams and several thousand are added each day, partly moving the server up to loads far over 50 and making everything unresponsive. Hence, I needed another solution and found Hashcash, a wordpress plugin that arguably works better than Captcha. So what does it do? Here is what they say on the site:
Every four hours, your blog picks a random large number (close to 32 bits). Whenever a visitor visits your permalink pages, an ajax call is made which retrieves some javascript. This javascript first decrypts itself, then executes itself again to retrieve the secret value, which it sets in the form. If a comment does not have this value, it is rejected. If a comment is rejected more than four times, the user is blocked for a specified period of time.

Sounds good and I hope it will work. Let’s see what happens. As long as I am not at 3000 comment spams a day, I am happy.