Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

I disabled the daily del.icio.us link posting, because there are better ways keeping up to date with my postings: join my del.icio.us network or follow me at Friendfeed.

Believe it or not, for more than one year I have an article draft saved in my weblog system, titled "Social Software". The original reason for writing this was that Dan Diephouse wrote about O'Reilly's Connection, a now defunct social network for geeks. Some days ago Brett Porter wrote about his experiences with social networks, and I decided to start over with this blog post.

Being user of some social networks of different flavors, I noted that the number of connections I have in different network differs strongly. One reason is that some network have a larger user base, others make it very hard to add connections, others imply a closeness of relationships that I do not want to share with everyone. So, what level of social relationships does being connected in one network imply?

Facebook

Nothing. It basically means "Hey you are on facebook as well!"

Xing, Plaxo Pulse and LinkedIn

You might be useful for my career, I better keep you in this network.

twitter, Last.fm, Flickr

What you do (listen to, or photograph) is interesting for me

del.icio.us and Digg

What you read and think is interesting for me

Dopplr and Plazes

If you happen to be in the same place with me, it would be nice to know so we can meet.

The most valuable network for me (apart from the address book synch of Plaxo) is del.icio.us, because it allows me to track and share ideas with people I find interesting and this is despite the poor network capabilities of del.icio.us. So if you would like to connect with me in del.icio.us, just leave a comment with your username,

I am using del.icio.us extensively. Not only for keeping my own bookmarks, also for discovering new links (by following my network) and of course, using the for:trieloff tag in del.icio.us is the way I prefer to get informed about interesting links.

When watching some of the links I get send using this method, I ask my self: "What do they (my friends, family and co-workers) think of me?". What do they think is interesting for me and worth tagging a for:trieloff?

In order to answer this question, I wrote a small ruby script that scrapes my personal del.icio.us link inbox, searches for tags and ranks them according to their popularity. This is the tag cloud the program came up with:

If you compare this to my own tag cloud of things I blog or bookmark, you will find a big overlap. It looks like they know me quite well.

Roller is a great weblog software. This is the reason why JRoller and Goshaky Weblogs use this software and this is the reason why so many great bloggers are on JRoller. But the standard Roller templates get one thing wrong: They fail to set the correct title for individual weblog permalink pages.

Take for example the Bile Blog, which is one of the most popular blogs on JRoller. The title of the start page is "The Bile Blog", but if you turn to an individual entry's permalink page, you will see the title of this page, e.g. of Another googleturd is again "The Bile Blog". Why is this bad? The top-5 reasons are:

1. Google cannot see the difference. The title of the page is important for Google's rankings and without a proper title, Google will not find out it is being bashed in Another googleturd, which means less visitors for the Bile Blog.
2. Firefox cannot see the difference. Imagine you are opening three stories of the Bile Blog in tabs in your Firefox webbrowser. The title of all three tabs will be "The Bile Blog" and you have no chance to see the difference, e.g. if you would like to show your colleagues the latest Google-bashing
3. del.icio.us bookmarks cannot see the difference: Many people are using the del.icio.us bookmarket to manage their bookmarklets. After clicking the bookmarklet and tagging the entry they are not reviewing the title, so their bookmark will be entitled "The Bile Blog", even if they are not bookmarking the whole blog, but a particular story. Take a search at del.icio.us for "The Bile Blog" and find out whether a link is pointing to the start page or an entry,
4. It is not accessible. Most people do not care about making their site accessible, but most people with disabilities are actually using the internet. Setting the correct title helps them visting your weblog.
5. You look like someone who is not able to customize the templates of his weblog system correctly, but with these instructions, it is no problem for nobody.

All you have to do is to login to your JRoller weblog. Click on Preferences, click on Theme, click on Customize (if you are not already using a customized theme), click on Templates and edit the Weblog or _decorator template. You need to find the text between <title> and </title> and paste following code:

#macro( showEntryTitle $entries)
  #foreach( $entry in $entries )
    #if ( $velocityCount == 1)
    $entry.title
    #end
    #if ( $velocityCount == 2)
    and more
    #end
  #end
#end

#if ($pageModel.weblogEntry)
  #set($entries = [$pageModel.weblogEntry])
  #showWebsiteTitle(): 
  #showEntryTitle( $entries )
#else
  #showWebsiteTitle()
#end

This will show the title of your current post on permalink pages and leave the start page unchanged. And, most important it will make Google, del.icio.us and Firefox users happy.

I finally figured out how to configure del.icio.us, the social bookmarking service to post a daily batch of bookmarks to my Roller weblog:

1. Create an account at del.icio.us
2. Login to your account
3. Click on 'settings'
4. Click on 'Experimental'->'daily blog posting'
5. Create a new job with any job name, use your Roller login name as 'out_name', your Roller password as 'out_pass', the XML-PRC-URL of your Roller installation as 'out_url', in case of weblogs.goshaky.com, the correct URL is http://weblogs.goshaky.com/weblogs/xmlrpc, enter the value '0' for 'out_cat_id' and 'out_time' (I've found no other values to work) and the ID of your weblog, e.g. 'lars' as 'out_blog_id'.

Now del.icio.us will post all links bookmarked at del.icio.us in the last 24 hours every day at midnight to your weblog. If you add some additional CSS to your weblog's template, you can customize the appearance of the blog posting.

Update, the URL has been changed from /xmlrpc to /roller-services/xmlrpc