This Blog Is Now Connect’d

By Nikolay Kolev on December 20, 2008

Let me first promise that this is my last post with the annoying ‘d in the title! ;-)

Two days ago I spent about 15 minutes setting up Google Friend Connect on my blog — I just wish it was more than a bunch of widgets and probably Google is already working on that. The process was simple and pleasant.

Yesterday it took me about the same time to also enable Facebook Connect here using Adam Hupp’s plugin called WP-FBConnect, which is the official one for WordPress. The two other plugins seemed either too invasive (Sociable!) or too early in development (Community Facebook Connect by Jessy Stay). There is an official Facebook Connect Plugin Directory now and, which seems to be actively updated.

I had to make a few minor tweaks to WP-FBConnect — the first and last names of users were not getting populated in the database and the CSS did not match my theme well, but in general it was also simple and pleasant experience.

What I find sad is that Yahoo! has failed to maximize the full potential of their MyBlogLog service — they’ve got all building blocks necessary to offer a combination of both Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect — identity, widgets, lifestreaming, friends, communities, following. Oh, well… again and again, Yahoo! is letting competitors eat its own pie.

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This Blog Has Been Coltrane’d

By Nikolay Kolev on December 11, 2008

Minutes after the official announcement of WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” availability my blog got powered by it! It took roughly 10 minutes to upgrade and I can say that it was worth the wait!

The next step would be to tweak the Emptiness theme to support threaded comments.

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Artiklz Has Been TechCrunch’d

By Nikolay Kolev on November 24, 2008

Finally! Artiklz has passed a major milestone in its development — it’s been TechCrunch’d by the European techcruncher Robin Wauters, who we had the pleasure to meet in person at BLOG08 in Amsterdam!

We are also happy to get a nice follow-up coverage by the #1 blogger in Eastern Europe — Svetlana Gladkova in her blog Profy!

Thank you, Robin and Svetlana!

Aside from being in the news, we’ve been busy at Artiklz adding three new features for blog readers and now kindly invite you to taste the fruits of our labor and line up for our private beta, which will feature the highly anticipated conversation search.

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Hashtagging Twitter Feeds

By Nikolay Kolev on October 11, 2008

As many of us use now twitterfeed by Mario Menti or Twitter Tools by Alex King, I think it makes sense to start applying some standard hashtags based on the feed type to make searching and filtering easier. As I added my BackType feed to twitterfeed, I now get automatic tweets when I blog and make comments. BackType added Twitter integration recently, but it sucks as tweets go out just once a day or once a week, which is a lot worse than the 30-minute intervals with twitterfeed.

After a short period of brainstorming, I came up with the following hashtags:

#blogpost for blog posts
#comment for blog comments

I will ping Mario Menti and Alex King to see if this can get built into their tools to ease standardization.

What do you think? Any ideas?

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Euro Trip

By Nikolay Kolev on October 10, 2008

I couldn’t wait to add my next trip with Artiklz on DOPPLR!

John, Iris, and I will first attend Web 2.0 Expo Europe 2008 in Berlin, Germany (October 21-23, 2008) and then we will get on the cityhopper to attend BLOG08 in Amsterdam, Netherlands (October 24, 2008). I haven’t been in any of those countries yet (excluding the airports), so, I’m excited! I’m also excited, because we’ll have the chance to present Artiklz to a different audience and hopefully to establish new partnerships. See you there!

Web 2.0 Expo Europe 2008   BLOG08 rockstars of the web!

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I’ve Been CrunchBase’d

By Nikolay Kolev on October 8, 2008

Thanks to being a principal of Artiklz, I have a profile on CrunchBase now.

CrunchBase’s structured wiki system worked really well. I need to find a creative way to do a mashup using their API… when I have time.

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Hello Blogosphere!

By Nikolay Kolev on October 4, 2008

I am proudly launching Blog 3.0. Yes, this is the third start from scratch of my blog within 3 years and interestingly each time it was on a different platform!

I launched Blog 1.0 in January 2006. I chose Typo, but its first versions were not quite stable and often my blog was offline for hours and sometimes even days. Often it took minutes to load even though it was running on a beefy dedicated server. I’m still not sure if I have to “thank” lighttpd or Typo for the headaches, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience.

Then, after being offline for quite some time, I fell in love with Mephisto and I launched Blog 2.0 and it was a completely different experience! Mephisto was fast and stable and my only problem was that its development has been sporadic and then it stalled. Even many have cloned it on GitHub already, the main line is still progressing slowly and not benefiting from all that collaborative effort. Anyway, it worked OK for me.

Unfortunately, due to some problems with PayPal’s recurring billing, my hosting company vpsFarm canceled my account and I lost my blog. Pathetic, I know, but I didn’t have a copy of my customized Mephisto and I lost everything! Argh!

There’s now a third platform built with Ruby on Rails — Chameleon, but its development also stalled after running out of the initial enthusiasm. Similarly to Mephisto, it’s using Liquid templates. Typo is more active recently and has new leads, but I will it continue at this pace? I don’t know…

I am a big and loyal fan of Ruby on Rails, but the blogging platforms built with it lack incentive to move forward and fast being overshadowed by MovableType and WordPress. It makes the most sense those Ruby on Rails platforms to combine efforts into a single one, but I don’t kid myself that it will happen soon if ever. So, I looked into MovableType and WordPress for my Blog 3.0 and they are pretty much at par. Due to the fact that I know PHP and don’t know any Perl, I naturally chose WordPress. I am also looking forward to Version 2.7 of the platform, which seems really great.

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