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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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