The Download Munkey : Download This, Download That :)

Currently, I’m trying out coComment (currently in beta) as a one-stop service to keep track of my own comments on blogs all over the .NET. Actually it works for any site which you can comment on e.g Flickr, Digg, Wordpress and Blogger blogs and more.

I have seen Wordpress blogs with a nice Subscribe to Comments plugin which Blogger sorely needs - it’s a pain to keep bookmarks every single post on a Blogger blog which you commented just to keep track of comments. Hopefully, I can get rid of that bookmarking madness with coComment

Features
With CoComment, I can see at a glance which posts have followup comments. I’m using Opera so I have to install a bookmarklet and click on it everytime before I post a comment on any blog that I want to track. After clicking on the bookmarklet, I click the Submit button as usual to send the comment to both coComment and the actual blog. Firefox users have it easier - installing a Firefox extension is all that is needed. Read more on how to use coComment to track your conversations here.

The main Conversations page

To keep track of conversations, login into coComment and look for any conversations marked in bold - they’re the ones with new comments. Click on the conversation to view the new comments or go to that particular post. Very convenient right?

There are also widgets to show the top coComment commenters for your blog as well as the comments you left on others’ blogs (see below), although I’m not sure what’s the value of the latter for your visitors

Issues
Sometimes, conversations with newer comments aren’t marked in bold (usually the Blogger ones, Wordpress blogs work very well) At least I can see the time of the last comment and roughly figure out whether there was a new comment.

Which brings me to one more issue : it would be much better if the Last Commented column could show something like 26 hours or 32 hours instead of a generic Yesterday. For example if I check coComment this morning (20 Jun) the Last Commented column will show Yesterday when someone happens to leave a followup comment yesterday (19 Jun) to a conversation I commented on that same day (19 Jun). I can’t tell whether it’s updated if the conversation doesn’t get marked in bold and time on the Last Commented column is so vague.

Then again, Opera is not officially supported so I’ll use it for another two weeks or so and see how everything goes

If you comment on a lot of blogs frequently, do try out CoComment. It’s free to use anyway so there’s no harm trying.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Blogger Backup Utility

I used to keep backups of entries of this blog in text files until I found this nifty little freeware by Greg Duncan on CodePlex. For Blogger users only!

The obligatory screenshot which is too small to be of any use

It’s really simple to use. You enter your Blogger ID and password, select the blog you wish to backup, enter a backup directory and click Backup Posts to save your posts (and optionally, comments) to XML files on your own computer.

There are options to overwrite existing backups as well as to denote which posts are to be backed up by specifying a date range. Although the caption reads “Only new posts since …” when you specify a date range, the software actually uses the modifcation date and not creation date of your posts when deciding whether to back up a particular post.

Before you start saying silly things like “It’s too good to be true!”, please note the following issues.

• It currently only saves your posts in XML files (other formats like HTML and PDF are pending) which means it will take relatively longer as compared to plaintext files in the event that you want to actually do something with your backups. At least all the relevant metadata like author, creation date, modification date, labels are available in the XML files.
• It requires the .NET Framework. No .NET Framework means no Blogger Backup Utility.
• Backup XML files are prepended with the modification date of each post which makes it impossible to sort and find the backup for a certain post by title without using searches. Easy to find posts chronologically though.
• You still have to manually back up your images. This is not exactly an limitation of thie software because this software was not written to be a full-fledged blog backup solution but it’s something to keep in mind.

Download Blogger Backup Utility from CodePlex.

In my previous post on the pros and cons of different methods of finding stuff on the .NET, I wrote that the lack of tagging for communities (blogs and/or websites in MyBlogLog-speak) in MyBlogLog made searching for sites of interest a major hit-and-miss affair

Not anymore

Now that the much-needed tagging has been implemented for members and communities, it should make finding other users and communities with similiar interests much easier.

It should take a while for existing members to start tagging their communities before tags becomes a viable way of finding relevant sites. Or else you can help by tagging the communities of your friends with relevant tags Yup, you can not only tag your own communities but communities belonging to others too. Don’t worry, they can always delete your tag if they don’t like it ;p

One problem I can foresee is unscrupulous users intentionally using irrelevant but popular tags for their sites to appear in the search results and mislead visitors

Read more about the new tagging feature from this post @ the official MyBlogLog blog.

If you have a community listed on MyBlogLog, do remember to tag them for increased visibility within MyBlogLog (and possibly higher traffic to your blog). For me, it simply means more sites to find and read. Yay!

I love digging for interesting stuff on the .NET (Actually I spend more time digging up stuff than reading or writing about them nowadays :p)

Below is a collection of my thoughts on the various methods I use to find interesting sites (not necessarily blogs) on the .NET. The entire article is intended to be more of an personal opinion than a comprehensive analysis so there may be some wrong assumptions and mistakes here and there. You’ve been warned

MyBlogLog
The social networking/blogging site known as MyBlogLog is a pretty good way to find interesting blogs - but only if you take the time to sift through the tons of blogs registered there (known as communities at MyBlogLog) - I don’t like to read purely money-making blogs and there seems to be a LOT of these blogs in MyBlogLog

For each user, you can view the blogs that he/she authors (under Sites and Blogs I Author) as well as the blogs that he/she is interested in (My Communities). The My Communities is usually a good way to find blogs related to the content of the blogs that a MyBlogLog user authors (sometimes)

However I find the navigation on Mybloglog quite tedious, requiring 2 clicks to view a single blog - click to view an user profile, look through his/her communities and click again to view the actual actual blogs. The same thing happens when I want to visit the blogs in the communities that I joined, click once to view the community before clicking again to view the actual blog. Arrrggh!

The community search feature works by searching the titles of the blogs - there’s no tagging so it’s pretty much a hit-and-miss affair.

My preferred method is to randomly click on avatars that stand out from the crowd and then cross my fingers :p Normally I can find one related to my interests per 10 to 15 users If I find one that that I like, I can view their My Communities section and hopefully find even more blogs on similiar topics.

You can see My Communities @ here. As you can see, there isn’t a good way to organize your communities

Digg
Digg is also another good source of links to some pretty cool stuff on the .NET but only IF you have the time to patiently look through the multiple duplicates of the same news items as well the enormous quantity of newly dugg content in Upcoming Stories per day. The short blurb accompanying each dugg entry allows you to quickly scan though the entries though.

Personally I have given up on monitoring the upcoming stories and use the search feature instead (which is pretty good but slow at times).

My diggs here (usually from the Gaming section). As you can see I haven’t been digging for a long time

Technorati
Technorati boasts the world’s biggest database of blogs but I haven’t had any success with finding stuff via its search engine - maybe my keywords are too generic. I tend to look for more obscure stuff so the top searches and tags are useless for me.

The method I use is to search for a blog that you actually read before and browse through the other blogs that link to that particular blog, to find related blogs. the favourites feature is a nifty feature but due to the small minority of bloggers who actually keep track of their favourites in their Technorati profile, it’s not that useful in real life.

Meta-Blogs e.g Ping.sg
Meta-blogs specific to your country or city are also an excellent source for finding bloggers with similiar interests. As meta-blogs cater to bloggers of a specific locality, there’s the added bonus of finding interesting local stuff which is sometimes pretty hard to find via search engines on the .NET.

I regularly visit Ping.sg, which is a meta-blog for err … SG blogs. The community is still relatively small enough (but growing rapidly) so that I can preview every single post submitted to ping.sg without spending too much time. I estimate the most posts submitted to ping.sg per day is around 150 which takes me maybe 20 minutes to check the latest posts before I start working every morning.

del.ici.ous & Stumbleupon
There’re also social bookmarking sites like del.ici.ous which I don’t use much because of the searching feature - it isn’t that useful because users can name and tag their bookmarks with whatever tags they feel like using which makes searching quite tricky.

There’s also the newer social bookmarking site Stumbleupon where bookmarked sites can have reviews which makes searching much easier than del.ici.ous. Unfortunately their Stumble feature which randomly redirects you to sites of your interest doesn’t support my Opera browser so I haven’t been visiting Stumbleupon that regularly

Blogger
Sometimes, clicking the prev and next buttons on the Blogger Navbar for Blogger users helps too..

For those who need a recent posts widget like the one on the right for their blog (Blogger only), you can go to Hoctro’s Place to add one to your own blog.

However, this recent posts widget has its limitations. Firstly it’s limited to a maximum of 25 posts because it processes its data from the Atom feed for the blog. This Atom feed is fixed at 25 posts for Blogger and there doesn’t seem to be a way to change the maximum number of posts for the Atom feed in Blogger.

Currently, the widget determines the most recent posts by last updated date and not post date. I haven’t checked whether that is changeable in the widget code or it’s due to limitations of the Atom Feed.

Something else to note when you add the widget code to your Blogger template. You need to add the code between tags (e.g in the sidebar) and not between tags as in the post. I think Hoctro did a typo there.

Ok, the rest of this post is about why I included this widget in this blog. You can start reading other posts now

I use the Atom feed for this blog to Google Sitemaps to index it for Google Search. As I update the blog, users searching for content in older posts get directed by Google Search to the post’s label instead. Since I can’t upload a sitemap to this blog for Google Sitemaps, I hope this Recent Posts widget is the best way to help any lost readers coming via Google Search to find what they’re looking for. One more reason to get a custom domain for a blog