Who's she?—new bio on ziki)
Mebeam, a video commenting system for bloggers, just was released to a limited number of beta testers. The system is based on Adobe Flash and is easily embedded using a few lines of HTML object code.
Please feel free to leave a comment here to let Ashod Apakian, the very talented developer of Mebeam, know what you think of his new service.
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Much to my surprise, it turns out that by embedding a single piece of Javascript anyone can now include a live-updated Digg button on their blog or website. This is all the code you need:
<script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js"
type="text/javascript"></script>
Include the code snippet into your blog and you'll see the familiar Digg icon, including the number of current Diggs, right next to the content on your page. Full customization details are available on the Digg Tools page. Before I found out about this Digg tool, I used Bitty browser to achieve the same result. Read on to learn how useful Bitty is when combined with anchored urls.
A couple of weeks ago my CNET rant was promoted on Digg for a couple of hours, mostly thanks to the impression I seem to have made on one particular digger named chrisek (have I thanked you enough?) It was really fun to see the counter go up each time I refreshed the page. One particular extension for Firefox by Jaap Haitsma, called Reload Every, which lets you set a refresh frequency for Firefox tabs, came in very handy in this situation. Still, keeping the news to myself didn't seem the right thing to do, so I did some quick thinking.
It made sense to me to update my blog post and see if I could boost its popularity on Digg even more. I couldn't find a suitable solution on the steadily growing TypePad Widget Gallery and I had explored the Digg Tools page for clues months ago already without much success, so I figured there was no way I could show the live Digg button unless I'd be prepared to migrate my entire blog just to be able to use the Digg plugin for WordPress.
I did some quick thinking and found a pretty acceptable solution by using "the browser in a browser" Bitty, displaying just the top-left part of the page:
I was reasonably satisfied with this outcome, but still wanted the image to be cleaner, smaller. Then I wrote to Scott Matthews, the Bitty developer, and asked if he could think of some way to have the Bitty scroll down the page, so that just only the Digg button would be visible inside the Bitty view port. Scott replied almost instantly: "Have you considered using one of the # anchor tags?"
I looked at the source of the Digg page for my blog post, discovered that there was an anchor id named "header-secondary", and added the id as an #anchor to the url used in the Bitty code. This was the result:
I promise I won't overdo it with these Digg buttons. I'll only display one if someone else diggs any of my posts. The discovery about Bitty is quite cool I think, especially when you have control over the HTML source of the page that you are displaying, or when there are useful anchors available already.
Here's my first go at CleverShots, an image ticker that I created by letting several tools work together. I start out by capturing screenshots throughout the day. SnagIt has recently made this a lot easier by providing the Flickr Output Accessory (direct download). This accessory facilitates uploading screenshots to Flickr. You can customize details such as the title, description and tags for the snapshot. For the purpose of showing off this ticker I put all screenshots in a Flickr set that I named CleverShots. This makes it easier to retrieve just the snapshots that I want to process further. The next step is to sign up for a service such as slide.com, which allows you to display a series of images in varous styles and themes.
Temp holder for Flash object
