Technobitionist

I was going to ask the question in the title but then I saw the Gravatar Blog and realized that people are catching on to their use/need but is there enough support in the world for people to care?  I ask because I added support to this blogging platform and wondered all the while who would care.  I don’t care but that could just be me because I took a quick survey and saw that I really have no interest with them and I will tell you why. 

1. Twitter doesn’t use them and since I only use Twitter…
2. They aren’t supported in Blip.fm either.
3. They are not natively supported in many systems. Sure it is in Wordpress.com but I don’t use that service.
4. There is no real way to stop people from leaching your avatar. 

The last one bothers me the most.  Sure most people use a pretty generic avatar but what if you have a distinctive logo/brand/image it would be troubling to see someone else using it.  Is that just me?

Granted the idea is good and I would use them if there were more support but there isn’t so I am going to use Gravatars for testing and no other reason.  At least for now…

Out of absolute stupidity I had been playing with tying Skype into the blogs. I have it now so it hooks any registered authors on the site automatically to their status icons and a link that will either place a call, start a chat or add the user. So of course it all worked as planned except for one hiccup. It seems that you can disable the status icons for web display which is cool if you are a privacy freak but is annoying when you are testing code and keep seeing the status set to offline. BTW - In my testing, the Skype bot that handles testing of calls and chats also has the icon disabled. Seems weird to me but what do I know.

To find out more, read here.

Out of absolute stupidity I had been playing with tying Skype into the blogs.  I have it now so it hooks any registered authors on the site automatically to their status icons and a link that will either place a call, start a chat or add the user.  So of course it all worked as planned except for one hiccup.  It seems that you can disable the status icons for web display which is cool if you are a privacy freak but is annoying when you are testing code and keep seeing the status set to offline.  BTW - In my testing, the Skype bot that handles testing of calls and chats also has the icon disabled.  Seems weird to me but what do I know.

To find out more, read here.

While I was searching for a better way to ping the boatload of unnecessary social services I stumbled upon Ping.fm. For those people out there who haven’t tried it yet I can say that it is a cool idea that you may want to look into but if you are a programming geek like I tend to be you will probably love it. Why? Because they expose an API that lets you ping their service and scatter the information to the wind. They even have a group on Google where people post code, answer questions and have some basic wrappers to the service. I tried one of the libraries (PHPingFM) and added Ping.fm support to this blog platform and it worked so well I never bothered to look at the rest.

My previous flirtation with pinging Twitter was a nightmare because i did have to ask for login information and had to deal with people changing their passwords on Twitter and then complaining that they can’t ping. Would be hard to ping without a good password right? Seems obvious to me but…

Ping.fm uses an application key rather than a user/password to do authentication for pings. From a developers point of view I have to say that I like the idea of an application key because it helps me sleep at night knowing that I didn’t have to ask for or store user names and passwords to do a ping.

The only criticism I have is that some parts of the UI are clumsy. I spent several minutes looking for something that I had seen previously and I had to trip over it later when I had nearly given up. But that is a small complaint for such a good service so I am going to give it a thumbs up.

Cool site of the day…

There is something nifty about a bot that takes SMS text requests and gives you back answers.  I have to admit that I have no immediate need for this service and rarely use it but if you are traveling and need help finding a restaurant, store or whatever else tickles your fancy it may be useful to you.

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