Nordaaker

ma.gnolia goes open source

2008-08-22T18:29:31Z

Thanks to Mr Messina for pointing out that ma.gnolia is going open source. This is a very interesting development for the project, and one that I've toyed with several times for our hosted projects as well. I do have some problems with finding a good business model for it (We still need to pay rent), but I'm excited to see ma.gnolia going down the open source road.

Of course, slashdot did this way back, and it didn't seem to hurt their business. Rather, it spawned a lot of slashcode based speciality sites, like use.perl.org, but it did not cause slashcode code quality to be hugely improved either. It will be interesting to see how it will turn out for ma.gnolia, and if it will work differently for bookmarking sites.

Anyhow, one imediate effect will be me moving over from del.icio.us to ma.gnolia as my main social bookmarking site. I originally started using delicious partly because it was made by an indie perl developer. Now that it has been bought by Yahoo, been rewritten in php, and the original developer has left Yahoo, I don't have that motivation anymore, and besides I've been a bit annoyed with the total lack of innovation in recent years.

The rewrite didn't really bring much of interest to the table either, so I'm jumping ship, and in the future you can find my social bookmarks at http://ma.gnolia.com/people/marcusramberg

Slides from YAPC 2008 talks

2008-08-15T21:03:55Z

I recently attended Yet Another Perl Conference Europe 2008 in Copenhagen, and I held two talks there, so I figured it would be nice to make the slides available. If you're interested, here's "Web Services with OAuth" and "Building Catalyst apps on the Amazon Web Service platform" in PDF format.

Suggest new version was broken, back now

2008-08-05T17:14:24Z

I managed to break 'suggest new version' while syncing iusethis with the iphone codebase. Sorry about that. It's back now. If you see other new weirdness, please report it to support@iusethis.com

New trust system to counter spammers.

2008-08-04T11:01:23Z

iusethis has been plagued with app spammers lately, people who register bogus apps in order to gain traffic/page rank for their craptacolous schemes, or register a bunch of useless windows apps. So far, we've just deleted these apps as soon as they have been discovered, but unfortunately, it still ends up in the new apps rss feed for some of our users, and lately it has become so frequent that we've decided we have to do something.

So, from today we introduce the concept of trusted iusethis users. That means if you've registered a valid app, or added a good review to an app, we flag your user as trusted, so your releases and new apps will show up directly in the feeds. Otherwise, they will be held pending moderation from one of our admins.

Since the user filter was mostly added to counter spam apps appearing on the front page, we're also changing the default setting to show all trusted apps on the frontpage. You can still chose to browse at another usage level if you prefer.

Press release: iusethis Adds Support for iPhone Apps

2008-08-01T16:15:45Z

The popular software tracking website, iusethis, has expanded its reach to iPhone users today. Members can now submit, browse and vote up iPhone applications.

iusethis has been serving the Macintosh community for over two years, and has planted its flag as the most innovative and community-centered software tracking site on the web. The website allows software users to mark applications they use, contributing to the application's "iusethis" score, similar to social news site digg.com.

The website's founders have been firm believers and fans of the iPhone, and were toying with the idea of an iPhone app section, even before the App Store was announced.

"We were actually thinking about doing this earlier for "jail-broken" apps, but once Apple stepped in with the App Store, an iPhone section on iusethis became a no brainer." says co-founder Arne Fismen.

Due to its use of modern technology, iusethis is in a position where it can quickly develop new features, and is the first major software directory to support Apple iPhone. A democratic web application like iusethis gives a better overview of popular applications, as well as a better opportunity to see trends.

iPhone applications are available on iusethis at http://iphone.iusethis.com.

PRESS CONTACT: Arne Fismen arne@iusethis.com

Perl on App Engine

2008-07-23T21:20:24Z

Brad Fitzpatrick has written on his LiveJournal about the possibility of Perl on App Engine. Seems they need a hardened Perl interpreter in order to support it. It would be awesome if this really happened.

Using MojoMojo as a personal wiki online

2008-07-17T09:32:23Z

Johannes Plunien has been helping us polish MojoMojo, our open source Wikistyle CMS tool. His motivation was to replace his private MediaWiki installation, and to that end, he's written a concise howto for setting up a private MojoMojo installation: MojoMojo - make it private.

planned downtime for iusethis.com

2008-07-16T13:13:34Z

We're going to have some planned downtime for iusethis at around 00.00 GMT tonight to perform a system upgrade on our database server. We'll try to be as quick as possible, thank you for your patience :)

update the downtime was moved to early august.

One thing I hate about Flickr

2008-07-11T22:11:49Z

this is tiny on my screen. should look more like this.

Summer Quizz: Which eminent iusethis user is this?

2008-07-10T16:31:16Z

Here's the facebook profile app for a well known person in the mac community.

First one to get the correct answer gets an iusethis tshirt. Leave the answer as a comment below.

update The correct answer was given by Frédéric Blanc. Look in the comments if you want the spoiler :)

New versions of your apps returns

2008-07-10T15:02:50Z

One of the features we decided to re-implement when widening the site earlier this summer was "New versions of your apps". This feature has been pretty obscure until now, under a separate tab in the menu. Now it appears as a sidebar view with the icons of your apps. To see the name, hover over it with the mouse. If you click the More link, you come to a fullscreen view, which also supports subscription via RSS.

Here's a shot of the sidebar from my profile:

As you can see, iTunes 7.7 was just released to support Apple's new app store. Expect to see something more from us on that very soon :)

Shared hosting will be going away (Yay :)

2008-07-10T09:47:59Z

Club Tropo wrote a great analyses about why Shared hosting is doomed. Personally I belive this to be very true, and with the low cost of virtual service hosting, I see little reason for people to keep using suboptimal shared hosting. However, they are saying shared hosting does not scale for the providers either in the long run, and they have great graphs to back it up :

iusethis spotted on twitter.

2008-07-10T09:35:31Z

Seems someone has set up an iusethis twitter account that tweets from iusethis. Might be a nice way to follow new apps on the site. I'm not so happy about how the tweets are formatted tho. Would there be interest in an official iusethis twitter user? If so, what would you want it to tweet?

Get satisfaction from Nordaaker and iusethis

2008-07-06T11:59:24Z

Get Satisfaction is a direct connection between people and companies that fosters problem-solving, promotes sharing, and builds up relationships. This is a great way to be open about how you are running your business, which is open to Arne and I, so we've set up a getsatisfaction account for nordaaker and our products here.

We have also added the recent list to the iusethis contact page as a first step, and we are considering adding the Get Satisfaction Help Center as well. I find this to be a great use of OAuth, a protocol that has been of interest to me lately.

While I was updating the about pages, I also added a couple of new ones; The tools page is a list of stuff that people have built against our apis and feeds. I've probably forgot some, so feel free to remind me, and I'll get your stuff added to the list asap. I've also added a small info page for icrawlthis, our friendly neighborhood spider.

Vaxy.org interviews interviews creator of The Big Picture.

2008-06-30T11:47:10Z

Boston Globe's The Big Picture has been getting a lot of attention online lately for their uncompromising focus on presenting interesting pictures, and untraditional format. I really like this interview with Alan Taylor, the creator of the blog.

We've been working hard on finding a good way to present photo diaries on the net with phiary.com for the last year, and this post was a great inspiration. I feel our format is really good for portrait style pictures, but we do have something to learn from Alan on presenting landscape-mode pictures. We're in total agreement about the content tho

you can find some mind-blowing images there, but I always felt like it lacked context, depth, story.

That's absolutely the direction I see for great photo blogs in the near future.