Tuesday, August 24, 2010
So the only thing now missing with my new Thingamablog Business Blog [this one] is the capability to allow discussion on posts. For me, I am not overly concerned in that most of the comments I receive on my other blogs are either nonconstructive or spam.
Of course, there are any number of offsite commenting systems-- bloggers can use to facilitate discussion on posts and even I have noticed at least one or two Thingamablog bloggers using one of these commenting services.
However, because I rarely use offsite services, including Flickr, YouTube, and other popular services which allow users to store media resources offsite, I looked for other options with regard to Thingamablog commenting.
What did I came up with? I could easily install a MySQL comments database with an integrated CAPTCHA function to collect comments on each post. This would be so simple-- it would be a breeze to setup. The only requirement? You would need MySQL [with at least one database available]and PHP support. A little more complicated-- would be setting up the comment delete function for the blog owner-- however should not be such a big deal.
I am not a fan of blog comments-- so I am not going to set this up for my blog-- just now. The other problem, I have? qisoftware.com- is overtaxed now-- with both installations of my personal blog and community forums and so setting up another database now-- is not a good idea for me.
That said, I would love to set it up for someone else.
I am a big fan of the Thingamablog Blogging platform. I have solved a lot of the problems insofar as feature offerings-- and believe that if one requires a non-resource intensive blogging platform [uses HTML files] and has a PC or Mac they can install the Thingamablog software [also requires Java-- easily installed from Sun]-- it is one of the best choices. You will of course also need a online site/domain to FTP your HTML and image files to. Even a .NET site can be used with Thingamablog.
If a .NET site were hosting you Thingamablog blog and you wanted to integrate comments on your site-- you would need ASP and SQL Server to setup the blog commenting system. Here again should be an easy thing to setup. And of course you can always -- use one of the many offsite commenting platforms.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
The Thingamablog blogging platform-- in my opinion offers interesting challenges. WordPress spoils, because of the number of plugins available-- however hacks or plugins for Thingamablog are not as readily available.
One problem I have meaning to look into? The absence of a Previous Post navigation tool for the main page of this blog. Other Thingamablog template pages, i.e., category, time archive pages or individual post pages-- can be set up to use something similar to the following as provided by the the Thingamablog Help file:
This afternoon, after a bit of JavaScript tweaking-- found a solution. It is relatively straight forward- I request the latest posts twice-- however with the second request-- add one to the limit. This allows me to write the link for the 7th post as the "Previous Post" [anchor text] and skip any writes for the 6 most recent-- which have already been written in full to the HTML file. Six-- the upper limit-- of the number of posts written to the page-- author settable.
You can check the code for this "hack" by reviewing source on the main page of this blog or contact me for more details.
See the "« Previous Post" link on the lower main page of this blog [just under the other posts] to see how it works.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Peerfly recently added RSS/XML feeds to their offerings, enabling publishers who use the service-- a means to generate automated ads on web sites and pages.
Currently, images are unavailable however can easily be determined manually-- if one wishes to use them with the feed data. I am told this feature is in the works.
I integrated a demonstration Peerfly interface on my personal blog, Q's Wire. One ad is randomly selected from the 10 most popular ads and then written as an "offer" at the bottom of the first post on the page or the only post if only a single post is being reviewed.
Are you looking to integrate Peerfly automated ads on your sites? QiSoftware can help-- contact.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
My first programming language was Basic. When I began using C in the late eighties-- I believe, I found the most important language that I would need. I have used others since learning C-- however, I consider C to be the most important.
The internet has made it so easy to gather usage statistics for almost anything. One of my favorite tools is Google Trends. That said- ambiguity often makes it difficult to get a good read-- especially when trying to gather stats for today's programming languages, i.e., Java, Ruby on Rails.
So when I happened on tiobe.com which maintains popularity stats for programming languages-- I was quite pleased and thought I would share-- see this page.
Partial table showing current programming language trends:
Freelancer.com project listings another good resource for statistics on software development languages and usage.
