Perhaps I was wrong about the RSS widget being the culprit. My feed fouled up again, this time returning the HTML for the front page of my blog. My suspicions are now aimed at WP SuperCache. Disabling that seems to have fixed the issue.
Not sure why but I had a few problems with my RSS feed today since upgrading to WordPress 2.7. On inspection (Feed Validator) it seemed that the RSS feed being returned from my main Atom link was returning the feed of my Pownce messages. Very strange. Seems like an odd bug but the quick fix was to delete the RSS widget that displays my Pownce messages in my blog sidebar. If you’re having similar problems and use the RSS widget you might want to try doing the same. Go to select widgets from Appearance in the Dashboard side menu and click on any RSS Widgets you have and click Remove. Be warned I don’t think this can be undone, it suited me as my Pownce feed is pretty much useless now Pownce is closing down.
UPDATE: Don’t forget to clear your cache after doing this.
UPDATE 2: Perhaps it’s the cache and not the RSS widget after all.
Daniel just Pownced a link to Wordle, a very slick application for generating clouds of words from a bunch of text where the most frequent words are displayed the largest. It has a nice interface for customizing the appearance of the resulting cloud with a good range of fonts and preset color schemes to tweak. Also it’s a Java Applet which actually features smooth animation and decent graphic design / typography. Definitely a candidate for the Cool Applets blog.
I know, I know! Powncified hasn’t been working for some time now. In fact it’s been out of action for over two weeks. My excuse is that with the JavaOne trip and the big push for the upcoming Altio 5.2 release I’ve been too busy to get things sorted. My excuse for not putting up a post to explain this and acknowledge the issue doesn’t exist. I don’t have one. Sorry.
A while back David asked me which service I preferred for aggregating my social feeds, FriendFeed or Socialthing. Both services aim to provide different ways to manage, consume and post to the different streams of information we receive and push to and from Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, RSS et al. every day. At the time I stated a preference for FriendFeed but I figured that might change as Socialthing supported new feeds and services. And it has. The addition of Pownce was quite key and it has become such a useful tool to me that I now run it in its own Prism window rather than a tab in Firefox, Google Reader being the only other web application sharing that honour.
I’ve known about this for sometime, but Ariel just announced on the Pownce blog that they have chosen the Pownce+SXSW site I announced yesterday as the one they’ll be promoting at SXSW this weekend.
A couple of weeks ago Leah and Ariel from Pownce suggested that someone build an app that shows a subset of the Pownce public feed with just the notes that contain the string “sxsw” for the upcoming SXSW Interactive festival. I teamed up with Rémi Toffoli who produced a nice flex app that used the stream that I created with the help of Chris and Dan.
Just a little update about Powncified. It’s been going quite well, not required too much maintenance and received a little attention courtesy of a pownce note from Daniel Burka. Thanks Daniel. It also briefly featured on the video podcast Epic-Fu presented by the lovely Zadi Diaz. You can add Powncified as a friend on Pownce to receive (almost) daily updates of what’s hot on Pownce. They are not as regular as I’d like as sometimes real life gets in the way and until the Pownce API provides a method for posting notes automatically I’ll be doing them by hand.
The post count on this blog has been dwindling somewhat recently. Spare time has been taken up working on a new project, Powncified which has been visible in the the side bar for a while. Powncified is a fan project of Pownce.com that uses the site’s API to find the most popular links posted by Pownce users in the last 24 hours. The top 10 links are displayed in order of the number of notes or “Pownces” that reference them. The total number of recipients, users that received any of the notes, is used as a tiebreaker. The application aims to provide insight into what links people actually value enough to share with their friends rather than just mark their appreciation of on social bookmarking sites. I discovered a similar site, PownceMeme by Bryan Pearson, that seemed to have a similar aim although I’m not sure of the algorithm applied there. It doesn’t seem to be based on any kind of “Pownce count” like Powncified. The other impetus of the project was to satisfy my own curiosity and once I started I had to follow it through.
The recipients tiebreaker is necessary as the numbers on the site aren’t that impressive at the moment. At the time of writing, the top link only had 3 Pownces in common. I’m hoping that, as the Pownce network grows, so will the correlation between the links people are posting. However looking at the last 6 months from Alexa this might not happen. The recent spike was likely caused by the extra publicity generated when the site opened up and left private beta on the 21st. However the traffic is already dropping. In any event the list will still hopefully serve as a resource of interesting links or at least satisfy those Pownce users with similar curiosities to my own.
I do intend to add a few additional features in the future. Certainly the ability to view the notes that refer to each link in another page. Also a similar feature that exists at Pownce and also PownceMeme whereby recognizable media such as YouTube videos and Flickr images are automatically embedded into the page. There are a few issues with the CSS layout I’d like to deal with as well. The page doesn’t resize so well and the background images of each list item would be better implemented with some kind of Sliding Door technique so that they resize to fit their content.
The site now features a hack of the Wordpress default ‘Kubrick‘ theme for now. It is bastardized to include a cleaned up version of the logo I designed yesterday in the header. That’s pretty much the only alteration made so far but the intention is to do much more in the future. The header could perhaps stretch over the whole page and sit over a two or three column layout. An interesting addition would be a plugin for Pownce to sit in the sidebar.