A mention from evhead... and the blogchatter experiment...

Two interesting recent referrals to mod_pubsub I'm forwarding to the list to keep everyone in the loop...

First, a mention from evhead -- thanks, Ev!:

    http://www.evhead.com/archives/2003_05_01_archive_default.asp#105284982405498452

Quoting Evan: "Scott Andrew's doing an interesting thing with the open source version of KnowNow's auto-updates-to-the-browser event router thingy (Scott has a good overview of how it works).  I built something using KnowNow's stuff a couple years ago. It was long before it was open source (and probably less mature). It was a project to demo their technology that worked with Blogger and blog updates. I didn't finish it, because the project got canned, unfortunately. But what was there was pretty neat—and crack-like addictive. I've been wanting to dig into it again since they open sourced. So much fun stuff to build, so little time."

I think that's our mantra: so much fun stuff to build, so little time.  I agree with Ev that the real-time streaming "recently updated blogs" application was very addictive.  Which brings us to Scott's blogchatter experiment (thanks Scott and Joyce!):

    http://www.scottandrew.com/main/2003_05#a000658

This is such a cool application!  Quoting Scott:

"We're testing out a real-time weblog interface, and you're invited to play!

"UPDATE: the client app below seems to be severely broken in Safari. I'm trying to find a fix but I know very little about Safari's JS engine. MacIE 5.2 for OS X seems to work fine.

"The interface is a URL that accepts a weblogs.com-compatible XML-RPC ping. If you're using Movable Type as your weblog tool, you already have the ability to send this ping. This ping is transformed into an event and published to a topic at mod-pubsub.org.

"The box below is subscribed to the same topic, and displays the incoming weblog updates the moment they are received. The result should be a real-time event stream of weblog updates, similar to the data provided by weblogs.com, without polling or a static data format.

"To ping the interface from Movable Type, follow these steps (p.s. I have no idea if there's an easy way to do this from other blogging tools, so please drop me a note if you have tips):

1. log in to MT and click Manage Blog for the blog you want to publish 
2. choose Blog Config 
3. go to Preferences 
4. scroll down to the section labeled "Publicity/Remote Interfaces/TrackBack." 
5. In the text box labeled "Others", add the following URL: 
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php

"Now save your changes. The next time you post to your weblog, the ping notification should happen automatically. You can see the incoming pings in real-time here. There is also an ugly-but-Netscape 4.x-friendly display. The display starts out showing the last 10 pings made in the last half-hour, then adds new pings to list as they arrive.

"This is a beta web service, primarily for testing. The plan is to allow people to ping the server indefinitely and see what happens. In the best case, we'll build apps that do interesting things with the real-time data and perhaps someday recreate it as a standalone service for stuff like real-time blogrolls.

"In the worst case, it will buckle under the traffic and die in a twitching heap, and we'll at least be able to say it was a grand experiment."

A grand experiment, indeed.  It's fun watching the panel update with new activity.  I could get very addicted to this very quickly; reminds me of Jeff Barr's (and Tommy's) RSS experiments: so many interesting things to click on, so little time.


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http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/presence1/



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