Welcome to Tim Yang’s Blog

Here’s the good news: Right before Christmas, I entered into an agreement with an angel investor for Nuposts.com. We are go!

For the past month, he has been looking for developers and we’ve both been briefing them, preparing the ground and refining the project outline.

Here’s the great news: We are looking for a web developer. Someone with experience with Ruby. We already have one Ruby developer and we need a second one to get the project off quickly. If you or anyone you know wants to get involved for a couple months (or thereabouts) in a great new project that’s going to change the way the internet consumes content from blogs, email me quick!

My experiment with locating TV commercials around the internet to create blog content is working out surprisingly well. At first I thought I’d be posting a few a week. But it looks like there are so many good TVCs around the web that I can promise to post three new ones every week day. And I’ve been running it for over two months already. Of course it’s only my opinion of what is a good commercial. Feel free to submit your own, I’d love to find out more about what’s out there.

http://adblog.wordpress.com/

This news about Philly’s metropolitan wifi LAN (MOWLAN) experiment isn’t new news. They’ve been talking about it for years. I came across the story a few years ago when I was researching a new idea that has yet come into fruition.

My idea was to eradicate cellphone networks and replace cellphones with wifi phones. Phones that work using VOIP.

I was inspired by the development of MOWLANS in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where there is currently the world’s largest MOWLAN. Wifi phones would allow calls to other wifi phones to become absolutely free and calls to land-line phones or cellphones anywhere in the world to be cut as much as 50%. Wifi phones use practically the same technology to communicate by voice as you do using Skype.

Wifi phones aren’t new. Currently, they work exclusively with hotspots like the ones at Starbucks or the ones being established by more and more offices. There are two things holding back the development of wifi phones.

First, there is the lack of network coverage. But with the creation of MOWLANS, this is becoming a moot point. Already, MOWLANS have been established in small towns in the US where cabling is harder to setup and maintain than an internet connection via satellite.

Second (and this was the problem with the establishment of wifi phones in Malayia), the cellphone companies are too powerful. They blocked any talk of wifi phones and the spread of MOWLANS using threats of legal action.

So far, the Philly story hasn’t spoken a single word about wifi phones. But I’m pretty sure that VOIP companies like Vonage are already on the ball.

You know what would be a really cool name for a blog about comment spam? Yup, Iamspeechless.com (or the other four-word variation Thismakesmespeechless.com). I get dozens of these comment spams a week with just those three words and a bunch of irrelevant links.

I’m really happy that Ozh recommended Akismet.com to me. It’s a comment spam catcher for Wordpress. For the past couple months I’ve been getting more and more comment spam every day — the kind that looks like it was sent by a real person and doesn’t use any of the comment blacklisted words.

Akismet caught 26 for me in the last 24 hours. Zero false positives. If you aren’t using Akismet yet, all you need to do is sign up to Wordpress.com.

I need some help with a project that I’ve been trying to get off the blocks for several months now. It’s called Nuposts.com and it’s a public hosted RSS aggregator. Basically if you’re a user, you can login and create a new publicly-accessible RSS aggregator page based on a specific topic. Let’s say, the topic is New York City. So every blogger from New York City will be able to login and add their RSS feed to the aggregator page and the latest items from their feeds will display on the page.

Eventually as Nuposts becomes more popular, each room will become a blogger community site for the topic of the page. Each room is like a blogring and meeting place for like-minded bloggers but with all the latest news from its members. If you want the latest news from the bloggers of New York City, just go to the Nuposts.com New York City page. Or if you want the latest about knitting, go to the Nuposts page where all the knitting bloggers hang out. Each room will eventually have optional community tools like forums and chatrooms and maybe even photo storage.

Nuposts, as a public RSS aggregator, allows anyone to create new rooms, as many rooms as they want. You can create rooms as specific as Chihuahua Fanciers in Johannesburg. And you can promote your rooms with built in publicity tools with the ability to search Blogger or Technorati to find other like-minded bloggers and email them about your new Nuposts rooms.

Nuposts has two kinds of target audiences:

Blog readers who are interested in a genre of blogs. They will be able to see which of their favourite bloggers has updated and be introduced to new bloggers of the same genre. They come back again and again to the room homepages to see what’s the latest in their favourite genre.

Second, Bloggers of a genre. Sharing in a Nuposts room reinforces their association with their chosen genre and they will be able to attract new traffic from Nuposts blog readers who are interested in their genre of blogs. They visit the homepage of their chosen genre once to tell Nuposts to get their RSS feed. But they will visit the forum again and again to parlay with other bloggers who blog about the same genre.

Right now, the project needs a couple programmers in PHP (or Ruby as the case may be) to help code the interface and the modules. I started the project off with a project description of the features, the timeline, the goals to be reached at each point of the project timeline and a wireframe of the homepage of each Nuposts room. It’s a big project. Really big. And the programmer who was working on the project had to leave because of work commitments.

I’m afraid there is no money. I have no funding. It’s all volunteer work until an angel comes along. If you’d like to help out, please do email me and I’ll give you more details and access to the project wiki. Thanks!

If you tried the Problogger Clean theme for Wordpress and you had problems with it, please do leave us a comment.

We have had some comments by email about problems with IE. But we’ve had inconsistencies with replicating the problem. The comments have revolved around the sidebar being misplaced in the single post pages.

If you have had this problem, please let us know the browser and platform you are using. A screenshot would be most helpful. Thanks!

I thought this was pretty cool. But I was expecting Microsoft to be the first to introduce this feature. Immedi.at gives you a bookmarklet which you click on when the website you want has a auto-discoverable RSS feed (or click on the bookmarklet when you are on the actual feed url). But I find it inconvenient that Immedi.at doesn’t save my IM settings so I have to re-enter them every time I want to bookmark a new feed for IM alerts.

immedi.at helps you to keep track of online information as it changes. It sends you an instant message whenever any RSS or Atom feed you want to monitor changes. immedi.at works with all major IM carriers including MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Jabber, and AIM/ICQ.

http://immedi.at/

This theme is based on my own blog design. But in many ways, this theme release is better (and with neater mark-up too). It has been tested on Firefox, Safari and Windows IE. Seven things are significant and quite unique about it.

1. Monetised

   This is one of the first Wordpress themes that comes with Adsense blocks built in. The adsense blocks have been tested to have optimised positions and optimised colours.

2. Featurised

   Unlike other themes which come sans-features, this one has built-in features using a single functions file that comes with the theme folder. So it does not rely on any plugins.

3. Corporatised

   It is a bit of a serious theme with a very corporate colour scheme, not usually the kind preferred by personal bloggers.

4. Search engine optimised

   Heavy interlinking for search bots to easily find pages. And page titles are automatically customised to the post titles.

5. Promotion optimised

   There are a few features that allow you to promote yourself and allow visitors to the site to share it with others if they find it interesting.

6. Stickitised

   Ok, that’s not a real word, but it simply means particular attention was paid to the internal navigation. Links to other posts are placed prominently and throughout all the blog pages to invite visitors to click on them.

7. Prioritised

   The positions of the sections, colours and font sizes have been prioritised to the immediate communication needs of the first time visitor. The theme is space sensitive and is thus very content focused, keeping much of the important details at the top or near the top of the fold.

And those are also the reasons why the theme is called Problogger Clean. If you choose to use this theme, please do email me or leave a comment about it on the support forum. We’d really like to see how you use it so that we can get more ideas on improving themes.

Proceed to download Problogger Clean or view the documentation.

Read more…

I just received an email telling me that Openomy.com has launched. Openonomy gives its users the ability to store files of up to 1 gig total on its servers. (There’s no copyright policy on the site that I found so I assume it can be used to store all kinds of video and audio files.) You can add tags to them to describe each file.

But Openonomy isn’t just a file system with tags. If it was, it would just serve as your own private online file catalog. Openonomy also allows its Ruby-savvy users to write applications to manipulate and present the tag data from your file system as well as the file systems of other users. It’s kind of like Ning.com in that sense, but only with the ability to manipulate file tag data.