Archive for February, 2006

New FeedBlendr Features

Saturday, February 18th, 2006

Well, being an overcast, kinda dull Saturday here in San Francisco, and being a little whacked out on cough medicine as I am, I decided it was a perfect time to roll out a few features that either people had asked for, or just that I had wanted to include. Here’s what’s just gone live:

  • Author elements of the output feeds contain the original author information from the source feed, and I make an extra effort to find an author’s name regardless of where it was stored in that feed.
  • The source feed details are now appended to the actual content of the post. This is intended to make it more prominent, and to make sure that it doesn’t overwrite author information in the case where there are multiple unique authors per blog.
  • I’m now storing the title of feeds, so that I can start building a public index of feeds involved in FeedBlendr’s engine (coming soon). I’m also using this in the source attribution process.
  • I’m removing (or at least attempting to remove) duplicate entries from blends now. As an example, if you blend 2 similar tags on Flickr, you should now only ever see each image once, even if it would normally appear under each different tag.
  • Updated the subscribe page to include information about the individual feeds included in a blend.

I have a few more features coming before I start serious work on the next one of my feed manipulation tools, but it shouldn’t be too far off now. Coming up soon are:

  • HTML (probably through JavaScript) output of a blended feed.
  • Public index of blends/feeds in the FeedBlendr index so you can find interesting feeds to check out.

Design Theft

Thursday, February 16th, 2006

Wow – that didn’t take long. The wonderful people over at RollaBlog.com appear to have liked the design that Ray did for this site so much that they stole it outright and changed a few colors before using it on their own site. Wonderful. Here’s the message I sent to them through their contact form, I hope they read it;

Hi, just wondering what you were hoping to achieve by completely ripping off the design of my website, which was created by my good friend Ray Hernandez. I mean you changed the colors a little and all, but seriously – give me a break.

You didn’t even bother changing any of the id or class names in the CSS for god’s sake, there’s still a “blendr” id in there.

Hope you feel great about stealing someone else’s hard work without any attribution or even permission.

Get a life.

Beau

A quick whois says that the domain ‘rollablog.com’ (which, incidentally, appears to be connected to another very dodgy-looking domain ‘hotblog.com.au’) is registered as follows;

Registrant:
Daniel Nerezov
4/38 Brae st. Bronte
Sydney, New South Wales 2024
Australia

Registered through: GoDaddy.com
Domain Name: ROLLABLOG.COM
Created on: 12-Feb-06
Expires on: 13-Feb-07
Last Updated on: 14-Feb-06

Administrative Contact:
Nerezov, DanielĀ  sales@hotblog.com.au
4/38 Brae st. Bronte
Sydney, New South Wales 2024
Australia
93865976

Technical Contact:
Nerezov, DanielĀ  sales@hotblog.com.au
4/38 Brae st. Bronte
Sydney, New South Wales 2024
Australia
93865976

Domain servers in listed order:
NS99.HOSTGATOR.COM
NS100.HOSTGATOR.COM