Benjamin created a small YouTube video showing how SUP works.

Benjamin Golub demonstrates SUP

So naturally, I now have a bit of SUP-envy, since I run a WordPress blog and not my own home made cloud-based blog platform like Ben.  Which means my next step was to perform a Google search for ‘WordPress’ and ‘SUP’.  To my great surprise, a small SUP plugin has already been written!

Enter WP SUP, a small plugin that does exactly what’s necessary, which is to say add a bit of code to the RSS feed to make it SUP-enabled, and ping FriendFeed when the feed is updated.

Done and done.  Thanks Derek van Vliet!  Everybody go friend him immediately on FriendFeed.  Thanks!

WP SUP home page

Update: Feedburner seems to be stripping the SUP information out of the RSS feed header.  I’m looking in to it, along with Josh Haley and Benjamin Golub

Media RSS extensions allow one to describe different types of media, such as embedded music and video clips, directly in an RSS stream.  These extensions are technically optional, so traditional RSS parsers can safely ignore them.

Although the integration isn’t huge, it did catch my attention and I decided to install Outbrain on my blog. Outbrain is a plug-in content rating system that also provides recommendations automatically at the end of each article where it is installed. There is no special logins needed to rate an article, just click on the number of stars you think the article deserves and your rating is recorded.

The install was very quick and easy, with one odd hiccup. The hiccup came when I was instructed to paste in a unique activation code for my blog in to the plugin’s control panel.  After hitting the button to attempt activation, I eventually got a ‘timeout’ error. I tried the same steps several times with no joy. 

Eventually, however, I noticed that my blog management page on the Outbrain web site apparently decided I was activated, and allowed the plugin to operate normally. It was all very mysterious and I never actually got the confirmation through the control panel as I should.  But knock on wood, I am up and running.

As you can see in my screenshot, I rated my own article to see if the Disqus integration was working. However, it didn’t ask me to leave a comment.  (I subsequently figured out the ‘comment’ link only appears on the single post page, after the Disqus module loads.)

There are a number of great blogs that I follow that are now using the Outbrain plugin, such as Louis Gray, CenterNetworks, WinExtra, The Inquisitr, and VentureBeat.

Disqus for WordPress 2.03 released.: This release includes trackback/pingback and pagination support as we.. http://tinyurl.com/5z98kh

That was enough for me!  Disqus’ lack of PingBack support in WordPress was really something that I missed, as you can probably tell from this article’s title.  So, without wasting another minute, I followed the link to the blog entry, and downloaded the new version of the plugin, 2.03.

And, I’m happy to report that it does indeed support trackback and pingback support!  I’ve included a screenshot below.

Disqus TrackBacks

Thanks for your hard work, Disqus team!

I noticed today while browsing my river on Feedly that it ‘enhanced’ one of my del.icio.us bookmarks with commentary from Digg on the same article.  As far as I can tell, it did not find the Digg entry based on the URL, but rather on the title of the article.  Very cool!  Also, the list of other recent del.icio.us bookmarks in the column on the right.

You may have noticed that the URL in question is actually one from Diigo.  I actually have my Diigo annotations being pushed to del.icio.us automatically. Also, not in this screenshot is a link to the original Digg article at the bottom of the comment thread.

Diigo tries enable a lot of ways of using its service and related features.  You can use it exactly like del.icio.us to bookmark and tag web sites you may want to search for later.  But you can also use it to share interesting bookmarks with your friends, discuss content with like-minded folks, and also leave comments on sites that Diigo users can read later!

The feature they are testing out applies to their groups feature.  Now, if you are a member of a particular group in Diigo, you can give certain URLs a thumbs-up if you think it is especially helpful.  They are holding off on deploying this feature site-wide until they can make a determination how game-able the feature is.

Groups are similar to a web forum, but centered more around site bookmarks that are collected to provide a resource for the group.  There are groups for all sorts of things, from social media to cooking.  Some groups are extremely active, and others are simple collection points for related URLs.

This is the group thread that alerted me to the thumbs feature.  Here is another article about Diigo where thumbs are mentioned.

Caleb has added a new feature to his socialized RSS feed sharing app, Toluu today.  Now, anywhere in Toluu when you see a feed name and you hover your cursor over it, you will get a pop-up dialog with the feed name and the last 5 articles titles.

If you click on the article titles, you will be transported directly to the article in question.

This new feature will reduce the amount of context switching you will need to do as your peruse feeds in your friends list and other places.

If you haven’t registered at Toluu yet, it’s quick and easy to get started.  You can always email me (phil – at – scribkin) for an invite!

Although I forgot to grab it in the screenshot, there’s also some quick links for bold and italic within the comment block as well.

Add to this integration with Picnik, and we are seeing a bunch of new features being added fairly rapidly to this platform.

Update: Never mind, my excitement overcame my rational brain for a few minutes.  I had forgotten I had installed the Firefox addon Better Flickr from Lifehacker earlier today.

Please, resume your normal lives.  Thanks.

I believe I have a problem, perhaps genetic, that does not allow me to make sentences shorter than originally written or determine when an article has gone on for too long, resulting in things like paragraph-long sentences, long meandering digressions, people having to take a bathroom break before finishing one of my articles, and browsers crashing as they run out of memory.

That said, now I have even less space to write this article. Ok, let’s get to it.

You probably know what an anchor tag is. If you don’t, you may still be using AOL as your internets provider. An anchor tag usually the first or second HTML tag that you learn in how-to-build-a-web-page-1.0-school. It’s so ubiquitous, in fact, that I won’t even show you an example here.

So, one of the attributes you can give the anchor tag is called target. This allows you to define where the link in the anchor tag goes. This was super-awesome in 1996 when you had a two-frame web page and you wanted links in one frame to go to pages in the other frame.

Things change. Having frames in your web pages now means instant ridicule and ostracization from polite society.

So the target attribute died too, right? Not even close. Now, if you give your anchor tag a target, and the web browser can’t find a window with the target name, it just creates a new browser window with that target. Some browsers can be configured to open a new tab, instead.

Over time, then, this minor attribute that had a valid use before modern CSS methodology, has now been co-opted into quite a different use than originally intended.

“Great!” You might think. “I like having my links open in a new tab anyway.” (I know I did, for a long time.)

The only problem is, there has always been a way to force a link to open in a new window or tab, and the opposite is not true. For example, if you hold shift or alt when clicking on a link, it will open in a new tab or window. However, what do you click to force a link to open in the same window? There is no key. It can’t be done. Your choice is gone.

That is the crux of the problem. Not everyone wants the choice taken away from them.

I decided a few weeks ago to start removing all the targets from the anchor tags on my site. Steven Hodson, author of WinExtra (and now of Mashable fame), has as well. I’ll be investigating ways of perhaps having a small icon next to links to indicate that it opens in a new window, but for now, it is in your hands.

PS – Does anyone have any tips for a WordPress plugin or other utility for making a quick little “open link in new window” icon automatically in posts?

I used to be really down on the service, with its exclusivity and the huge hype that led up to its unveiling.  But recently, I’ve changed my mind. 

In fact, I’m ready to turn 180 degrees.  Why?  Read on.

This service has been around for a while now, thought it is still in beta at the time of writing.  To be honest, its focus is not really aligned with social media at all, it’s designed to go up against the likes of the new Digg, Mixx and Mozilla’s offering, Propeller.

The way it works is fairly familiar if you have used Digg or Mixx before.. to an extent.  The front page looks similar to these other voting sites, but how the articles got there is a different story.  Yahoo! actually considers several factors when deciding if a story is buzz-worthy.. how many people buzzed it, how many people are using Yahoo! to search for it or similar articles, and how many blogs are linking to it.

In a way, they have managed to fuse many of their back-end applications; yahoo membership, web search, blog search, and link density to come up with a novel way to find popular news of the day.

So why am I starting to like the service?  Several reasons:

• Speed: Only certain blogs are chosen to be sources for Y! Buzz (which I don’t necessarily agree with), but if you are reading an article on one that does have buzz support you just click a button buzz something up.  Fast and easy.
• Novelty: As I said above, Yahoo! Buzz is only similar to Digg on the surface.  But what it is doing is leveraging big Yahoo! properties to bring you what’s hot on the net.
• The Buzz Lottery: For those blogs that are chosen to be included in Y! Buzz, if one of their articles is judged as super-popular, it is seen by millions of people.  This has to be a great feeling! 

Of course, the blog has to be chosen first. Well, here’s hoping.