Toluu : Development on a Shoestring

Development on a Shoestring

Localising FeedDemon 3 for AustraliaApril 5

Nick Bradbury has just released the latest beta version of his great RSS reader FeedDemon. With the new update comes a bunch of new items & so that means that my old localisation file is now out of date.

Since I got to play with a pre-release version (thanks Nick!) I had a chance to update the language file that comes with version 3 to replace Synchronize with Synchronise, Color with Colour and so on. So if you like your colourful language, you can grab the file here after downloading FeedDemon. To install the file either click on the link to the language file while browsing in FeedDemon, or download the file & copy it to C:Program FilesFeedDemonDatalang (Assuming you’ve installed FeedDemon there) and then double-click on the file.

One thing

Twitter newspaper style for FeedDemonApril 1

As Amit Agarwal pointed out in his (very detailed) post, the new FeedDemon is a great Twitter client, with a whole bunch of features to make using Twitter easier.

One thing that a lot of people don’t know is that FeedDemon’s newspaper layout is very customisable, I while I use the Surfer theme usually, I found that for Twitter feeds it was very annoying. Showing the title is useless because the body of the post is the title, also, the large spacing around each post just used up a lot of space and meant I had to keep scrolling a lot to read the feed. Also, the thumbnails view is pretty useless for a Twitter feed, seeing as it’s just full of people’s profile pictures

So I took the surfer style & I’ve customised it for a Twitter feed (download here). FeedDemon is great in that it lets you set a custom newspaper style for particular feeds (Feed Properties -> Advanced). The new Twitter style removes the thumbnails, removes the post title unless you’re in headline

Getting FriendFeed real-time in your Firefox sidebarOctober 16 2008

FriendFeed has released a real-time page that auto-scrolls all updates from your subscriptions. There’s a mini window option that allows you to see it in a separate window, but I’ve found the best way to view it is as a sidebar in Firefox.

To get this you need to bookmark the mini-window page, so open the mini window, right click on the page and select ‘Bookmark this page’. Then right-click on the bookmark, select ‘Properties’ and check the ‘Load this bookmark in the sidebar’ check box & click ‘Save Changes’.

Now when you select this bookmark, the real time view will open in your sidebar - awesome!.

PropertyPortalWatch.com is down, the day it appears in the SMH MySmallBusiness sectionOctober 8 2008

UPDATE: And it’s back up again, on http://www1.propertyportalwatch.com/ www1.propertyportalwatch.com is on IP 74.124.211.14 where as www.propertyportalwatch.com is on 74.124.210.232. Looks like there was an issue with the server they were sitting on. Apache on www.propertyportalwatch.com is giving a 302 Moved Temporarily over to www1, so looks like it’s a technical failure after all.

Today, in the small business section of the SMH, there’s an article about the ex-CEO of http://realestate.com.au Simon Baker’s new venture called PropertyPortalWatch. Since being kicked from REA, Simon Baker has been working on this site which is meant to “congregate news, opinion and gossip about other property portals and companies around the world, in a one-stop shop for people within the [online real-estate] industry.”

Automattic Acquires IntenseDebateSeptember 23 2008

IntenseDebate, a centralised commenting service similar to the Disqus service used on this site, has been acquired by WordPress parent company Automattic.

From the announcement on the IntenseDebate site:

So what does this mean for you, our valued users? A couple of things:
1.) We will be temporarily going back into private beta. This won’t affect our current users, but new installs will require an invite code. This is just to give us a little time to ramp up the hardware and get our ducks in a row as we join the Automattic team.

2.) You’ll be seeing IntenseDebate a lot more often. We’re really excited about the distribution possibilities this opens up, so expect to see our comment system and use your IntenseDebate profile on a lot more blogs.

3.) You can look forward to tighter integration with some of the other Automattic joints including Akismet and Gravatar.

But don’t worry!
You will still be able to use IntenseDebate on Typepad, Tumblr, Blogger, Movable Type, and other platforms with more to come! We will continue to improve our comment system and your commenters’ exper