Tag Archives: Bloglines

Bloglines Notifier – My First Google Gadget

Published Nov 4, 2006 | In API's/Mashup

Bloglines Notifier Google GadgetI didn’t have much to do last weekend and so I thought of giving a try to Google Gadget and ended up developing my first Google Gadget – Bloglines Notifier. As the name implies it will notify you the count of unread items in your Bloglines account. (Nothing special just a trivial one 😉 )

You need to enter your Bloglines account email id and it will retrieve the unread count using the Bloglines API and display it in the Gadget screen. The count will be automatically refreshed according to the interval set in the Gadget settings. Since Bloglines doesn’t need you to be authenticated before retrieving the unread count you don’t need to enter your Bloglines account password.

The Google Gadget API is very simple to start with but at the same time very powerful if you need to do complex or advanced things. If you are interested grab the Google Gadget API Developers Guide and get started. It’s actually that simple.

The full source code of this Gadget is available here and if you are interested you can add it to your personalized page by clicking this button. Add to Google

Now I can have one icon less in my system tray. 😉 BTW if you guys have a nice idea for a Gadget, let me know I shall give a try.

Resources Used

Posted in API's/Mashup | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Comment on coComment

Published Mar 7, 2006 | In WordPress

Well if you know why people use Bloglines, then I am sure you would have heard about coComment. For others, it’s a new Web 2.0 (ok don’t scold me for using this word.) app which allows you to track the comments that you leave on others blogs.

coComment is an excellent example of Viral Marketing. Instead of just writing about it in the developer’s blog or releasing a press release, they made people like scoble to talk about it and it reached the peak of fame in a matter of hours. Even I was one among them who got really exited after hearing about them. I was looking for way to handle and follow up after I leave comments on blogs that I read.

The guys who are behind it are putting in lot of effort and are rolling down new features almost every week. Even today they have released some new features. And I got really impressed with them when they listed their direct competitors on their own blog. That’s the way to do business. Hat’s off guys!!

But I some how feel that you people miss the very important feature. Yes I am talking about comment crawling – the ability to follow up the comments which are entered by people who are not using coComment also. It may act as a big marketing opportunity as of now, (because, I myself have recommended it to lot of people so that I can follow up their comments too) but it may not help them in the long run.

If any of you from coComment are reading this, then I have a small idea of implementing it (in WordPress blogs at least). Every blog post (in wordpress) will have a corresponding RSS feed for the comments. So you can grab this feed every time a person leaves the comment and by just reading this feed you can get the latest comments left by other people. I actually tried to implement it some time back but didn’t found enough time to complete it.

And I found one smaller itch when commenting in blogger blogs which have enabled popup comment forms. I am not able click the coComment bookmarklet since the comment form opens in a popup and the bookmarks bar is not displaced. I used to copy the url and remove the ‘popup=ok’ part from the query string and then it works.

Apart from it, I am very happy with coComment and let’s hope that they add comment crawling soon. In fact they have also mentioned in their blog that they are currently working on it.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged | 8 Comments

My right hand has less work now

Published Oct 13, 2005 | In Random/Personal

GMail has spoiled my mouse usage to a great extend. The recently introduced Google Reader was also having keyboard shortcuts. So I thought of changing to Google Reader from Bloglines. So I logged into Bloglines and I was about to export my subscription list as a OPML file but to my surprise I saw a bunch of hotkeys on its footer. Viola! Bloglines too have keyboard shortcuts and I dropped the idea of switching.You could see them in the footer.

Here is the list

  • j – next article
  • k – previous article
  • s – next sub
  • f – next folder
  • A – read all
  • r – refresh left pane

I wonder how things change suddenly when there is a competition. As I always used to say it’s the users who are going to get benefited when there is a competition.

Now I just can’t wait to see Bloglines redesign its interface and Google Reader introducing more cool features.

So because of Keyboard shortcuts Bloglines is still my feed reader.

Posted in Random/Personal | Tagged , | 2 Comments