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How to Create Your Own TV Channel for Your Blog

Posted on January 6, 2008 by jessestay

I’ve been considering doing this for awhile – we’ll see how long it lasts and when my wife puts an end to it. If you look in the upper-left corner of the blog, you’ll see the “Ask Jesse” Show stream. If I’m online, when you click play you’ll see me, live, as you are on the blog!

Here’s how I did it:

Create an account at Ustream.tv

Click on “My Shows” – there you can configure the look and feel of your show page if you want

Click on the “Go to Show URL” link next to the “Broadcast Now” button

You’ll now see an “Embed Stream” html snippet in the lower right of the page – copy this, then paste into your html layout for your blog

Click “Broadcast Now”, and you’re live for all your voyeuristic viewers to see!

The Camera I’m using is the Logitech Quickcam Communicate STX. It has great picture, includes a built-in microphone that detects how far you are, and the camera comes in with built-in software that follows where your face is (or two faces if you’re more than one person). I’m half-way across the room, and you can still hear me well, and the streaming results are almost real-time! (Scott Lemon says it took just 14 seconds from him Twittering to me saying I received the Twitter)

Some issues to watch out for:

Make sure you’re appropriate when your camera is on! Put a sign up or something reminding those entering the camera area that they are being recorded.

Be careful if you talk to sensitive business clients. You may want to mute, or stop the stream altogether so sensitive information isn’t broadcast out to the entire world

Be sure your router can handle the bandwidth. I use a Gigabit Linksys WRT350N Router, and my Comcast connection has 8 Mb down, and about 3 or 4 up (at times). Search for “Comcast Speed” in the search box in the upper-right for some tips on how to speed up your home internet

My big prediction for 2008 is it will be the year of streaming video, and you’ll see more and more people embracing such technologies. I think I’ll try this for a bit – I think this can be a great way to drive people to stay on your blog longer. People are naturally voyeuristic, and want to know more about the person whose writing they are reading. If they can actually see them and chat with them, they are likely to stay longer, bringing more traffic to your site.

Auto-Follow Those that Follow you on Twitter

Posted on November 14, 2007 by jessestay

On Twitter, it is generally polite to follow those that follow you – they are saying, “you are interesting”, so it is the polite thing to show interest in them as well. I have heard from multiple people, including Scoble and Chris Pirillo that they have requested Twitter do this for them.

Well, I’m proud to announce that I’ve written a script that does just this for you. It’s a simple script, that does just what it says it does – auto-follows those that follow you. To install the script, download this script, unzip it (gunzip), then edit it. You’ll need to specify your Twitter username and password in the specified places, and if you want to blacklist any screen-names you’ll want to add those in as well. Then, add the script to a cron job somewhere, say, in cron.hourly or cron.daily, and it will now auto-follow anyone that follows you on Twitter! If you get any bologna (as I call it – others call it bacon) followers, you can simply add them to your black list in the script and it will ignore them.

If you have any problems installing it or running it, please comment. This script is being released under the GPL, v.1. Again, you can download the script at:

http://www.jessestay.com/auto_follow.pl.gz

I’ll post it to CPAN later as I get time so it can be downloaded there.

UPDATE: you’ll need to have Net::Twitter installed – you can install this by running “perl -MCPAN -e ‘install Net::Twitter'”

UPDATE (11/14/2007): Chris Pirillo has pointed out that it’s hitting an API limit if you have to follow more than 70 users within the same hour. If that is the case, set it to run on cron every hour, and eventually it should catch up. Twitter can also add your username to a white list if this is important to you and contact them. If you are on that white list, it should follow everyone in one swoop.

Facebook Developer Accounts

Posted on October 17, 2007 by jessestay

I was discussing with a client today about this, and realized I still had not blogged about this yet. Facebook has launched Developer Accounts. Now, no longer do developers have an excuse for errors on their pages, or sites going down because they are working on their production Facebook app, which is their only development environment to work in. Also, no longer do developers have to risk all their work deleted because they opened up a mock Facebook account and Facebook decided to kill it because it wasn’t a real person. I strongly suggest you start using this if you are a Facebook developer.

Twitter’s Application Directory

Posted on October 17, 2007 by jessestay

A few months ago, Facebook announced they were releasing their platform to all developers via an open API. At the same time, they release an Application Directory indexing and categorizing all of the applications for their platform. I was wondering today if Twitter, who had an open API even before Facebook, had the same thing. It turns out they do, and it’s on the Fan wiki:

http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps

Not quite 5000+ like Facebook, but there are quite a number of apps I didn’t know about. What Twitter apps are your favorites?

Twitter Launches Facebook Status Updates

Posted on October 8, 2007 by jessestay

I noticed yesterday that Twitter has officially launched the ability to update Facebook through your updates on Twitter. You just click on the Twitter app within Facebook, and you’ll see a link that says, “Want Twitter to update your Facebook status? Click here.” Click on that, the message will still be there (they say they’re working on that), but all your Twitter updates will now go to your Facebook status as well. Any Twitter replies (with @username in them) stay on Twitter and do not go to Facebook, resolving my previous concern.

UPDATE: Twitter doesn’t ignore just any post with an @username in it. The post has to start with @username for Twitter to ignore the post. I’d love to see it just ignore anything with @username, since Facebook friends won’t know who @username is anyway.

Presenting at Utah Facebook Developers Garage Tomorrow

Posted on August 9, 2007 by jessestay

Just a reminder to everybody that I’ll be presenting at the Utah Facebook Developers Garage tomorrow (August 9th) evening at 6pm. The details are all on phil801’s blog (link above). I plan on doing a “Hello World” walk-through, where we’ll start with adding the application, work on setting it up, and actually write things for it. Hopefully we can cover a lot of the most useful features I’ve found to get you up and going. My preferred language is Perl, and the framework I use is Catalyst, so this might also be a good opportunity to get a glimpse into what the latest in Perl is doing, and how Rails’ up-and-coming competitor, Catalyst, is going to take the world. (okay, I’m biased – did I mention my license plate says “USE PERL”?)

New Facebook Tag

Posted on August 1, 2007 by jessestay

Facebook just announced a new tag today, the fb:random tag. From their website:

“Fb:random allows the developer to input a series of tags, of which 1 or more will be shown randomly. Each item can have a weight and the tag can be specified to show more than one of the choices. Each option should be wrapped in an fb:random-option tag.”

You also have the option to assign a weight to any of the tags. So it looks like you now have the option to, with pure fbml, to include random items in your profile. Expect to see many more non-Flash 8-balls, dice, and random quotes in the near future on your friends’ profiles.

Google Analytics for Facebook Apps

Posted on July 11, 2007 by jessestay

Today, Facebook announced they were releasing a new FBML tag for developers that would allow developers of Facebook Apps to track their applications via Google Analytics. Before this, because the code you put on your page is javascript, there was no way to track your apps. I tried to install this, but ran into issues, in that Google tries to look at your main facebook app page for the javascript (which isn’t parsed by Facebook), while Facebook gives an error if you put the raw Javascript on the page. I came up with the below solution, which works like a beauty – you put your javascript between your tags, like this:

...

Since Google reads the plain callback url it won’t interpret the fb:google-analytics, and Facebook ignores everything between the tags. Works like a charm on mine.

Comments

Posted on May 5, 2007 by jessestay

I just realized I had a ton of comments awaiting moderation. In switching to WordPress lately, I didn’t realize I had moderation turned on. In noticing I wasn’t getting any comments lately, I went and checked, and sure enough, there were over 50 comments awaiting moderation. My apologies to those who commented to get no response from me. I will go through all the moderated comments now and try to respond to any pending questions. I need to decide now if I want to leave moderation on or just turn it off and risk a little spam here and there.