Texas Social Media Awards

@carrie_k nominated me for the Texas Social Media Awards! Check it out and leave a comment! http://bit.ly/Pjjk

Great Moments in Carter History #73

June 26, 1968:

The Carterfone is a device invented by Thomas Carter. It connects a two-way mobile radio system to the Public Switched Telephone Network. This particular device was involved in a landmark United States regulatory decision related to telecommunications. The 1968 Federal Communications Commission allowed the Carterfone and other devices to be connected directly to the AT&T network, as long as they did not cause damage to the system. This ruling (13 F.C.C.2d 420) created the possibility of selling devices that could connect to the phone system using a protective coupler, and opened the market to customer owned equipment.

Twitter2Mail

In the aftermath of the Twply debacle, I thought it might be nice to have an app to email your @replies that doesn’t require more than just your Twitter username and an email address.  So, I bring you Twitter2Mail. Enjoy!

FF2Disqus v0.3

Now that v0.3 of FF2Disqus is in private-beta, I thought I’d put up a page to answer basic some questions about the application and record feedback.  Please check-out the example above of how a typical sync works.  If you have any questions or comments, please leave them in the comments.

Ping Response

FF2Disqus provides users the ability to ping a URL to initiate a sync.  We automatically run syncs once an hour, but some people aren’t that patient. The format of the response is JSON.  The response object has the following attributes:

• success: true or false
• errorCode (optional): is success is false, this provides a short code explanation (invalid-user/time-out/unknown-error)
• message: if success is true this is an array of comments that were synced, else a longer explanation of the error

RIP FF2Disqus

[UPDATE]: FF2Disqus is back up, but in limited beta.  Email/Twitter me if you’d like to try it out.

Over this past weekend I wrote an app that attempted to bridge the gap between comments occurring on your blog (old school) with the comments proliferating on FriendFeed (new skool).  It started out as a client-app, matured into a service and was beset by glitches.  I spent the better part of 2-3 days trying to track down what exactly was going wrong, and now I finally have an answer.

The problem was when I executed Disqus API calls on my computer the results were DIFFERENT than when I called those same API’s with the exact same parameters on my host (Google’s AppEngine).  I will not pretend to have the faintest idea of what is going on.  Someone, somewhere is caching the results of these API calls and passing them back to my service.  You can see for yourself the results of two seperate (but identical) calls to the service “get_thread_posts”.  If you do a search for “Mo bugs mo problems”, you’ll see that comment does show up in my local response, but DOES NOT show up the response provided to AppEngine:

Disqus response (appengine)

Disqus response (local)

…which lead to insane amounts of duplicate comments at random times for random people.  And so ends my quixotic journey to have my comments and eat them too.  If someone from Disqus has some time to look into this, I will provide any information I can.  In the meantime, I apologize for letting down the people who signed-up and got some use out of FF2Disqus.  I think I understand now why it’s a bad idea to put things out there that aren’t fully baked.

Updates

• Looks like to might be Google’s fault (link #1) (link #2)
• Ryan Williams points me to a work-around
• And… we’re back! But super-limited beta.

FriendFeed/Disqus Comment Sync v0.2

Please see my previous post for a run-down on how this tool works.  So, what’s new?  Well, alot:

• This is a hosted/automated solution (https://ff2disqus.appspot.com)
• Comments are synced every hour and all actions are logged
• Users can discontinue syncing at any time

Well, I hope (some of) you like this!  Just another scotch-tape web application that was a product of too much free time!

FriendFeed/Disqus Comment Sync v0.1

I’ve completed an alpha version of my Friendfeed-to-Disqus Comment Sync.  It is a 100% Javascript client app, but you must download it to your computer in order to run (cross-domain scripting issues prevent hosting).  The app consists of an html file and a javascript library.  Here are some immediate issues to note:

• Comments pulled from FriendFeed and posted to Disqus are done so using a bogus email address.  Email is a required field to post a comment to Disqus, but FriendFeed does not provide emails in its API.  So, the email used is <ff nickname>@bogus_email.com.
• Comments pulled from Disqus and posted to FriendFeed are, unfortunately, posted as you.  There is no way around this given their API.  To compensate, the following tag is appended to each comment: “(comment via Disqus by <name>)”.  In addition, FF does not allow a timestamp to be associated with a comment, so there could be some minor ordering issues.

Feel free to give it a spin and leave any feedback here or on FriendFeed.  I’ll just sync it later. 

FF/Disqus Comment Sync

This is a test post for some code I’m writing to sync comments between FriendFeed and Disqus. Wish me luck!

Topping 2008 Will Be Hard

This has easily been one of the best years of my life:

• I got engaged to the love of my life, Carrie Knittel
• I spent an amazing summer interning in Seattle and accepted a full-time offer to go back to Microsoft full-time
• I settled my lawsuit with WAKA, banishing the dark cloud that hung over DCKickball

The list certainly goes on, but those are the highlight.  And you know what?  2009 is going to be even better!