However, this will only work for sites that have PubSubHubbub enabled. Fortunately, this is very easy on Wordpress:
Install the PubSubHubbub plugin – you can do this by going to Plugins -> Add New and searching for PubSubHubbub. Two plugins exist, the one called “PubSubHubbub” seems to be the more popular and actively maintained plugin, so go with that one.
Once its installed, activate it:
Thats it. Your posts should now show up in Google Reader nearly instantly.
Its been a day since Google Buzz launched publicly, but given that it works inside of gmail, there is already a huge user base. You might have a “Digg This” or “Tweet This” button on your blog or site, but now you need a “Buzz This” button.
TechCrunch created their own “Buzz it” button and posted a link to the code in the comments. Its easy to add to any wordpress site (or really any other content management system. The following steps will show you how to add a “Buzz This” link to your site, like the one above on the BlinkTag Blog.
Open the single.php file of your sites template. You can do this via FTP or in Wordpress by going to “Appearance” -> “Editor” and selecting single.php.
Paste the following code where you would like the Buzz It button to appear. If you are not sure where, the line right before or after <?php the_content(); ?> is a good place.
Replace http://IMAGE HERE with the URL of your image, or remove the image code entirely to have a text only link. If you want, take this 16×16 Buzz Logo image: but please copy it to your site, don’t link directly the image hosted on BlinkTag.
Save the single.php file. Test it out on an individual posts page on your site.
This same process can be in used in page.php or any other template file to add a Buzz link to your Wordpress pages.
Respond in the comments if you come up with a better way to accomplish this. If you liked this post, please Buzz it!
Our pals at Freshbooks asked us if they could use our office to host an upcoming workshop on “How to Build a Web App Business”. We were pumped to open our office to people interested in web apps and to get a visit from our favorite Canadian tech company.
On Feb 26th at 9 AM right at BlinkTag HQ Mike McDerment, Freshbook CEO will explain the secrets behind building a business around a web app. Read more about it on the Freshbooks Blog. Tickets will probably go fast, so register now.
I found this picture of when the Freshbooks crew on our swinging couch.
As long as we stay under 100 employees and keep our average annual gross receipts of $12 million we get a 5% bid preference on applicable state solicitations, waived fees and a streamlined bidding process for state contracts. Also, non-small businesses who use us as a sub contractor are eligible for some bid preferences. Let us know if you are interested in working with us.
Warning: sort of technical here, so this may not be of interest to everyone. But I still feel like people should know how to do this.
I was about the re-install Snow Leopard the other day because I did something real dumb and couldn’t figure out how to fix it. I was trying to install a postgreSQL client on my computer and was having trouble with permissions on certain folders in my root directory during installation.
So, stupidly, I recursively set all permissions in the /usr folder to read/write/execute, thinking I could set them back afterwards. Bad idea.
DON’T MESS WITH THESE.
The real kicker here is that if you screw up these settings, you also mess with your ability to use sudo to reset them from the terminal. I found a number of blog posts like this one or this one that basically said: you’re screwed. Wipe your hard drive.
Okay, assuming now that everyone knows what not to do, here’s how to fix it. Run Disk Utility and click “Repair Disk Permissions”:
Notice anything different in our URL? We just completed purchasing and transitioning to http://blinktag.com from http://blnktag.com. Note the lack of the letter “i” in our old domain name.
This new domain name is easier to communicate and matches our company name. All links to the old site redirect properly and all @blnktag.com email addresses forward to their @blinktag.com counterparts.
One of our clients, James Perry got written up in an article by Salon “The Best Campaign Ad Ever”. Hes running for mayor in New Orleans in 2010.
When a narrator, describing other candidates, says, “Political insiders and career politicians,” a woman’s face appears onscreen and she says, “What? Are you shitting me?” (The word “shitting” is bleeped out, as are all the other curse words in the add.) Then, a man comes on and asks, “Are you fucking kidding me?” He’s followed by another man who simply says, “What the fuck?”
We’re excited that James is getting good publicity and that he is getting recognized for his innovative campaign. Take a look at his website: http://jamesperry2010.com.
Jed and I are at Datacamp SF #cadata today. MUNI announced at the event that their real time arrival information is now open and free for developers to access. Its the same data that powers nextmuni. A while back we wrote a post complaining that this data wasn’t available. We’re excited about open transit data in general and its great that our local transit agency is leading the way to opening up its real time data.
The Bay Bridge just had a cable snapped and BlinkTag is on the wrong side. The Bay Bridge is closed, sounds like it could be 24 hours or more before it reopens.
I’m curious how long it will take google maps to automatcally reroute around the bridge closure and what systems they have in place for verifying and updating info on emergency closures to key transportation links. As more people start to rely on online maps for traffic info it becomes increasingly important for emergency info to make it’s way online quickly.
In honor of Geocities shutting down today, XKCD redesigned their site in Geocities style. This redesign included a prominent use of the blink tag (including some HTML mistakes to show the markup).
What’s even sweeter is that we figured every hipster with $10,000 bucks would have bid on this guy, thanks to SFist. But I guess the down economy has come to our rescue once again.
Burning Man, here we come. (We’ll probably pull this to South By Southwest too, depending on its roadworthyness)
The stats:
1984 articulated MAN
Make: MAN Company Website
Model: SG310-18-3A
Serial:EC720800
Fleet #: 6090 SF. Muni
Engine: MAN pancake
Fuel: diesel
Transmission: 3 sp. Allison auto.
Registration: non op.
Top speed: 55 mph.
Starter: pneumatic
Tires: 50% or better
Length: 60 ft.
Width: 102 in.
Seating: 55
Factual errors: When Charlie is confronted by Steve in the helicopter under the freeway, the buses in the background are MUNI buses. The movie takes place in Los Angeles; MUNI is the public transportation in San Francisco.
So this might be kind of a gray area terms-of-service-wise, so do what you want with it. But if you’ve ever wondered how to mashup the Google Transit layer with your custom map, here’s how.
While we aren’t advocating anybody actually do this, we’ve heard from a *confidential* source that Google implements new feature requests in rough proportion to the number of people who hack together stuff like this. Just saying . . . .
Firefox 3.6 beta was released today. It added support for “Orientation” events in web content. This javascript event can use a devices built in accelerometers to detect the orientation and update accordingly.
Since our company name is based on a non-standard HTML tag that makes text I thought it would be fitting to apply the orientation event to our entire site. To view, you need a laptop with an accelerometer (a newer macbook pro or Thinkpad) and to install and run Firefox 3.6.
It turns out that if you actually have orientation events enabled, this embedded youtube video will disappear as it doesn’t play nice with embedded youtube videos. However, if you are seeing this effect live, then you don’t need to see the video.
We haven’t posted pics of our office, which features Super Mario Bros wall decorations, a 7ft tall scale model of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, a tiki bar and even some computers.
In partnership with 511ContraCosta.org, Blinktag is proud to announce the release of its very first iPhone application, iSmog. This is something we hope to be doing more of in the future, so be sure to contact us if you’d like one of your own.
From 511CC:
“511 Contra Costa is proud to announce the release of its very first iPhone app – iSmog!
iSmog displays air quality information for the San Francisco Bay Area. With just a tap of the screen, users will see an easy-to-understand map of environmental quality in the Bay Area’s five air basins, built using data provided by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD). With this information, commuters can make more informed choices about environmentally friendly transportation options, and members of sensitive groups will be better able to stay abreast of information that can be, literally, life-or-death.
Push notification alerts users with allergies or other environmental sensitivities when the air contains unhealthy levels of contaminants including ozone, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and two sizes of particulate matter, all precursors of ozone. Notifications can be customized by level of sensitivity and by geographic area.”
As a volunteer effort, Blinktag Inc has been involved with building the website for myamericanhealthcarestory.org. (read more on our project page) Its a site where Americans can share their personal stories about the American healthcare system in video format. We’ve gotten over 100 video submissions and more are submitted every day.
It was fun working with a great team of volunteers to launch an awesome site on a short timeframe. Its the most video-focused site we’ve worked on to date.
The team recently posted a few funny videos highlighting the serious topic of healthcare reform:
Good Magazine has lots of great posts on transportation, technology and cities. They also have a sweet domain name: http://good.is
Their post on why gallons per mile (as opposed to miles per gallon) is a more effective way to discuss fuel efficiency in automobiles is very interesting. Its basic math, but I never heard this mentioned at all when cash for clunkers was being discussed.
most people assumed that improving a car’s miles per gallon from 25 mpg to 50 mpg would save more gas over 10,000 miles than an improvement from 10 mpg to 20 mpg. But when you do the math, the latter saves more than twice as much
The chart sums it up
This helps us understand that pulling cars out of the teens [in terms of miles per gallon] is so much more valuable than pushing an efficient car even higher. That only becomes clear when you start thinking about gallons per mile. That tiny increase from 10 mpg to 11 mpg saves essentially the same one gallon of gas every 100 miles as does increasing 33 mpg to 50 mpg.
Are there any advantages to using miles per gallon other than its what we’re used to?
I was really excited when I read about Google Chrome Frame yesterday. Its a browser plug-in for Internet Explorer that replaces the internals with that of Google Chrome, a much more modern browser that supports recent web standards and generally just works.
IE is notorious for rendering pages improperly and not supporting new web standards which basically require web developers to apply special hacks or design sites specifically for IE.
Google Chrome Frame is interesting because the user doesn’t need to seek out and install google chrome frame. If these people were interested in seeking out new software they probably wouldn’t be using IE6 in the first place. Instead, website authors can include a few lines of code that prompts users of IE to install the Google Chrome Frame plugin.
I set up a chrome frame test page with the google chome embed and lots of elements that don’t work well in IE6. and had a friend of mine who works for a very large bank where their computers are locked down to only using IE6 try visiting the page. I was hoping that somehow Google Chrome Frame would be allowed to install itself.
BART released a new version of its official map this week. Its a streamlined version: The folks at San Francisco Cityscape have created their own streamlined map that shows all the rail transit in the Bay Area. It makes the system look much more comprehensive and integrated than it really is. It includes BART, MUNI (streetcars & light rail), VTA light rail, ACE trains, Caltrain, & Amtrak. See the full size pdf or gif.
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Google just announced support for PubSubHubbub (PuSH) in Google Reader. With PubSubHubbub, new posts show up nearly instantly in Google Reader instead of up to a half hour delay. This means content gets pushed to your readers faster.
Its been a day since Google Buzz launched publicly, but given that it works inside of gmail, there is already a huge user base. You might have a “Digg This” or “Tweet This” button on your blog or site, but now you need a “Buzz This” button.
but please copy it to your site, don’t link directly the image hosted on BlinkTag.
Notice anything different in our URL? We just completed purchasing and transitioning to 
