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Category: web

yahoo pipes on iTouch

Published January 24, 2008 by lieven

The next thing on my tech-to-do-list : learn all about Yahoo Pipes :

Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs. Here are a few popular ways the service can be used:
– create your ultimate custom feed by combining many feeds into one, then sorting, filtering and translating them.
– geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.
– remix your favorite data sources and use the Pipe to power a new application.
– build custom vertical search pages that are impossible with ordinary search engines.
– power widgets/badges on your web site.
– consume the output of any Pipe in RSS, JSON, KML, and other formats.

I’ve posted before on setting up your own lifestream, or your own planet, or scraping feeds, or subscribing to my brain, or … whatever. The good news is : all these ideas are now superseded by Pipes!

Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code. You make a Pipe by dragging pre-configured modules onto a canvas and wiring them together in the Pipes Editor. Once you’ve built a Pipe, you’ll be able save it on our server and then call it like you would any other feed. Pipes offers output in RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF), JSON and Atom formats for maximum flexibility. You can also choose to publish your Pipe and share it with the world, allowing other users to clone it, add their own improvements, or use it as a subcomponent in their own creations.

This is the essential message to get : yahoo-pipes allows you to remix the web, filtering out all noise! And the good news is

  1. There are plenty of public pipes around to get you going, and
  2. Pipes has an iTouch-friendly interface (see above left). All you have to do is to Safari to iphone.pipes.yahoo.com and use them.

Here are a few public-pipes you can use out of the box!

  • iPhone / iPod Touch: The Most Comprehensive Feed Ever!, doing what it promises : giving you the best iTouch-posts without having to roam for them.
  • JSON Geocoder, returning lat/lon/address info from the the given address.
  • Uber Blog Search, Search all the blogosphere with one query. Hits Google, Ask, Technorati, and icerocket then returns the unique results. Below the web-interface giving the results for ‘noncommutative’…

and finally, one of my favorites, implementing to some extend the Lifestream-idea (iTouch-interface above left)

  • lifefeed – virable, Easily Aggregate your social whereabouts great for blogs profiles and more! Aggregates Your Feeds From: -Digg -Last.fm -Twitter -Flickr -Del.icio.us and your very own blog Adopt and Improve, enjoy!

I’ll promise to spend some time soon to set up my very own pipes and make them available…

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please, use this bookmarklet!

Published January 21, 2008 by lieven

Great! You’ve finally managed to arXiv your paper after months of laborious research, and now, you’re eagerly awaiting response…

The odds are you’ll be disappointed, if not frustrated. Chances are high that if you get any response at all it is only to clarify that someone else (usually the person emailing you) proved this result a long time ago, or that your result could be generalized enormously, or that you could have shortened your proof tremendously if only you were more educated, or …
Mathematics seems to be more of a pissing contest than anything else, at such moments.

Imagine someone would be kind enough, at that particular moment, to send you an email saying not much more than : “Gee thanks! Ive just browsed through your paper arXived today and you really made my day! Keep up the good work, all the best :: lieven” (change the name to your liking)

Sadly, math-circles are not known for their ‘good-vibes’ generally. Mind you, Ive send similar emails to people posting on the arXiv, but, admittedly, I did it far fewer than I might have. Often I like (even admire) a result but repress the urgent need to communicate that feeling to the author, perhaps my Asperger kicking up…

Now that you may feel some empathy with the situation, let’s get to a similar situation in math-blogging. Sometimes, you spend a lot of time writing a post (( but probably you have to be blogging yourself to appreciate the amount of energy it takes to write a genuine post compared to a link-post or a couple-of-lines-not-going-into-the-specifics post )) , release it to the world, see tons of RSS-bots and genuine hits passing by and then what?… nothing! no reply, no email, no comment, nothing at all!

Personally, I’m not that influenced by this. When I blog I do it because (1) Ive the time, at that particular moment and (2) I like to write about the things I do, at that moment. But sometimes, it comes to us all, that feeling of ‘why am I doing this after all? can’t I spend my time more sensibly doing something else?’ and when you begin to have these doubts it usually marks the beginning of a long silence at your blog (( browse my archive and I can tell you specifically what happened at that particular moment to stop blogging ))

So, here’s an appeal to all you lurkers at math-blogs : give these people, once in a while, something back…. Ive thought for a long time that this lurk-but-no-comment attitude was something typical of mathematicians, but, as often, when researched in more depth, I have to admit that I’m wrong! Read the post Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute by Jakob Nielsen to find out that most blogs act along a 90-9-1 scheme :

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:

90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

So, the good news is, it’s not that particular to us autistic mathematicians. But, wouldn’t it be even better if you could do something positive about it? Speaking for myself : often I read a post I like, and (being a semi-pro myself) appreciate the work had to be put into producing such a post, but even then I don’t feel the urge to communicate this positive feeling to the blogger in question. Perhaps, we could accelerate things by having a bookmarklet in your bookmarks-bar that does the following : when you like a post, go to the post-page where you are asked to leave a comment. Hit the bookmarklet and it will automatically fill in your name, URL, email adress and a supporting message along the lines of “Nice post! I’m not so much of a commenter, but rather than not replying at all, I found it important to let you know that people actually read and like your post. All the best (and perhaps later I’ll comment more to the point) :: lieven (again, change the name to your liking).

Well, I’ve just done that! So please take a few minutes off your time to read and follow-up the instructions below and have a math-blog-bookmarklet up in your bookmark-bar to tell the blogger in question you really liked her/his post. This may just be enough motivation for them to carry on…

Okay! Here the nitty-gritty (it takes under 2 minutes, so please, do it now!).

part 1 : copy the following text and save it as blogmarklet.html

  • Download mathblogmarklet.txt and save it into your favorite text-program as bookmarklet.html and change your URL, name, email and custom message (please extend on your compliments…)

  • Once you saved the file as bookmarklet.html open the file under your favourite browser (Safari or Flock) and drag the link to your bookmark-bar.

part 2 : use it!

  • Whenever you visit a blog-post you like, go to the page of that post where you can leave a comment. Hit the bookmarklet and your comment-fields are filled (but PLEASE ADD TO THE DEFAULT COMMENT IF YOU FEEL LIKE IT) and press the submit-button!

  • That’s it!

For example, Ive just changed the layout of this blog. Please leave a specific comment what you think about it.

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Top 5 wp-plugins to improve your bounce-rate

Published January 18, 2008 by lieven

The bounce rate indicates how many web-visitors leave the site without visiting any other pages before a certain session timeout elapses. That is :

High bounce rate means the site must be horrible to site visitors and most likely they would never return again. They are not even interested to check other content of the site. First impression counts.

After installing google analytics some weeks ago, I noticed a worrying high bounce rate : close to 80%… At first I thought this was due to the fact that all iTouch fans left the moment they saw a mathematical symbol, but further analysis proved me wrong : iTouch fans study posts here a lot longer than the average mathematician. But then, what was the reason? Is this site really so horrible to look at? is the content of such poor quality?

Anyway, I’ve tried out a couple of tricks, with surprising effect. The bounce rate dropped from 80% to under 3% and best of all, it appears to stay that low. Here, the google-analytics bounce-rate evolution of the last 3 weeks

So, what kind of magic voodoo did I perform on january 6th? I’ve installed a couple of WordPress Plugins and changed the upper part of the entry-page. My basic assumption is that people leave a site when they come to it for specific information (for example via a search engine), do not find the info immediately and don’t want to spend too much time looking for it. So, I wanted to have all tools to find content on this site right in front of the potential new-comer. Here are the 5 major changes to the header part and the plugins Ive used.

1 : Rather than having a monthly-archive in the sidebar providing no more info than the number of posts in a particular month, create a proper archive page where visitors can find the titles and links to all posts in reverse chronological ordering. I did use the Smart Archives Plugin.

2 : Even better : have a drop-down archive right under the header-picture so that visitors can scroll down the list of all posts without having to load another page. Ive used the Awsom Archive Plugin.

3 : Let visitors see in a glance what your blog is all about by having a tag cloud under the header. I didnt feel like tagging 300 old posts, so I used the Simple Tags Plugin to do it all for me.

4 : Have a welcome message near the top to aid new visitors (especially when you have, like me, 77.51% of them around). The message disappears after their third visit. It’s a wonderful idea, made possible by the What Would Seth Godin Do-Plugin.

5 : Write series of posts and have links to the other parts available at the top of the new post. Likely, people are going to check out the other parts for more information. Rather than hard-coding the links by hand, Ive used the In Series Plugin.

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