Modern Idea

My blog: she might be ugly but she’s got a great personality. And by personality, I mean technology set.

This is a WordPress blog, meaning it automatically integrates with Ping-o-matic to alert sites like Technorati and Feedburner—which I also use to burn my feeds. Since I’m willing to forgo the few remaining subscribers from my eklektos blog; I have decided to take advantage of the Feedburner feature that allows me to use my own domain name (feeds.davidcatalano.com). So far this is all pretty standard stuff. Other common enhancements include analytics which is handled by the venerable . A Google Sitemap is also employed to help with SEO. and are on the article pages to hopefully simulate some promotional value. Why don’t you go ahead and Digg this article right now? I’ve also pulled in my Google AdWords account for now (in the Clicky Clicky section).

All of the items discussed thus far can be implemented in minutes. Not much pimpin going on just yet…

Things get a bit more complicated with the Micro Posts. Notice that I’ve pulled in my twitter tweets and delicious bookmarks in the center column. This is made possible through the incredible Internet utility called Yahoo! Pipes which came out about a year and a half ago. Pipes aggregates all my tweets and delicious bookmarks tagged dcblog. The Pipe also assigns an id that is used to create the bullet next to each entry. Pipes is used in a few other places in my blog as you can see from the diagram above. I have a simple Pipe that pulls in my Facebook status—updated in real time. Lastly, if you subscribe to my blog with micro posts then you’ll be getting a Feedburner feed that is generated by Pipes. Unfortunately for now there is an issue with the feed reporting that my blog is the Yahoo Pipes page instead of davidcatalano.com. I don’t see this getting fixed so I’ll have to suppress my anal-retentive tendencies until I learn of a solution. The Pipes stuff might sound complicated but it’s really easy, hence I could do it in just a few hours.

The last item of note is the incorporation of my Blackberry 8830. I have added the Facebook application for Blackberries as well as the TwitterBerry application for twitter. I can also email a secret email address to create draft posts in WordPress. And no, I won’t tell you what address it is.

So there you have it. My blog is officially pimped out. There’s a few rough points to iron out (such as finishing the HTML/CSS) but that is the easy stuff. Let me know what you think!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 7:15 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.