Using twitter for product updates

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Ever since we moved the iusethis blog content over to nordaaker.com, we have felt that the profile for this blog has been a bit unclear. Nordaaker is a company that works with web application development, rather than Mac software, and we would like our company blog to reflect that. At the same time, we would like to communicate with our users at iusethis.com.

To this end, we've now set up a twitter account for iusethis, which we will use to talk about updates to the iusethis site, policy ,news in the mac software world as well as other mac fanboy related material (Have you seen the new macbook? It is so shiny and smooth, we just got to get some of that!)

If you're not a twitter user, or you prefer getting your updates in a feed reader, you can just subscribe to our rss feed instead. The latest tweet can also be found at the top of every iusethis page.

In the future we plan to launch product specific twitter accounts for our other products as well. Also, a parting note for our fellow Norwegians: Expect to see something interesting at nordaaker.no soon.

ma.gnolia goes open source

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Thanks to Mr Messina for pointing out that ma.gnolia is going open source. This is a very interesting development for the project, and one that I've toyed with several times for our hosted projects as well. I do have some problems with finding a good business model for it (We still need to pay rent), but I'm excited to see ma.gnolia going down the open source road.

Of course, slashdot did this way back, and it didn't seem to hurt their business. Rather, it spawned a lot of slashcode based speciality sites, like use.perl.org, but it did not cause slashcode code quality to be hugely improved either. It will be interesting to see how it will turn out for ma.gnolia, and if it will work differently for bookmarking sites.

Anyhow, one imediate effect will be me moving over from del.icio.us to ma.gnolia as my main social bookmarking site. I originally started using delicious partly because it was made by an indie perl developer. Now that it has been bought by Yahoo, been rewritten in php, and the original developer has left Yahoo, I don't have that motivation anymore, and besides I've been a bit annoyed with the total lack of innovation in recent years.

The rewrite didn't really bring much of interest to the table either, so I'm jumping ship, and in the future you can find my social bookmarks at http://ma.gnolia.com/people/marcusramberg

Slides from YAPC 2008 talks

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I recently attended Yet Another Perl Conference Europe 2008 in Copenhagen, and I held two talks there, so I figured it would be nice to make the slides available. If you're interested, here's "Web Services with OAuth" and "Building Catalyst apps on the Amazon Web Service platform" in PDF format.

I managed to break 'suggest new version' while syncing iusethis with the iphone codebase. Sorry about that. It's back now. If you see other new weirdness, please report it to support@iusethis.com

iusethis has been plagued with app spammers lately, people who register bogus apps in order to gain traffic/page rank for their craptacolous schemes, or register a bunch of useless windows apps. So far, we've just deleted these apps as soon as they have been discovered, but unfortunately, it still ends up in the new apps rss feed for some of our users, and lately it has become so frequent that we've decided we have to do something.

So, from today we introduce the concept of trusted iusethis users. That means if you've registered a valid app, or added a good review to an app, we flag your user as trusted, so your releases and new apps will show up directly in the feeds. Otherwise, they will be held pending moderation from one of our admins.

Since the user filter was mostly added to counter spam apps appearing on the front page, we're also changing the default setting to show all trusted apps on the frontpage. You can still chose to browse at another usage level if you prefer.

The popular software tracking website, iusethis, has expanded its reach to iPhone users today. Members can now submit, browse and vote up iPhone applications.

iusethis has been serving the Macintosh community for over two years, and has planted its flag as the most innovative and community-centered software tracking site on the web. The website allows software users to mark applications they use, contributing to the application's "iusethis" score, similar to social news site digg.com.

The website's founders have been firm believers and fans of the iPhone, and were toying with the idea of an iPhone app section, even before the App Store was announced.

"We were actually thinking about doing this earlier for "jail-broken" apps, but once Apple stepped in with the App Store, an iPhone section on iusethis became a no brainer." says co-founder Arne Fismen.

Due to its use of modern technology, iusethis is in a position where it can quickly develop new features, and is the first major software directory to support Apple iPhone. A democratic web application like iusethis gives a better overview of popular applications, as well as a better opportunity to see trends.

iPhone applications are available on iusethis at http://iphone.iusethis.com.

PRESS CONTACT: Arne Fismen arne@iusethis.com

Perl on App Engine

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Brad Fitzpatrick has written on his LiveJournal about the possibility of Perl on App Engine. Seems they need a hardened Perl interpreter in order to support it. It would be awesome if this really happened.

Johannes Plunien has been helping us polish MojoMojo, our open source Wikistyle CMS tool. His motivation was to replace his private MediaWiki installation, and to that end, he's written a concise howto for setting up a private MojoMojo installation: MojoMojo - make it private.

We're going to have some planned downtime for iusethis at around 00.00 GMT tonight to perform a system upgrade on our database server. We'll try to be as quick as possible, thank you for your patience :)

update the downtime was moved to early august.

this is tiny on my screen. should look more like this.