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Current.com = Digg + TV [WP Plugin Hack Included]

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

Current.com LogoSocial News Aggregation is big business – take a look at Digg, arguably one of the most popular sites on the internet & all powered by user-submitted content.

Well I’m a big fan of social websites, and news aggregators… and I have recently found a new(ish) site that I have a feeling may definitely be the way forward.

Current.com is a social news sharing site with a difference – it has it’s own TV channel (in the UK, Sky channel 183 and Virgin channel 155). It’s the perfect menagerie of services… think Digg, but televised. This helps fuel submissions to the site, as if you comment or submit material, there’s a chance your content may end up featuring on TV making you a pseudo celebrity in the process.

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Popularity: 16% [?]

22.05.2009 Tech View Comments

Streamy Revamps & Leaves Beta

Friday, May 8th, 2009

For a long time I’ve been looking for a website that houses absolutely everything I look for in a personalised start page… and for as long as I can remember, I’ve had to settle for iGoogle. Don’t get me wrong – Google’s start page is absolutely stellar, and I can almost absolutely everything from feed reading, to checking Facebook, updating Twitter and so on.

However for a fair while I had also been eyeing up a contender for it’s replacement in the form of Streamy. You may remember the site from my previous review of the site that had a fair bit of attention.

Anyway it’s been a fair while since I’d used the service, and I decided to check it out again, and discovered that the devs had revamped the site’s look and functionality. After having a chat with site co-founder Jonathan Gray, I found out that they had “quietly launched” out of beta, and hadn’t yet advertised the fact. This is great news, as I highly recommend the site to anyone – and here’s why.
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Popularity: 2% [?]

08.05.2009 Tech View Comments

Turn your blog into a games hub with Heyzap

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

Website authors have been using embedded flash games on their pages for years as a means to get extra hits, repeat visitors and to make cash from advertising revenue etc. However most sites I’ve seen has had a single flash game embedded at a time, or it’s been a vBulletin forum with a specific arcade plugin (like the one I run at www.hybrid-gamers.com).

Well now a new site can best them all and boast an embedded games hub that is embedded with a simple wordpress plugin, or some copy/pasted code to go into any website.

Heyzap has been called a “Youtube for flash games”, and it works a treat, housing gaming classics like Tower Defence & Arkanoid (a clone called “Breakit”). However my favourites are Straw Hat Samurai & the Fancy Pants Adventure games.

Installation is easy (especially in WordPress 2.7)… just install the plugin, and upon activation you have the facility to add the mini games browser in your sidebar. In truth, I had a few issues installing everything, as I wanted to have my cake and eat it by having a separate dedicated games page.

When I initially installed the plugin, I could use the sidebar widget without issue, but for some reason the plugin didn’t activate properly and somehow this stopped the embedded player working. Within maybe… 20 minutes of me installing the plugin and registering on the Heyzap site, I had an email from their support team advising that I may have a conflict on my site for the heyzap player. I was gobsmacked – I didn’t need to contact their support team or check the site’s FAQs, they contacted me!

After a few emails, we sorted out the problem (I say we, I really mean the company’s Co-founders Immad & Jude – yes both founders was personally helping me sort out the plugin!), and now everything works like a charm – it turns out that some javascript conflicts can sometimes cause an issue, and I had the Footer Javascript plugin installed, which didn’t help things.

So now, thanks to the guys at Heyzap you can now go and have fun on my own personal games page! playing games using the sidebar widget. They even included a link to my site on their latest blog post. :)

In fact I’m so impressed with the plugin, I’m going to install it on my girlfriend’s blog over at Toadpink.com. :D I hope you enjoy playing! (You can also play below)


heyzap.com – free online games

Popularity: 4% [?]

23.01.2009 Tech View Comments

New Addiction

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

I have a new social site addiction – Blip.fm. The site is prettymuch Twitter for music enthusiasts, and the best thing for me is that it interfaces with my other favorite social music site Last.fm . :)

Once you register, you build your profile like any other social site… but when it comes to adding your content, you search for your desired track by name, or artist name. You can then preview the track to make sure it’s the right one. When you’ve selected your track, you can then enter a 150 character message to go with it a-la Twitter.

I have set up the site to post directly to Twitter, and scrobble to Last.fm too… and using this, I’ve also enabled Twitter to update my Facebook status. However I don’t want to spam Twitter or Facebook too much, so thankfully there’s a method of selectively not sending an update to Twitter: All you do is add an exclamation mark followed by a space at the beginning of your post. So for example, my post could be “! This track really rocks”.

There’s a nice community feel to the site as well, with each blip having a vote up button where you can “give props” to the DJ for posting it, as well as adding the song to your own playlist, or reblip aka reposting that blip yourself. You can even send a DJ a message/reply using the Twitter-esque @username method.

Anyway check it out, and add me if you’re into similar music – hope you enjoy! I think I got Smoo addicted to it as well. ;)

Popularity: 1% [?]

17.01.2009 Tech Comments Off

Geek Xmas Tree

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

This pacman tree is the best geek Christmas tree I’ve seen… aside from the very simple PCB one pictured below.

PCB Xmas Tree

Check out the youtube video after the jump to see the pacman tree. :)

Take a look at some more high tech Christmas trees here.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

09.12.2008 Tech, Video View Comments

Google Friend Connect – Now Active!

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

Ever since I heard of Google Friend Connect (around about the same time I heard about Facebook Connect) I was extremely interested in the idea. I’ve always somewhat of a social media whore, so this little idea from Google sounded promising. On top of that, I’ve been a strong advocator of Google for a long time, despite their megalomaniacal approach to all things intermaweb-related.

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Popularity: 1% [?]

03.12.2008 Tech View Comments

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