The MyBlogLog Blog The source for all things MyBlogLog.

What’s New with You?

We just refreshed our profiles, re-arranging house in order to make room for the previously announced New with Me feature which now runs down the center of the page. Profiles in the past were pretty static but now they become a dynamic representation of your current activity.

A few things to note:

- if you're looking at someone's profile, you'll see a list of updates from their services
- if you're looking at your own profile, you'll see a collective view of updates from all your contacts
- on any page, you can toggle to the other view

The updates are pulled from public
data available from the services you've entered into your MyBlogLog
profile. The more services you add, the richer this section will become.

Click around, let us know what you think in the comments below. We're in tweak mode and would love to hear what you say as the look and feel here is something we would like to carry through the rest of the site going forward.

PS. If you're wondering who Saurabh in the profile screenshot is, he's one of the engineers behind New with Me who's currently visiting with us from Bangalore to participate in this launch.

MyBlogLog Current Visitor

A few days ago I posted about some More New Web Magic by the Intense Debate crew on my personal blog ToddSampson.com.  As it turns out, the Intense Debate team created their magic by monitoring the MyBlogLog Reader Roll for the most recent reader and using that information to pre-fill the blog URL in their sign-up form.  This is a really cool hack.  However, as of today, there is a much easier way.

The MyBlogLog tracking script (which is auto-magically included with the MyBlogLog Reader Roll) is now making the following global Javascript variable available:

"mbl_current_visitor"

This variable will return the 16-digit MyBlogLog Member ID for the person visiting the site.  If the person does not have a MyBlogLog Member ID, is not logged-in, or has "blocked" themselves from displaying on the site the Javascript variable will be blank.

As reported by Marshall Kirkpatrick on Read/Write Web, and unveiled at last weeks's Search Sig event, Kent Brewster has already put this new feature to great use in his wicked-cool application BlogJuice.
Kent's app gives a taste of the power combining the current reader on your site with the MyBlogLog API can have.  I can't wait to see more of these fantastic hacks; and the even cooler ones that will be possible with our soon-to-be-released new features.

Note:  The MyBlogLog API is currently an invite-only beta.  To apply for an invite, click here.

Verified Checkmarks on the Flyout

Thanks for all your great feedback on the new Recent Readers widget. The adoption has been fast and thick with many of you jumping right in and trying it out.

Yes, seven colors is restricting. We'll see about getting instructions on how to customize this for your own site with skins that you can share with others. Soon.

Olivier asked if it's possible to have a "landscape" view of the widget so you could have a row of your recent readers across your site's header or footer. On the configuration screen, just select Multiple Columns and one (1) Row and the width you need and despite the preview not showing you, the code will work just fine.

Lastly, we took Mark Hopkins' suggestion over on Mashable and added the MyBlogLog checkmark of truthiness to the site listings on the flyout. See the check next to Olivier's LiFE-LiNE site? That shows that he's verified the site using the MyBlogLog verfication process.

As always, let us know if you see anything not working right. We'll continue to tweak this widget while working on the New with Me feature we've got cooking.

Broadcasting Your Online Life

MyBlogLog is, at its core, a broadcasting platform. What started out as a simple way for a site owner to track visits to their site has flipped around to meet the evolving needs of our users who are looking for ways to get their message out. We've always been about connecting readers to web sites they love. Each time you visit a site and leave behind your photo on someone's Recent Reader widget, you're leaving behind your calling card like those business cards you see tacked up on the local diner's cork board.

Behind that virtual calling card is your profile. We include information about any blogs you have and latest posts from these blogs. Yet, blog posts are only part of who you are online. We upload photos to Flickr, we send out pithy one-liners to twitter, we bookmark points of interest on del.icio.us, we favorite videos for our YouTube collections. We're like digital magpies, collecting shiny points of interest and sharing them with the world around us.

We added the Services tab so you can put in pointers to these other services you use and we've been adding to these services bit by bit and each time you add a new service, the corresponding pointer has been added to your profile on MyBlogLog. The email signature and About Me widget were ways to make these pointers more portable.

But the web is a dynamic place. The next logical step from pointing people off to your activity on these other sites is to bring the updates together into a unified view. Why settle for a static list of pointers when you can harness the power of RSS and what Technorati famously called, the living web?

So with that vision in mind, we set off to pull in the activity taking place across the web based on the pointers you gave us. Internally we called this feature "mylo" which was shorthand for "my life online." Because MyBlogLog is a collection of communities, we wanted to show not only updates you've made but also aggregate updates from everyone you're connected to. We've been playing around with this for several months and tackled difficult engineering problems related to caching and synchronizing these updates across two datacenters.

We're now at the point where it's humming along pretty nicely and want to share what we've built with you. All along, we've been following the conversation around what is now come to be called "lifestreaming" and the recent debate about the privacy implication of pulling together your digital life in one place.

Back to the billboard photo above. The MyBlogLog community is different from most because people join MyBlogLog in order to share. They want people to find out more about them and create rich profiles and surf around and leave their avatars behind because they want people to know they were there (another code name we kicked around was "kilroy" btw). We're confident that most of you will want to have people look at your profile and see what you and your friends have been posting across the web.

But we also subscribe to The Principle of Least Surprise and that gets to the real purpose of this post. Maybe you're not too keen on having all your updates gathered together and made available. We honor all permissions and are only pulling in public data. For example, if you've given us your Flickr feed, we will not pull in any photos that have been marked "private" or photos that are limited to only your friends or family. We plan on making your updates not only public but also available to third parties via RSS and our API. As I said at the top, MyBlogLog is a broadcasting platform.

So now's your chance. If you're uncomfortable in any way, please opt-out of this aggregation by removing your username from any of the fields in the Services tab on your profile. We've made it real easy. If there's a pointer to a service in your profile, we'll follow it and add it to the mix. Once you remove it, we'll blow that data away. It's a simple choice, you're either in or you're out. We plan on releasing this feature in the next week so if you plan on making edits, please do so now.

Of course, we hope you'll stay with us and see where this grand experiment takes us. We're all just learning how powerful this concept is and look forward to hearing your thoughts on this feature as we evolve it.

(image courtesy of mtsofan)

MyBlogLog Adds Additional Microformat Support

For some time now, MyBlogLog has supported the "rel=me" portion of the XFN (XHTML Friends Network) microformat.  This allowed members to point to the various bits of their identity online.  Today we are adding further XFN microformat support by publishing members' friend connections (rel="contact") on MyBlogLog.  This will allow for the discovery of contacts and verification of bi-directional connections.

MyBlogLog has also added Tantek and Kevin Marks's rel-tag (rel="tag") microformat on all of the member and community tags on MyBlogLog.com.  This will help give further context to the information available on the site.

As our buddy and UED-wiz Micah Laaker would say, "Good times!"

Keep following the MyBlogLog Blog (subscribe)... More great new features and open-standards support coming very soon.

Recent Reader Widget – Putting on the Gloss

Spring is a time for renewal. OK, that doesn't work for you folks sitting in the New England snow but here in California, it's beautiful out and a perfect day to . . . refresh our widgets!

The new widget has a glossy finish, multi-colored shading, and new, eye-catching icons to add readers to your community.

There "flyout" which fades in when you hover over a reader's photo for more details on that visitor. You can quickly browse more information about that reader and directly click through to that person's MyBlogLog profile or their community pages.

To keep it simple, we've limited the number of options when you configure this widget. There's a choice of seven colors, two layouts, and you can choose how you want the flyout to behave. No more messing about in CSS, choose the width and number of rows and it configures itself automatically.

For those of you who love to tinker, we've got plans for you. Stay tuned. We'll tell you how to upload your own skins.

I want to call out the graphic inspiration by Arlo Rose who took time out of his work with Yahoo Widgets to get us thinking about design. Also Manny Miller, our UI foo master who tweaked this code to no end and got it over the finish line.

Go have at it, update your sidebar widgets and give it a whirl. We think we've got most of the bugs squashed but if you see anything else that's weird, it would be great if you could let us know in the comments below. Known issues are posted in the Known Issues section of help but we'll be standing by and tackle new ones as they come in.