Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category
Feedoor, Central Feed Management Service
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | July 2, 2008 – 2:28 pm |
1 Comment
Feedoor, is an interesting feed management service that aims to give users complete control over their feeds, and the flexibility to do whatever they want with them.
The service is quite simple and straightforward, packing a number of features in its corners. Some of the most important and interesting of these features are the following; it gives users the possibility to:
- Combine and splice several feeds of different formats (RSS, ATOM, RDF) into one feed.
- Easily add individual items such as videos, photos or audio directly into existing feeds.
- Create feeds of random items such as videos, photos and audio; thereby creating podcasts or media channels.
- Customize the look and feel of their feed page by using available themes or creating their own themes.
And for the created feeds, the service provides detailed statistics including: Subscribers, hits, visits, and referrals.
A developer API was launched recently enabling developers to pull content from hosted feeds, statistics of a certain feed, or the number of subscribers. The API also gives the ability to build and add themes, widgets and doors (small interactive applications that can be integrated into the feed to enhance reader interaction with feed content).
For people hosting their websites on their own domain names and who want to have their feeds hosted under the same domain, the option is offered for free.
A number of publishing and publicizing options are available as well, making it easier to integrate or show off a feed’s content on several places on the web.
Feedoor currently has an English interface only, although it supports different languages in the feed content.
The service was initially launched in 2007 from Jordan by Mahmoud Mehyar.
# Feedoor
Dwwen Arab Blog Aggregator To Launch API Soon
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 22, 2008 – 10:33 am | 2 Comments
Dwwen, the popular Arab blog aggregator, almost shut down recently due to financial and resource burdens. Luckily a flow of supportive messages, and a generous offer by an Arab blogger to help the service out with the necessary server resources changed the aggregator’s destiny and gave it a new lease on life.
Now Dwwen are working on an API that they’ll be releasing very soon, in a move to open up their service and make the information aggregated in it more available and usable to everyone.
We got to play around with the inside beta of the API, and it’s really easy and simple to use. The API currently allows the pulling of articles directly from Dwwen; it provides the possibility to specify the number of articles you want to pull, the language of the pulled posts (Arabic, English or both), and whether you want to get the latest articles or the most popular ones.
A number of applications are also being built around the API, one of them using Adobe AIR, which is proving to be a pretty popular choice for internet applications on the desktop.
# Dwwen
Analysis: Dwwen Blog Aggregator Almost Shut Down
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | May 29, 2008 – 1:55 pm | 7 Comments
A few days ago, Arab blog aggregator service Dwwen announced they would be shutting down on June 15th this year due to financial and resource burdens.
The announcement came on the blog of Tareq Abu Zeid, the founder of Dwwen, where he said that the lack of financial backing for the service doomed it and made shutting it down inevitable.
After the announcement, a number of comments flowed in, with some people proposing that Dwwen start a donations campaign to raise money to keep going on, while some others offered to help in any way possible, and others asked how much they needed, showing readiness to help financially.
Yesterday, only a couple of days after the initial announcement, a little announcement was put up on the Dwwen homepage telling users that the service wouldn’t be shutting down and that further details would be communicated later.
It’s great news that Dwwen managed to find the backing or means to keep going on, they’ve built a really good service since they launched, and have managed to gain many an Arab blogger’s respect.
But now that things have worked out for the best, I think we should take a step back to study and analyse their case a little bit, because I think it more or less gives us some insight into the rather short life cycles of Arab startups of this kind, and how they end up having to take the decision to shut down.
Arabized WordPress 2.5 Released
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | April 18, 2008 – 5:29 pm | No Comments
The Arabized version of WordPress 2.5 was finally released a few days ago on the official site for Arabic WordPress.
This release brings all the new changes and features of WordPress 2.5 to the Arab blogger community, from the completely overhauled admin area and dashboard, to the new media gallery, automatic plugin download & update, multi-file upload, tag management, and the better visual editor, to the more technical additions and enhancements under the hood.
Upgrading from earlier versions should be quite straightforward using the upgrade script. Still, it is recommended to backup before beginning the upgrade.
This version can be downloaded from the official Arabic WordPress site.
Watwet, Social Networking And Mini-Blogging Platform
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | April 18, 2008 – 11:30 am | 4 Comments
Watwet is a new Arab social networking and mini-blogging platform, quite similar to Twitter, that was launched in December 2007 by the TootCorp team, who brought us services like the photo and video sharing site Ikbis and blog aggregator Toot in the past.
The concept is very simple: Using watwet you can post short messages (watwets) updating your status, through which you can stay in touch with your friends. These watwets can be posted from the web or by sending SMS to Watwet. These updates are then shown to your friends on the Watwet website, as well as sent to them by email and SMS.
You can also send your friend direct private messages too or whispers (Washwishes) as they call them.
Watwet doesn’t stop at short text messages though, it goes even further supporting photos, that can also be uploaded through the web interface or sent by MMS.
The website is well designed, pretty straight-forward and easy to use, and work is currently underway on an AIR based desktop client. The only two points I found a bit inconvenient are that users’ timelines, their lists of updates, are only accessible to registered users even if they choose for them to be public in their privacy settings; and the public timeline (updates from all users) can only be seen if you logout.
The service is available in both English and Arabic, and is open to users from all over the world, although the SMS service is only available in Jordan for Zain subscribers now. Not sure when they’ll be expanding to other operators around the Arab world.
Something I think Watwet should do though is open up their system a bit, either through an API or through modules they develop themselves to enable users both to pull information from Watwet onto their own blogs/websites/services and push updates from other services to Watwet automatically.
For more on how to use Watwet, you can take the Watwet tour.
# Watwet
