ronny.haryan.to » Blogging

Wawancara di Koran Tempo

ronny — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 04:07:12 +0000

Budi Putra, jurnalis media Koran Tempo, mewawancarai saya beberapa waktu lalu mengenai Planet Terasi yang saya kelola dan aggregator secara umum.

Artikelnya ada di website Koran Tempo (perlu login).

Cuplikan:

Bagaimana masa depan agregat blog?

Saya rasa salah satu kuncinya ada di fokus. Aggregator blog yang bisa menjaga fokus topiknya dengan baik akan bertahan.

Kunci satu lagi ada pada kendali pengguna (user control). Sekarang ini aggregator berbasis planet tidak memberikan user control apa pun, bahkan preferensi pun tidak, karena semuanya toh di-generate menjadi halaman web statis.

Contoh ekstrem dari user control ini adalah aggregator personal, seperti Bloglines (bloglines.com). Penggunanya bebas menentukan blog mana saja yang mau diagregasi dan bisa diorganisasi sesuai dengan preferensi mereka.

Tentu saja yang saya maksud dengan “user” di “user control” dalam konteks ini adalah pengunjung situs, bukan admin aggregatornya.

Selain artikel di atas, ada satu lagi artikel mengenai aggregator secara umum.

Terima kasih, Budi dan Pujiono dari Koran Tempo.

Update 14/03: Kedua artikel di atas diposting ulang secara lengkap oleh Budi Putra di blognya.

Update 17/03: Enda menulis artikel yang berhubungan di Global Voices Online.

Akismet

ronny — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 01:59:23 +0000

Well, since it’s a new year, a new distro, might as well throw in something new. I’m adding a new plugin to my blog, Akismet. It’s included in WP 2.0, but I don’t need to upgrade yet. So, bring it on, spammers, let’s see what you’ve got.

Blog as Research Aid

ronny — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 08:08:30 +0000

I’m working on a school project this semester. The first half of the project is mostly literature review to get some background about the project topic, identify any open issues and try to propose a solution or research to be implemented on the second half of the project. The project topic is, tentatively, Context-Aware Mobile Applications. I will have implemented a working prototype by the end of this semester (around end of November).

The subject coordinator (not my project supervisor) mentioned that one of her students uses blog as a research aid. The student posts his annotations for the literatures as he reviews them. Towards the end he will then use these annotations to summarize, analyze and write a nice report. This seems like an excellent idea. The notes become available from anywhere with internet access, and it is shared with people so they can give comments and/or have discussion about it. An example of such blog is iclouds (choose “Literatures Reviewed” category).

I will probably do the same for my project, for literature reviews as well as progress on the project itself. I’m hoping to post as much as I can about the project as soon as I have the permission from my supervisor. I can only say that I will most likely be developing a mobile application that runs on mobile devices like a PDA, it will most likely be using the .NET Compact Framework since most powerful PDAs or smart phones nowadays use Windows Mobile as the OS, and from what I heard .NET CF is actually not that bad even though it’s from Microsoft. So I’ll definitely be doing something different this time.

Update: Found another blog that is used to record progress for research, coincidentally the topic is very similar to what I’m interested in.

Blogpoly

ronny — Fri, 13 May 2005 11:08:51 +0000

It’s a monopoly board spin-off with a blogging theme to it. Blogpoly, anyone?

(Link via BoingBoing)

Planet Terasi: Statistics and More

ronny — Sat, 07 May 2005 16:33:06 +0000

Here are some graphs of Planet Terasi stats. The trend shows that Planet Terasi is getting more hits every month. Note that these graphs are taken today which is only the first week of May, but the bars for May are already almost half of April’s.

By the way, I’m planning to do a facelift for Planet Terasi, hopefully in the near future. No promises and nothing fancy, I just want to make it look nicer to read for people who don’t use RSS aggregators to read Planet Terasi.

I’m also interested in suggestions for other aggregator software like Planet (which is used by Planet Terasi) that supports:

Blog aggregating (duh!),
RSS (ideally all versions, but version 1 and 2 at least must be supported),
Atom (mostly for blogger.com users that don’t have RSS feedburner feeds),
flexible templates or templating system (ideally),
can provide blogrolls in either OPML or FOAF or both (ideally),
can sort entries by timestamp within a date instead of by the order specified in the config file,
(minor) can make sticky post only to the aggregate blog (e.g. in planet terasi only) (this can be done manually with a flexible templating system, of course).

Planet can fulfill almost all of the above quite nicely (with some minor quirks), I don’t mind if I keep using Planet for Planet Terasi, but I’m just curious if there are better approaches. I’ve tried Drupal to do this, it’s still not very good at this moment, although it works perfectly well for other projects. Suggestions are welcome!

Update: Well, that near future is really near, apparently. I have updated Planet Terasi‘s theme, and I think it looks much better and more usable now than before.

Update: I’ve upgraded Planet Terasi to use the latest version of Planet from Scott’s GNU Arch repository. The empty Atom posts bug is gone now, so feedburner RSS is no longer required. The sort ordering works as I requested above in the new version. And other minor fixes. I can probably stop looking for other aggregating solution now. I can probably hack the script for sticky post that appears in the page and in the feeds as well. Python is really cool.

TILT: A New Category

ronny — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 16:47:24 +0000

I have always wanted to write informative and comprehensive articles based on what I have learned. But being the Great Procrastinator™, most of the times I couldn’t be bothered enough or do not have the time to write longer than two sentences max. So I thought, “Hey, why not just write it down anyway, and stick it together with the other things I have learned today, and call it ‘Things I Learned Today’?” So there it is.

After all this is what web logs were really meant for originally, writing logs on the web.

The first entry is probably longer than the expected average TILT post length because I had some time to spare today.

I decided to combine the items together in one post instead of splitting them into separate posts. It’s not about the length, there’s nothing wrong with short posts. It’s just that I feel that I could include more interesting stuff in the combined post which would otherwise not be included because they might not have been “blogworthy” by themselves.

WP Yahoo! Smileys Plugin Hacking

ronny — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 14:14:17 +0000

I’ve spent most of my Good Friday holiday installing Priyadi’s im_smiley plugin. The install process itself was very quick and painless, but I found some bugs, and I wanted to have clickable smileys, and I had to figure out how to have live preview of the comment, so it took a while. The bugs were quickly ironed out by Priyadi. The live preview bit didn’t take very long to implement either.

The clickable smileys was not part of the original plugin, so I modified the plugin to provide that functionality. I notified Priyadi about my modifications, he quickly incorporated my changes and adjusted them to his code. He released version 4.0 of the plugin right away. :D

You can get the plugin from Priyadi’s im_smiley plugin, or from my local copy.

Planet Terasi

ronny — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 13:20:09 +0000

I was playing around with Planet to create an aggregate blog based on Thomas‘ idea to create a collective blog. Planet is not, in my opinion, a collective blog per se; it’s an aggregate blog because it pulls the entries from the syndication feeds of the subcriptions and conviniently aggregate them together in one place. A collective blog, however, is a blog, unique to a topic, that has more than one author posting entries to the blog, hence the name collective blog because the blog is done collectively.

Anyway, the new aggregate blog site I just created is Planet Terasi. It focuses mainly on Indonesian bloggers who share common interests in blogging and technology in general. Let me know if you’d like your blog to be included (or removed), or to submit your Hackergotchi.

I said, “Woo-Hoo!”

ronny — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 11:23:46 +0000

Woohoo, finally I got around to setting up a blog. It’s pretty rudimentary at the moment; more fancy stuff coming hopefully a bit later (in other words 3 or 4 months, hah!). Believe me, folks, I wanted to do the blog thing since a long time ago, but those of you who know me personally know that I procrastinate way too much. So this isn’t about trends. Really. I have always thought that a blog is a good way to manage content for personal websites; at least for me anyway.

The old website is still available for your perusal while I work on the blog layout. I don’t plan to move most of the old contents to the new website except for a select few.

Thanks to Priyadi for the “encouragements” and to the excellent people who brought us WordPress.