Ali Kuru

Although I had an account at Facebook for quite some time, using it never really interested me before.

Now, I’m about to permanently leave the town which I’m living for 14 years and the university which I’m working for nearly 9 years, thought that I would probably need something more efficient than email and IM for keeping connections with my friends and colleagues. Since all of them are using Facebook (just like the rest of the world must I say, if we consider the network is dwarfing any other alternative with its 400 million users!), using it seems inevitable. So, I decided to came out of the rock I’m hiding under for years, and created myself a profile.

Since every once in a while I read about privacy concerns of Facebook users on the net, I was skeptical about how it handles the privacy, and this was on top of my list of reasons for not using Facebook. However, I found their way of handling privacy more robust than I imagened. It looks like Facebook listens their users voice (“scream” could be more appropriate here), and evolves with their needs, which is good know.

I still have few annoyances about the service though; (more…)

After two weeks waiting, I’ve received my Google Wave invitation today. Wave had generated a lot of buzz in recent weeks and, what I understand from what I read/listen/watch about it, almost everybody have the same impression; Google Wave will blow! Well, either in a good or a bad way :)

Anyway, my account came with 20 invitations. Please leave a comment to this post if you are looking for an invitation. You don’t need to publish your email address at your comments body, I’ll send the invitation to the email address you filled in the comments form. Invitations will be send first come, first serve basis.

And, please don’t forget to come back and tell your first impressions about the Google Wave, I’d love to hear what yo think.

UPDATE: All gone, no invitations left, sorry. Please don’t post anymore requests!

Also, note that Google Wave’s invitation system is more like “nominating you for an invite” than “directly issuing you an invitation”. Since I “nominated” you for an invitation, it’ll take some time before you actually receive an invitation.

Here is what’s been told on my invitation Wave;

Google Wave is more fun when you have others to wave with, so please nominate people you would like to add. Keep in mind that this is a preview so it could be a bit rocky at times.

Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.

I’ll let you know if I receive more invitations. You can subscribe to my feed, or follow me on Twitter (@alikuru) for updates.

Yesterday Disqus commenting system has launched an update, and previously reported Facebook Connect caused messy statistics issue showed itself again with upgraded WordPress plugin. Since workaround offered at Disqus blog is not working anymore, I’ve tried to fix things manually.

Disqus plugin tells Facebook Connect to look for the xd_receiver.htm at the Disqus plugin directory with the variable facebookXdReceiverPath. Problem is, Disqus plugin doesn’t ship with the xd_receiver.htm, and that’s why Facebook Connect’s attempts to reach this file are returning with errors, and causing statistics mess.

Here is my solution;

1. Remove the previous workaround code, if you’re still using it.
2. Download the xd_receiver.html file here (right click and save as) and change its extension from “.html” to “.htm”.
3. Upload the renamed file to your Disqus WordPress plugin directory (to /wp-content/plugins/disqus-comment-system).
4. You’re done.

Hope you find it useful.

Update: Disqus team repacked the plugin with the previously missing xd_receiver.htm. Just update the plugin and your problem will be solved.

Good news first; according to VentureBeat, Prezi will open its gates to the masses next month, at 5^th of April. You can check my prezi review if you want an early look of the upcoming service.

Here comes the bad news; pricing scheme seem to be surfaced with the launch plan and there will be three plans available to the users. Which are; Free (on-line only, all information shared), Enjoy ($57 per year, only works online) and Pro ($160/year, on-line and down-loadable).

Sharing what you’ve created might not be problem for most of the users but being not able to download and use your presentations offline will definitely hurt free users. Anyways, Prezi is a really innovative tool for creating slick presentations and definitely worth a try.

Update: It looks like its not the presentations that free users are not able to download, but the new “offline editor”. See comments for details.

I have all of the main browsers installed on my computer(s), including Google’s Chrome (dev channel, v2.0.169.0). Nowadays, I’m trying to create a new theme for this blog, and I was using Chrome only to see how my design is performing on it.

Although I hated the installer and its registering of Google Update both as a service and as a timed job, I liked the Chrome’s look since its first release. I’m a long time Firefox user and I usually spend 5 to 7 hours in front of it every day. Yesterday, I’ve decided to give it a chance and switched to Chrome and ditched the loving Firefox for a day. I did my usual browsing including some standard emailing, roaming, searching, reading my RSS subscriptions, banking and I remotely accessed to my lab PC via LogMeIn. Also, I’ve browsed our internal FTP server for updates.

Here are my thoughts after the day; (more…)

I’ve recently started using Disqus for the handling of this blogs’ comments. Service has really nice features, including integration with Facebook Connect, which unfortunately seem to mess with your statistics if you are using StatCounter or Google Analytics (I’m using both).

There is a solution posted on the Disqus blog and I’ve got a tip for you if you are using WordPress, which will allow you to include the given xd_receiver.html on your blog only when necessary, to reduce the front page size.

If you wrap the given code on the Disqus blog with the WordPress conditional tag is_single(), mentioned xd_receiver.html (and the javascript that its calling) will only included in your post pages, where the comment form should appear. See the code below;

<?php if (is_single()) { ?>
<script type="text/javascript">
var facebookXdReceiverPath='http://alikuru.com/wp-content/files/xd_receiver.html';
</script>
<?php } ?>

If you are allowing your visitors to comment on your WordPress pages too, you might want to change the is_single() with is_singular() ;)

Update: Disqus has launched an update and Facebook Connect caused messy statistics issue seem to reoccur. Here is another workaround.

Prezi is a new Flash based online presentation tool from Zui Labs, which lets you create extra ordinary “zooming” presentations.

With traditional presentation tools such as Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote, you have to work slide by slide to create your presentation. With Prezi you have only one slide to work with! But rather than thinking your working space as a “slide” in Prezi, you should think it as a big (actually limitless) scientific poster. (more…)

Apparently, Google Calendar has an offline mode just like Gmail. Although I didn’t like the way Gmail handles your offline data, since it dumps every mail and attachments’ to your hard disk in an un-encrypted fashion, I like the idea of always accessible Google Calendar.

As always, you’ll need Google Gears to be installed in the first place.

Just noticed Bespin, a collaborative browser based code editor from Mozilla Labs, which announced last week. The idea of an online editor is not new, but this one looks pretty cool even in its very early 0.1 version. It has those must have features like code highlighting, and you can access your whole codebase wherever you want, share and work with whoever you want. I strongly suggest watching the screencast below to understand its features and discover its cleverly designed user interface.

[via: siberkültür]

I got an invitation to Ginx recently, and want to share my thoughts about this new Twitter front-end, a webware which is currently in “pre-alpha” status.

What makes Ginx attractive is that it handles conversations in a threaded fashion. This makes easier to track people’s replies to each other, hence improving overall Twitter experience. Ginx has another usability feature which is about shortened URLs; it automatically converts shortened URLs to longer ones for preview, you don’t need a browser addon or a user script to do that. It also adds target web pages’ favicons next to the links and, especially if the link is pointing to an image, creates thumbnails (unfortunately, Ginx only takes care of the first one if there are more than one links in the tweet). (more…)