April 2007 Archive

Aarggghh!! Why is this happening to me?

Why is it that although twitter is basically me telling a webpage what I am doing – that it’s so damn addictive?

Posted by Neil Middleton on 12 Apr 2007

Would you find a forum useful?

Well, basically I want to bounce an idea of all of you guys and that’s basically what the title says.

For a while now I have been considering creating a feed-squirrel.com forum which would basically be an area to discuss any of the topics that feed-squirrel features.  I know most tech stuff is done on mailing lists but personally I like the format of forums – hence the question:

Would you find a feed-squirrel.com forum useful and what would you like to see in it?

Posted by Neil Middleton on 12 Apr 2007

Best blog post ever?

It may be a little old now, but I had to point everyone at Guy Watson’s recent blog post “”_blank" href=“http://www.flashguru.co.uk/where-have-i-been/”>Where have I been".

A lot of people need to read this and take note.

Posted by Neil Middleton on 13 Apr 2007

Mail Issues

Apparently the squirrel’s been suffering from some mail issues which may have prevented any mail you have sent to the site from getting through.  So you know, I am still here and the squirrel is as busy as ever and I am also looking to get the problems solved as soon as possible.

In the meantime, you can get me direct on gmail using neil.middleton@ (or MSN by using neilmiddleton75@hot…)

Posted by Neil Middleton on 20 Apr 2007

Mail Issues Update

I beleive that the mail issues are now resolved so if you have ever sent me a mail and not got a response, please try again.  If you still don’t get a reply then try me on gmail using neil.middleton and I’ll take another look at the server.

Posted by Neil Middleton on 22 Apr 2007

Whats new pussy cat?

Well, the squirrel’s been busy beavering (or squirrelling??) away over the spring and now has decided to get very talkative. In order to help him out we have just launched a brand spanking new forum for everyone to use. This now means you can get to discuss the daily tech news you see on the site and also get to meet some of the other users. Hopefully the forum will grow into something genuinely useful (and yes adobe.com forum users, you can even edit posts).

http://www.feed-squirrel.com/forum

At the moment the forums obviously a little empty, but sign up, make yourself known and who knows, maybe something beautiful might happen.

If anyone has any ideas or feedback on the forums (or the site in general), please let me know, either by mail or via the, uh, forums.

Posted by Neil Middleton on 22 Apr 2007

Life in the Feed-Squirrel Forum

Well, the FS forum has been up and running for a couple of days now, and what have I learnt? Well, for starters, spammers are a PITA which are able to get round almost any system you put in front of them. Secondly, the behaviours of users are very interesting.

Consider this: You have a site, be it a forum, or a social-based site such as mySpace. You have no users, but your concept is reliant on users. Users will not come to an empty site and will probably never return once they have witnessed it’s emptiness. So how do these things start? How does someone attract people to an empty social site? It’s quite an interesting conundrum which I am working out at the moment.

So far traffic to the new forum has been intentionally low, as I don’t want a mass of people seeing an empty forum, and due to this there has been a slow but steady influx of new users – some of which are posting happily. So the next step I suppose is to slowly increase the traffic to the site by increasing the number of external links, and waiting for Google to sort it’s act out. As these happen I would expect the site to hit a critical mass – a point where I believe the community will start to look after itself and the membership will reach a steadily increasing level up to an upper level where it will naturally sit whilst experiencing minor fluctuations as time progresses (a site like mySpaces being obviously a lot larger than that of this site).

So, all in all, I know a lot of people would think me insane for trying to start a forum in the middle of a community awash with sites such as Adobe.com’s forums, and lists such as CF-Talk, but I like the insane, and as I said, its also quite an interesting experiment.

Posted by Neil Middleton on 24 Apr 2007

Off to Microsoft MIX07 in Las Vegas

So, I leave tomorrow to Las Vegas for the Microsoft MIX07 conference. It will be a chance for me to see what is being done re-RIA technology on the other side of the fence. I’m actually pretty excited to see what Microsoft are doing and what their roadmap is. The last time I looked at their RIA offering it looked pretty far behind what Adobe was doing with Flex, so it will be interesting to see how things have progressed over the last few months.

It’ll also be an opportunity to catch up with some ex-Adobe friends who now work for Microsoft. If you’re going to be there, feel free to drop me a note at niklas [ a t ] monochrome [ dot ] co [ dot ] uk.

When I’m back next week I’ll give you an update on how it went!

Posted by Niklas Richardson on 27 Apr 2007