API Developer Harness
Posted by nigelg in developer, dis.cuss.it on September 23rd, 2009
Dis.cuss.it API Test Harness
A little while ago I mentioned work was under way to produce a test harness for our API. Today I’d like to unveil the harness, hop along to http://developer.dis.cuss.it to see it in action. The harness is designed to show and document the methods exposed by our API.
The API uses oAuth for authentication so before you get stuck into writing lines of code get yourself an application key from here.
The Dis.cuss.it Engine widget and Dis.cuss.it Live Moderator were written using our API. We’d love to see what you can build so get in touch with your ideas or creations.
Dis.cuss.it Live Moderator
Posted by charlie in dis.cuss.it on September 14th, 2009
Dis.cuss.It Live Moderator v1
Say hello to the Dis.cuss.it Live Moderator. This FREE application allows you to watch your comment streams and receive desktop notifications for new messages as they are posted.
New comments can be ‘Approved’, ‘Withdrawn’, marked as spam, replied to or even re-tweeted directly from the application. The Live Moderator can support multiple blogs allowing you to aggregate all your comments for easier moderation. To open a comment in thread view simply double click on it and a new column will open up highlighting the new message within the thread.
Currently we just support Wordpress and our own dis.cuss.it engine (which don’t forget can be used on pretty much any web page, or built into your application via the API), but we are working on Blogger support as I type. If you use another blogging or comments platform that you would like to see supported by the Live Moderator, let us know and we will look into it.
The application is an Adobe Air application and therefore runs on PC/Mac or Linux.
Beavering away
Posted by nigelg in developer, dis.cuss.it on July 20th, 2009
Beavering away
It’s been a while since our last post so I thought I’d share our latest workings. The majority of our time has been spent working on the Dis.cuss.it API, this will make customizing widgets and moderating comments a breeze.
API
oAuth equipped and rich in features, our API has had an overhawl. It’s a step closer to being publicly released. We’ve written a few test applications using the API and I’m pleased with it’s speed and ease of use.
API Test Harness
To go alongside the API we have been working on a test harness that provides documentation and enables you to test the API from within the browser.
Social networks for business
Knowledge Sandwich
I gave a talk on Wednesday at the Huddersfield Media Centre’s inaugural Knowledge Sandwich event, about using social networks to promote your business, it’s been a long time since I last gave a talk like this, so it was pretty exciting. The talk was just 20 mins and had to be accessible to all, so it was a pretty basic overview of how things work, and how I think they can be used to raise the profile and interest in a business. The talk was a good driver for discussion, and we covered some interesting areas.
For me the key points revolved around the fact that social media works best when it’s about individuals and not organisations. It’s about building reputation and trust. Prospective customers will be more likely to deal with a company if they know and like some of the individuals within it. So get employees to tweet as themselves not as the company.
Whilst giving the talk I came up with what I think is a pretty neat twitter theory (I’m sure it’s probably been discussed before). Twitter is a celebrity driven environment, the biggest names on twitter are some of the biggest celebrities in real life. But a lot of the lesser known people we follow are personal celebrities to us. I follow a number of people who are experts in my field and are celebrities in my eyes, but 99% of the world population wouldn’t have a clue who they were.
This talk also gave me the chance to use Docubate as a presentation tool, and I think it worked pretty well. The trick is to change the view mode to “slide mode” and then go full screen. I was then able to cue up all the webpage examples I wanted to show live in different tabs of the browser, and then just control tab between them as and when needed.
Anyway I think the Media Centres Knowledge Sandwich format worked well, and I’m looking forward to the next one.
Dis.cuss.It results from SurnameDB
Posted by charlie in dis.cuss.it on June 5th, 2009
The Internet Surname Database
We have been running the dis.cuss.it threaded comments widget on the SurnameDB site since the end of January. The site gets a good amount of traffic and therefore makes an ideal partner site for us, so I thought I’d give some details on how it’s going and what we have learned so far.
The SurnameDb had a comments system before it was replaced by dis.cuss.it, this system was built into the application and required a visitor to create an account before they could post. We decided to implement the dis.cuss.it widget using the ‘post moderation’ option so that visitors could just type in their message and enter their name to post.
By removing the registration barrier we imediately saw a ten fold increase in the number of messages posted. On the whole we have found that post moderation works well for the SurnameDB site, most days see just one or two messages being withdrawn as inappropriate. Although occasionally a thread is taken over by school children for a bit of online fun (presumably SurnameDB is used to solve that home work question of what does your surname mean), but these have been easy enough to nip in the bud using the moderation tools.
Recent Posts
A lot of the comments posted on SurnameDB provide good additional information and insight on the origins of the names. By using some server side code we have been able to expose this information to the search engines. SurnameDB relies heavily on the search engines to provide traffic, so this additional content is providing very valuable search engine juice.
Because the widget is set to allow anonymous posts we are seeing only about 2% of commenter’s logging in. This is disappointing, since we would like to see the profile data filling out for the commentators there by creating more trust between visitors and a better sense of community. However we hope that we can improve this by providing better profile views and other login benefits, within the widget.
We will continue to work with SurnameDB to improve the commenting community and the traffic generated by the dis.cuss.it widget. If you would like to see what we could do to help your site please get in touch.
FOWA London 2009
FOWA
Nigel and I are big fans of the Carsonified crew and their Future Of Web Apps event. It was after attending FOWA three years ago that I realised the way we where trying to build our web apps was too long winded and complicated. I haven’t missed a show since, and heartily recommend them to anyone either working on a web app or just starting out with an idea.
It’s also a great event for mingling with other developers, investors and marketeers. I’m expecting lots of interesting insight into live activity streams this year which will be great for the work we are planing on dis.cuss.it
Dis.cuss.it beta now LIVE!
Posted by charlie in dis.cuss.it on May 8th, 2009
Engage with you visitors using Dis.cuss.it
We’ve finally drawn a line in the sand and released Dis.cuss.it under a beta flag. We are still beavering away on the code, adding lots of new features, and additional widgets, but these will be released in a later version.
We are working with a couple of web design companies to add the dis.cuss.it widget to exisiting sites. The plan is to post messages on this blog as and when these sites go live with the discussion widget.
If your interested in using Dis.cuss.it on a site, please feel free to setup and account and have a play. Also drop us a line via the contact form here and we will do our best to help you get the most out of it 
Docubate: a dis.cuss.it based mash-up
Posted by admin in dis.cuss.it, docubate on April 30th, 2009
Easy document sharing and discussion tool
dis.cuss.it may still be in closed beta, but we have released a new product called docubate.com which is a mash-up of the dis.cuss.it widget and the Scribd iPaper viewer.
The product makes it super easy to share and discuss documents. Simply enter your email address, accept the T&C’s and upload your document (supports MS Office and Open Office docs, plus Adobe Acrobat/PDF files) and an email is sent to your address containing a link to a webpage that contains your doc rendered in the superb iPaper control, with the facility to download the original file, or pdf version, if required.
Beneath the iPaper control there is the dis.cuss.it widget for discussing the uploaded document. Share the document with others either by forwarding them the link in the email or by using the “share on facebook” tool.
We built the Docubate application to help promote the dis.cuss.it system, and demonstrate how it’s ideal for building into mash-up applications. The product is FREE to use so please make use of it, and give us some feedback on how you get on.
