WhenGuard for bloggers
WhenGuard is now serving over 200 jitlinks, thanks to thousands of visitors from all over the globe. In celebration of this little milestone, we will be writing a series of in-depth posts about how different people can use WhenGuard to their benefit.
Today, we will see how exactly, you, a blogger would find WhenGuard useful.
Over the last five years, bloggers have become an important intermediary for disseminating fresh information. Some of this information is time-sensitive and cannot be publicized to your blog’s readership until a certain time has passed. At other times, you want information you’ve posted on your blog to expire after a certain time. Popular blogging packages like Wordpress offer some of this functionality already, but it’s quite basic. WhenGuard expands on the concept and generalizes it to all Internet content.
Here are four ways you can use WhenGuard as a blogger:
- To schedule or expire content on your blog. If you want to hold a blog post (or some information embedded in it) until a certain time, create a jitlink with that reveal time and distribute the link ahead of time to your readers. If you want some content on your blog to expire after a certain time instead, distribute a jitlink that with that time as a hide time. In both cases, WhenGuard decouples the time of publicizing from the time of publication. Your blog will still see page views and serve up ad impressions as usual; WhenGuard does not usurp these from you.
- To build up buzz for a new blog. If you are launching a new blog, you can use a WhenGuard jitlink as a space for interested visitors to sign up to be notified when it goes live. By publicizing a new blog well ahead of time, you can build up a community of interested visitors with the commenting feature on the countdown page for a jitlink.
- To embed special offers and Internet coupons on your blog. Running special offers and Internet coupons on your blog is a pretty standard way of attracting readership. Keep the content on your blog current by using jitlinks that reveal or expire after particular times for these special offers.
- To chop up you RSS feeds into ’shows’. WhenGuard also works for RSS content; if an RSS feed is a ‘channel’, a jitlink can help create a time-slice of the feed, kind of like the equivalent of a ’show’. You can give out a jitlink with reveal and hide times around your RSS feed to your readers so they can stick it into their RSS readers just as they would any other RSS feed URL. You can use these feeds to group together posts you’re doing for the holidays or for a certain duration, like Black History Month.
See the WhenGuard FAQ for more information on WhenGuard, including definitions of terms like reveal and hide times. WhenGuard’s content timing features can be useful to bloggers like you in several many different ways. Are there any that I missed?
Make sure you let us know what you think of WhenGuard at http://whenguard.com/feedback.
Until next time,
MidtownNinja
RSS jitlinks now work in Google Reader
After my last post concerning apparent issues with RSS jitlinks in Google Reader, I engaged in some hacking fueled by educated guesswork. The good news is that RSS jitlinks now work in Google Reader. What’s more, Google Reader caches all content at an RSS jitlink, until the end of time, even if the feed itself has stopped serving old content. One positive side effect of all this caching is that with Google Reader and RSS jitlinks, you can cut a slice in time through an RSS feed–something like a Tivo for RSS content.
Google Reader may still behave erratically with respect to when it requests RSS jitlinks from WhenGuard; you may see some side-effects of this if you are subscribed to a particularly short-lived RSS jitlink. I can confirm though that everything is basically working as it should be from WhenGuard’s side. I’ll be happy to tweak how RSS jitlinks work based on your feedback…
Speaking of which, keep the feedback coming!
Until next time,
MidtownNinja
Something screwy is going on with Google Reader
Dear readers,
The proper functioning of XML jitlinks depends crucially on redirecting RSS feeds. Now, there doesn’t seem to be a huge consensus on how to redirect RSS feeds. I’ve chosen to use HTTP-level redirects, i.e. 3xx response codes in routing XML jitlinks to the right feeds. Ever since adding support for XML jitlinks yesterday, I’ve been noticing something screwy is going on with online RSS aggregators like Google Reader.
The native RSS support built into browsers like Internet Explorer recognizes and works with an XML jitlink just fine, but Google Reader doesn’t seem to honor 3xx redirects. This means that after a Google Reader user subscribes to an XML jitlink, they won’t seamlessly receive updates (say from Twitter) on that subscription. I’ve been noticing similar behavior with Bloglines as well.
WhenGuard is currently responding with 3xx redirects for all feed readers other than Google Reader and Bloglines. For these two online feed readers, WhenGuard is returning a 200 and proxying the true content into the response stream. If anyone has had success with Google Reader and redirects (temporary or permanent), I’d appreciate hearing from you from the feedback link. I don’t know what the solution is just yet, but I thought I’d put a note out there to tell people that I am aware of the problem and am trying to find a solution.
Until next time,
MidtownNinja
What Goes Up Might Come Down
Until now, WhenGuard’s jitlinks have been able to reveal a piece of information starting at a given time to the end of time. But what if jitlink creators wanted to automatically expire a piece of content, say coupons, after a given time? Fear not, WhenGuard has that covered.
Starting now, WhenGuard jitlinks can have both a reveal time and a hide time. In other words, you can put up a piece of content at a given time and take it down automatically at a later time.Let’s say you created a jitlink around an Internet coupon with both a reveal time and a hide time:
- If someone visits the jitlink before the reveal time, they will see a countdown page telling them how long to go until they can see the Internet coupon.
- If someone visits the jitlink after the reveal time but before the hide time, they can see the Internet coupon itself.
- If someone visits the jitlink after the hide time has passed, they will see a page telling them that that jitlink has expired.
From now on, jitlink creators can time when their content gets published and when it gets unpublished.
Speaking of content, jitlinks so far have been restricted to plain old webpages. But why stop there? WhenGuard now makes it possible for jitlink creators to make jitlinks around any XML content, such as RSS feeds. Jitlinks around RSS feeds, as with any other kind of content, can have hide and reveal times as well. Between these times, WhenGuard will redirect users accessing that jitlink to the appropriate feed.
This opens up a number of interesting possibilities. Let’s say you are on a microblogging service like Twitter. With a jitlink around your Twitter RSS feed, you can effectively create interesting time slices of your twitters. You might be an active Twitter user who is attending a tech conference for a few days. You could create a jitlink around your RSS feeds with reveal times and hide times around the dates you’re attending a conference. Then, on the days you’re attending the conference, interested users can subscribe to your twitter updates. These users will be informed when this channel of updates has expired.
As I promised last time, the scope and meaning of a jitlink has grown considerably. So, please keep the feedback coming and help me iron out the bugs!
Until next time,
MidtownNinja
When change happens…
Happy Halloween!
WhenGuard has been attracting visitors at a lively and quickening clip. A few days ago, a screencast of the jitlink creation and viewing process was uploaded to the main page.
Based on feedback from early users, WhenGuard has added a couple of new features:
- Updatable jitlinks. Jitlinks are used as vehicles for critically timed content. Watching the clock count down to when your content will be live is an exciting feeling, but what happens if the reveal time of your content shifts after you have sent it to some people already? Effective immediately, you can specify an email address during the creation of a jitlink. At that address you will receive an email containing a special link that can be used to change the reveal time of that jitlink. You can change only the reveal time, and nothing else about a jitlink. If you need to change other things about a jitlink, just make a new one–jitlinks are free and easy to make.
- A note from the creator. Jitlink creators can put in a short note about the jitlink they are creating. This note will be shown to visitors to that jitlink on its countdown page, before it is revealed. Visitors can use the information in this short note to drive conversations around that jitlink.
There are a number of other improvements sitewide, in usability and styling. The next update will add to what a jitlink means in a big way, so keep an eye out.
Keep the feedback flowing!
Spookily yours,
MidtownNinja
From content to conversations
WhenGuard’s evolution continues, with two major features debuting this week:
- The time-sensitive content that a jitlink masks is almost certainly going to be interesting to somebody. But at least as interesting, if not more, are the conversations around that time-sensitive content that happen before it is revealed. Speculation and conjecture as to the nature of the news abound, and sometimes, useful insights come out of these conversations. WhenGuard now provides a way of capturing these conversations with a commenting feature on an pending jitlink. If a jitlink has not yet been revealed, WhenGuard’s countdown page now enables visitors to add their own comments about the jitlink they have received. They may discuss where they got it from, what the news might be or any number of other interesting things about the jitlink.
- Coming to a countdown page for a jitlink is nice, but what if you can’t be at the countdown page when the jitlink is revealed and the news is finally displayed? WhenGuard now enables visitors to a pending jitlink to register their interest in that jitlink by entering their email address. When that jitlink is revealed, everyone who indicated their interest with an email address will receive a short notification directing them to the newly revealed jitlink.
I hope these will be valuable features for WhenGuard users! Keep the feedback coming!
Until next time,
MidtownNinja
Improvements are ongoing
After super-useful feedback from some early users, I’ve made a few minor improvements:
- The reveal time used to be one text field. Now it is two, so you can enter the date and time separately. The current date and time appear in these boxes so if you don’t have Javascript you can still type it in manually. Which of course brings me to those who HAVE Javascript turned on…
- You can now pick the date out of a gorgeous drop down calendar. You’d still have to type in the time manually. I was considering adding a time picker as well, but I’ll await feedback from you and my other dear users before I add it in.
Please keep the feedback rolling in!
–MidtownNinja
Welcome, you?re here Just In Time for?
WhenGuard!
Until next time,
MidtownNinja