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Feedhaus

Podcast: Interview with feedhaus Developer Andrew Bays

The podcast returns (after another six month hiatus) with an interview of feedhaus developer Andrew Bays. If you’re interested in the inner workings of feedhaus or in finding out what’s coming soon, I highly recommend that you give it a listen. Here are some notes from the show, which include links to most of the […]

The podcast returns (after another six month hiatus) with an interview of feedhaus developer Andrew Bays. If you’re interested in the inner workings of feedhaus or in finding out what’s coming soon, I highly recommend that you give it a listen.

Here are some notes from the show, which include links to most of the topics we covered. Andrew started by describing his background. He began his programming career as a volunteer developer on the Tsunami Virtual World MUD. (I commented that I was really into a MUD back in the day, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Adventure Game.)

We started talking a bit about Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 and how this had led bdg to conceive and develop a social news site called feedhaus. He described some nuts and bolts stuff, including how he leveraged Dojo and Comet to build the real-time features in feedhaus. (As an aside, Andrew mentioned how one of our west coast developers, Brendan Budine, ran into Alex Russell at BEA World. Alex was really excited to hear about our use of Comet in feedhaus!)

We talked about other companies who use Comet (or Comet-like functionality involving long-polling or continuations) and meebo came up in the discussion. We continued by going into a discussion about some of the myriad other technologies that make feedhaus possible. Here’s a partial list:

We closed the conversation by talking about tag clouds and the feedhaus implementation of the history slider, which was inspired by the Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud. This reminded me of another tangentially-related project, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Enjoy the show and post your comments here or send an e-mail to [email protected].

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