Category Archives: feeds

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Make a Wordie Screensaver

If you’d like random words to float around your screen when you’re not using your computer, it’s easy to set up Wordie’s recent words feed as a screensaver.

If you’re using a Mac, open System Preferences and in the “Desktop & Screen Saver” section select “Screen Saver,” then choose “RSS Visualizer” (this is the effect Apple stores usually have going at their “Genius” bars). Under “options” enter http://feeds.feedburner.com/WordieLatestWords. When the screen saver fires up, you’ll see the latest nonsense from Wordie floating dreamily across the screen.

If you’re using Windows, NewsGator offers a screensaver add-on for their feed reader, and Lifehacker has a post outlining a similar download.

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Introducing Wordie Mini-Feeds

Wordie now has a Facebook-style mini-feed of your recent activity, like adding words or lists, making comments, moving words, and adding tags. If you go to a profile, you’ll see a link to this in the upper-right, available as either a web page or a feed.

By default this is turned on and visible to everyone. You can turn yours off by clicking the ‘edit personal preferences’ link on your profile. Activity is tracked (if you keep it turned on) from tonight forward; previous activity won’t be available.

This is a first step towards enabling some sort of watchlist feature, so you can more easily keep track of what friends and people whose words you like are up to–think Flickr contacts. Since it’s available as a feed, I’m hoping people will find their own good uses for it, as they’ve done with other Wordie feeds.

While I was mucking about on the server I also upgraded a bunch of other stuff (for the curious, I moved the whole shooting match to Rails 2.0), and probably broke something, or many things. As always, please let me know if I did, or if you have suggestions.

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Transmogrified List Feeds

Lisa from Sophistechate has built a refurbished feed for Wordie lists using Yahoo! Pipes. It takes the feed from any list page, and adds the row of lookup favicons that appear under the words on the site to the words in the feed. Like so.

One thing to note is that once you’ve generated the pipe, you won’t immediately see the transmogrified feed on the Pipes page, which threw me at first. You first need to click the ‘My Yahoo,’ ‘Add to Google’, or, to see the raw feed, ‘More options’ link.

Thanks Lisa! This joins angharad and uselessness’s Wordie Bookmarklet as another very cool member-contributed utility.

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News Feeds

Just added two new feeds: one displaying five random words, and one showing the last 20 comments made on Wordie. The feeds are available in the new “feeds & widgets” section (linked at the bottom of each page), to which I’ll soon be adding a “random words” widget, as well.

I’m planning on devoting more time to Wordie in the next few weeks, so please let me know if you’d like any changes to the feeds and widgets, or if there are any other features you’d like to see.