Skribit - Piss off Formspring, Skribit was here first

Skribit.png

There’s this new craze on Twitter1 to get people to ask you questions anonymously and answer them on Twitter or your website. It uses this little site (run by FormSpring.com) called formspring.me to solicit questions, and people derive some amusement from it.

BUT

The day I heard about it, I thought immedaitely of skribit.com which I had only JUST installed on my site a week earlier and does exactly what formspring.me does only prettier, usefull-er and integrated-into-your-site-ier which for me are all important things.

See that little blue tab over there -> ??

That’s the Skribit tab. It says “Suggestions”, but if you hover over it, it says Skribit too! Click it. I dare you. I’ll wait. You can come back by clicking the little (x) in the top right… Go on…

See that form? It lets you ask questions, just like Formspring. It even lets you do it anonimously, just like Formspring. Unlike Formspring, Skribit lets you add tags, follow questions until they’re turned into posts, and generally interract more with the person you’re asking. But it’s not just for anonymous questions. Paul Stamatiou (one of the creators) has been using it on his site since he started building it, and his readers suggest posts then vote on the topics that they want to see him write about, which was the whole reason he made it in the first place. It’s all about curing Writers Block, which I own up to having about 99% of the time2 .

Well Skribit launched at the end of last year! They’ve been open for business for a while now, but they’re pushing to get the word out for twenty-ten3 , and I had to write a post about it so I could tick that off my Skribit to-do list. So if you’re already using Formspring.me (bleh) or just want some feedback from your readers in a way that makes you accountable and helps you keep track of it then you should probably go install it. It keeps out of the way, and it’s kinda pretty. It’s easy to install (there’s a Skribit widget for Wordpress too) and integrates with Twitter and Facebook so your lazy readers don’t even have to log in! If you’re interested try the tour to get a feel for it (or just test it out here), or read about the people who made it

And to my reader(s)4 you can leave me suggestions on what you’d like me to write about, or ask anonymous questions, just like all the cool kids are doing! Try it5!

Of course this post’s disparaging remarks against formspring were not endorsed or condoned by Skribit6 .


  1. I say new but it’s been going a couple’ months now 

  2. the other 1% is when I’m in the shower and don’t have a pen 

  3. that’s right, I’m a twenty-tenner 

  4. hi Andrew, Dad, Mum 

  5. Please! 

  6. and I have nothing against them either 

Triple J radio stream on a Wii

When we bought our Wii, I promised Mil that we could listen to TripleJ using it, as we haven’t had a radio in our lounge room for years, and she was missing it. So I set up Orb to play my iTunes library and TripleJ and Radio National1 . But my computer had to be on for it to stream properly, and Orb was pretty useless for streaming video (the other reason I installed it), so eventually I gave up on it, and Mil went back to a music-free existence :cry:

But determined not to be beaten, I found a nifty little MP3-playing SWF (flash program) that I could install on a webserver somewhere and point to the TripleJ MP3 stream. The player I used is created by neolao, and is very easy to use. I used their “generator“ page to build the embed code I needed, and downloaded the player. I created a simple webpage that includes the embeded code (feel free to steal the “source”), and uploaded and pointed to the player hosted on my site. It points to the TripleJ stream, but could easily be adapted to play any other mp3 file or stream. The page is at http://nunnone.com/radio/ and I’ve added it to my Wii’s favourites menu so Mil can find it quickly when she wants some radio. It’s a very basic page, and the same site has many different versions of the player to do more - in fact if Radio National did an MP3 stream as well, I would create multi player so Mil could choose between the two stations.

I can even embed the stream right here, so enjoy!

Edit: removed - see update.

2009-09-06: Using the Homebrew channel to add radio

The biggest problem with the the Wii browser is that it can’t drop the stream, so the buffer fills up eventually and crashes. I tried a few MP3 flash players including one that suggested it could overcome this by playing two streams in sequence for five minutes each and dropping them one at a time to clear the buffer, but I couldn’t get any of them working reliably so I gave up for a while.

Then Lifehacker posted <a href=“http://lifehacker.com/5342733/hack-your-wii-for-homebrew-without-twilight-princess?skyline=true&s=x”>this article about how to add the Homebrew channel to your Wii with just an SD card, and I gave it a shot. Then I downloaded the Homebrew Browser and copied it into an “Apps” folder I created on the same SD card. With that installed I downloaded the MPlayer Christmas Edition from the browser, and finally edited the menu.conf file in the Apps\mplayer_ce folder to add Internode’s stream to the Radio menu with the following line:

<e name="TripleJ" ok="loadlist 'http://media.on.net/radio/117.pls'"/>

Now I can play Triple J for free on my Wii, Mil is happy again, and I can also play DVDs, TV shows and music streamed form my PC!

Yay for lazyhacking!


  1. thanks to Lifehacker for the tutorial