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One of the main handicaps I keep running over and over with Twitter is that there is no concept of groups. The usual story goes along these lines: You get forced to create accounts that behave as groups, make their updates private, and then ask the members to request to follow, and once they follow, that’s it. Yes, a bit convoluted. Yesterday, I ran into GroupTweet that basically automates this process. It still creates a new user account that works as a group fan but, at least it makes the process easier. ...

cForms is a WordPress plugin that allows you to quickly add forms on your site. The plugin will allow you to collect information from visitors easily. Besides mail notifications, it also provides database back-ended tracking. Pretty convenient if you have to boost the usefulness of your site. Two examples I have more or less been involved is the SEASR 2009 workshop registration form and the iFoundry application form. On both cases, cForms worked like a champ. ...

I have been using FireStats for gathering statistics on WordPress sites for more than a couple of years now. I mainly use FireStats combined with WordPress Stats, and Google Analytics. Each of them give you different views into traffic, but FireStats is by far quick and fast and give you a good overall picture you can dig down using WordPress Stats and Google Analytics. I just installed the new version 1.6.0 on this blog and found a new interesting goodie. Now FireStats also tracks the number of RSS readers coming to your site :D ...

A while ago, I wrote about “Publishing yourself online”. Among other solutions, Lulu, seemed to be a more traditional publishing method, with the twist you do it your self, and you can decide what kind of book you want (e-book, paperback, hardcover, etc.). The other day I was spending some cycles trying to find out if they provide LaTeX templates, and no, they are a Microsoft shop (with the option of dealing with Open Office). They, however allow you to upload PDFs, so you can also prepare manuscripts in LaTeX. I searched a bit, and run into and very useful post by Veta Project describing how to take your LaTeX document and make it Lulu friendly. Worth taking a look at it… ...

by Llorà, X., Ács, B., Auvil, L., Capitanu, B., Welge, M.E., Goldberg, D.E. (2008). This paper has been accepted at the 4th IEEE International Conference on e-Science. An early draft of the paper can be found as IlliGAL technical report 2008013. You can download the pdf here. More information is also available at the Meandre website as part of the SEASR project. Abstract: Data-intensive flow computing allows efficient processing of large volumes of data otherwise unapproachable. This paper introduces a new semantic-driven data-intensive flow infrastructure which: (1) provides a robust and transparent scalable solution from a laptop to large-scale clusters,(2) creates an unified solution for batch and interactive tasks in high-performance computing environments, and (3) encourages reusing and sharing components. Banking on virtualization and cloud computing techniques the Meandre infrastructure is able to create and dispose Meandre clusters on demand, being transparent to the final user. This paper also presents a prototype of such clustered infrastructure and some results obtained using it. ...