Posts categorized as Internet
Site converted to django-friendly: FriendFeed integration
I posted about it on Twitter this afternoon, but I finally succumbed to the FriendFeed trend and I'm going to let them do the hard work of aggregating my life stream and normalizing it. Honestly, I don't need to fight the never-ending battle of scraping and parsing a billion feeds when a company flush with cash and smart people can do it for me, right? :) What's great is that they provide a fabulous API and so I took some time yesterday to build a Django application I call django-friendly that you can pop into your site to integrate everything ...
Posted on: 2008 July 14
Filed under: Django, Internet, Programming, Social Networking
django-galaxy: a reusable feed aggregator in Django
I'm flooding the site with Django stuff lately, but I've had a recent burst of productivity that I attribute almost solely to my reading of James Bennett's new book, Practical Django Projects. This particular project isn't completely done yet, but it mostly works. I just need to make this public to force me to get it to where I want it to be. The idea is this: I maintain one or two sites that aggregate posts from other people's blogs. Typically these are called "planet" sites after the first popular bit of software that performed this task. They're very popular ...
Posted on: 2008 July 09
Filed under: Django, Internet, Programming
Sharing Flickr photos is super easy now
Prior to this new "sharing" menu, you had to pop through some hoops to find the proper URL for hotlinking a Flickr photo (or grabbing the proper embedding HTML). Now Flickr has added a cute little AJAX accordian menu that lets you do four different sharing options: "Share This Photo" actually emails it to someone "Grab the link" is a vanilla URL to the page for the photo in question "Embed it", piggybacks on the terminology used by just about everyone. The concept of "embedding" a picture on a page might seem silly, but its bound to be a very ...
Django project idea: Disqus application
I'm putting this out there because I can see there's a need for it. Disqus, which I mentioned in my previous post, has a couple of methods of integration. The method I chose, the quick and dirty route, is to insert a chunk of JavaScript in certain places on your blog that injects comment counts, a comment thread, and a comment box into your page. On the other side, is a great potential for true integration with your custom blog or site. Disqus has a fairly full featured API: All API methods accept their parameters in the query string of ...
Posted on: 2008 May 13
Filed under: Django, Internet, Programming
What should the "Share with Note" keyboard shortcut be?
Chris Wetherell, Google Reader engineer, wants to know what we think the keyboard shortcut for sharing an item with an note should be. I noted the lack of such a shortcut in my post last night. Shift+S is already for sharing. Should it be Shift+N? Shift+S n ? You can reply to Chris on Friendfeed.
Google adds all the right stuff to sharing items
You've been able to share items with your Google Reader friends forever. You could also publish a page of all the articles and pages you share to the public in HTML or RSS format. Google added a bunch of new features to Google Reader today that enhance the experience of sharing items with people. If you're a regular reader of my site, you might remember that I specifically asked for these features back in February: Currently, I’m using Facebook Shared Items to compliment my Google Reader shared items, mostly because I can personalize the message and give my shared item ...
Posted on: 2008 May 05
Filed under: Internet, Social Networking
google, googlereader, linkblog, microblogging, socialgraph, twitter
Brightkite, easy to use, location based "Twitter" and photos
Long title, huh? I was going to write out a thoughtful post about Brightkite and why I'm kind of warming up to it, but Herschell's vertigo-addled brain did all the work for me: My first text to the brightkite servers was relatively painless and took the same amount of time as it would to tweet it (on Twitter). All I did was send “? LOCATION” to BrightKite’s SMS # and in seconds, BKite (see what I did there? heheh) asked me to verify WHICH LOCATION, in which I replied “1? and PRESTO CHANGE-O! Internets! YAY. Bonus points for the seamless ...
Posted on: 2008 April 20
Filed under: Internet, Life, Social Networking, Technology
apple, brightkite, champagne, chicago, fireeagle, geospatial, iphone, locationservices, sdk, sms
Dealing with information overload
How I skim my "high volume" feeds: information overload from Clint Ecker on Vimeo. I've long thought it would be interesting to make a video of how people with tons of feeds skim them and pull out interesting information. This is my "high volume" folder which holds posts from sites which post 10+ more items a day and which I could "mark all as read" and not miss much. When I skim through these posts, this is how I do it. Each post probably gets less than a second to catch my attention. You can definitely see which posts get ...
Posted on: 2008 March 28
Filed under: Internet, Technology
aggregation, aggregators, feeds, googlereader, information, informationoverload, reading, RSS, skimming
SXSW: Friday and Saturday
We left our apartment in Chicago around 6am and made it to the airport on time. We had a mini freakout when we encountered not one, but two sprawling and packed security check lines. To make matters worse, I only have an expired driver's license for identification and I was a little worried it would hold me up. I performed some ninja moves and found a tucked away security line that not many had discovered and we zipped through. My lack of non-expired identification was actually not that big of deal. They lady hassled me a little bit and then ...
Posted on: 2008 March 08
Filed under: Blogging, Health & Lifestyle, Internet, Social Networking, Technology
Find me on FriendFeed
FriendFeed is a site that lets you view something like your "Friends Feed" on Facebook but for all of their online activities! Here's my page, add me! http://friendfeed.com/clint
Posted on: 2008 February 26
Filed under: Internet, Social Networking
TechCocktail 7
These things are so packed I can never find anyone I actually want to talk to. I still meet new people every time though. Here's a photo of me and Jacqui waiting for the bartenders to start handing out the booze! Link: TechCocktail
Posted on: 2008 February 23
Filed under: Internet, Social Networking, Technology
Steve Jobs Is Your New Bicycle killed the meme
My stupid little site got a lot of linkage. The first big site to link was Violet Blue's TinyNibbles.com (NSFW). I emailed Violet a screen grab of what I considered to be one of the funnier lines I wrote, "Steve Jobs Told Katie Cotton That You're Rude," because it was specifically about her (Violet's) experience with Steve Jobs on the floor of Macworld. That got a lot of people linking to the site on Pownce, Twitter, and elsewhere. Yesterday Eric Zorn, a technology blogger at the Chicago Tribune, emailed me with a series of questions about. His article on the ...
Posted on: 2008 February 22
Filed under: Apple, Fun, Internet
barackobamaisyournewbicycle, isyournewbicycle, meme, stevejobs, stevejobsisyournewbicycle
Steve Jobs Is Your New Bicycle
Link: http://stevejobsisyournewbicycle.com
Posted on: 2008 February 19
Filed under: Internet
South by Southwest Interactive
Yes, Jacqui and I are heading south this March. To Austin, Texas for South by Southwest, or SXSW as the kids say. A lot of really cool people from all over the country who also happen to be friends are going too. I am also excited to be attending my first conference in a long time where I am not media. That means I can have fun, enjoy things, learn stuff, goof around with friends, stay up as late as I want, and get a pony for Christmas too! For those who may not know exactly what South by Southwest ...
Posted on: 2008 February 07
Filed under: Internet, Marketing, Programming, Social Networking, Technology
Javascript Loading Speed
A great post by John Resig, the lead developer of jQuery. The pbWiki guys did an excellent analysis of many different Javascript libraries and there are a few takeaways that web developers should note. On the subject of compressing your Javascript files: Looking at the speed of loading jQuery in three forms: normal, minified (using Yahoo Min), and packed (using Packer). By order of file size, packed is the smallest, then minifed, then normal. However, the packed version has an overhead: It must be uncompressed, on the client-side, using a JavaScript decompression algorithm. This unpacking has a tangible cost in ...
Posted on: 2008 February 05
Filed under: Internet, Programming, Technology
How to add or update your Google Reader profile
As a service to all my new Google Reader friends, here is a short tutorial on how to update your Google Reader profile so you can add at least a nice little icon for your account. Why would you want to do this? Well, for one, it's tough to tell you all apart at a quick glance! Without an icon, my friends list looks like this: Not only does that list look boring, it's hard to tell everyone apart unless I read their names. Here's how you update your profile, which can include a lot more than just a user ...
Posted on: 2008 February 03
Filed under: Internet, Social Networking
New blogs I'm reading
As I mentioned in my previous post, my new organization system has allowed me to check out a bunch of new blogs and I really wanted to post here about the sites I'm keeping in case other people might be interested in checking them out. HorsePigCow - This is the blog of Tara Hunt. She's co-founder of Citizen Agency in SF. The Ministry of Type - Another typography blog, but I like the pace and subjects showcased here. Andrew Mager's Blog - Virginian, now lives in the bay area, works at CNET. Loves to get his photo taken with people. ...
Thanks to everyone who's added me on Google Reader
I just wanted to drop a quick line here and thank all the people who added me as a friend on Google Reader. I'm already seeing a lot of cool posts I probably would've never come across normally!
Posted on: 2008 February 03
Filed under: Internet, Social Networking, Technology
Did I forget to post about EveryBlock?
A week or two ago, Adrian Holovaty and his intrepid crew at EveryBlock released the product they've been working on for the past 6 months or so. His team of Paul Smith, Wilson Miner, and Daniel X. O'Neil have put together a site that aggregates civic information like business licenses and street closings and mashes them together with crime data, business reviews from Yelp, missed connections & lost and found reports from Craigslist, and more. All these stats can be broken down, viewed by neighborhood or zip code, and analyzed. Most common crime in Chicago? Theft! Other weird stuff I ...
Posted on: 2008 February 02
Filed under: Internet, Journalism, Technology
adrianholovaty, chicago, django, everyblock, hyperlocal, journalism, nyc, SF, wilsonminer
Django People
DjangoPeople is a site put together by Simon Willison & Natalie Downe that hopes to gel the Django community at large into a more cohesive group. Simon puts it this way: I'm constantly surprised by the number of people I run in to at conferences (or even in one case on the train) who are using Django but are completely invisible to the Django community. It seems that this is the downside of having good documentation: many people just read it and start building, without ever showing their face on the mailing lists or IRC. The site allows you to ...
Posted on: 2008 January 22
Filed under: Django, Internet, Social Networking, Technology
django, gmaps, google, maps, mashup, nataliedowne, simonwillison
Bits and bobbles before Macworld
Things have been moving extremely quickly in our run up to the week of Macworld over the past few days. Because I have so little time, I am proceeding to engage in a massive brain dump. In no specific order, here we go: I've secured a G4 Powerbook to use next week from our good friend Adam Received the Eye-Fi and discovered that it is extremely close to being able to perform the tasks I wished, but falls oh so short. I'll talk about those in an upcoming article on the device on Infinite Loop. Besides not being able to ...
Facebook Shared Items now in Tumble Log. It was harder than it should've been!
As a point of notification, I've now started to include my Facebook Shared Items in my Tumble Log (how's that for openness!). While it's technically true that I can export all of my shared items from Facebook via a handy RSS feed, it's not nearly that cut & dry. I treat Facebook Shared Items as a sort of social bookmarking service. I have a bookmarklet in my browser's toolbar and when I run across a site I enjoy, I stab it, enter any thoughts of my own and click submit. Facebook tries to extract an image from the page as ...
Posted on: 2008 January 05
Filed under: Internet, Social Networking, Technology
dataportability, export, facebook, feed, import, RSS, socialgraph, socialnetworking, syndication
Django and Gmail: SSL Timeout. To patch or not to patch.
There are updates at the bottom of this post and in the comments Do you use Gmail as your mail server in your Django projects? So far this has never been an issue, but I ran into it on this server. I have code in my project to shoot me an email whenever someone leaves a comment on the site, moderated or not. What I was seeing on my production server but not my development machine was that the mandatory SSL connection required by Gmail was timing out. Specifically, the error was this: Exception Type: sslerror Exception Value: The read ...
Cursor*10: Cool addicting flash game
What you see above is the title screen for a flash game called Cursor*10. Made by Yoshio Ishii, you click on the stairs to take you to the next level. In the first few levels you can easily find the set of stairs, but in successive levels it gets hard and takes more time to reveal the icon. Here's where the cool part comes in. You have ten "cursors" or lives and you can cooperate with yourself to go higher. Whatsa?? When you play your second, third, et cetera cursors, you see all of the previous attempts ghosted against your ...
Posted on: 2008 January 03
Filed under: Fun, Internet, Marketing
advertising, ferryhalim, flashgames, games, interactive, internetgames, marketing, onlinegaming, orsinal
Your social graph: do you own the data?
A big stupid brou-ha-ha erupted last night when blogged Robert Scoble ran a script written by Plaxo against his 5,000 Facebook friends' information and got banned in short order. Scoble initially posted that Facebook banned his account and only later admitted he'd been screen scraping, or brute-force removing information from Facebook using an unnamed tool by a 3rd party (he was under NDA). Scoble was miffed that Facebook would ban him for trying to help "free" his "own social data" that "he owns." This isn't a new movement, people have been pressuring Facebook for a while now to let them ...
Posted on: 2008 January 03
Filed under: Blogging, Internet
facebook, karaswisher, nickcarr, plaxo, portability, privacy, scoble, scrape, socialgraph
Live blogging and the Eye-Fi Wireless 2 gigabyte SD camera memory card
Jacqui and I (and others at Ars Technica) have done the live blogging thing enough to know that orchestrating the whole affair can be a challenge with only two people in attendance. Unlike the mega-sites Engadget and Gizmodo who can afford and finagle up to four people to sit in the press area, take photos, transfer them, format and upload them, manage the live blogging itself, et cetera. When we go to an event like WWDC, MacWorld, or TechCrunch40, we generally only have two people in the keynote (if we're lucky). Most of the time there is only a single ...
Posted on: 2008 January 03
Filed under: Internet, Technology
apple, ars, arstechnica, camera, conferences, dslr, eyefi, liveblogging, macworld, mwsf, wwdc
My Twitter Statistics
Damon Cortesi has written a Perl script that downloads all of your tweets to Twitter, aggregates them in useful ways, and provides a nice looking Numbers template for presentation of the data. Here are my stats for the past year: For some reason I tweet a lot more on Tuesday than any other day of the week. Weird. Via Gruber
Web Applications I Use on a Daily Basis
I saw Michael Arrington post his list over on TechCrunch and since I have always been a proponent of using online tools over desktop applications to get things done. In the past year though, it has become even easier to make that transition. Whereas I swore off desktop mail clients years ago and went 100% Gmail, I just recently made the jump from NetNewsWire to Google Reader (mostly for the cool sharing support and persistence everywhere, including the fancy mobile interface for my iPod touch and Blackberry). So here's a list of all the online tools I use on a ...
Posted on: 2008 January 01
Filed under: Internet, Technology
analytics, bookmarking, facebook, flickr, gmail, google, googlereader, lastfm, tools, twitter, web, web2point0, yelp
Vote Jacqui Cheng as sexiest geek of 2007 on Wired
Do it for Jacqui and do it for Ars! Go here http://reddit.wired.com/sexygeeks2007/?s=new Find Jacqui Cheng Vote!
Where is your god now?
This post specifically targeted at Micah Strand:
by Clint Ecker
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