Next serial enthusiasm?

January 28, 2008 – 1:47 am

Update: Yeah - I sent out a request for comments after breaking my comments. Ugh. Thanks if you tried commenting, and I hope you might try again. If not, thanks for stopping by anyway!

So, I’ve been basically hacking on nothing after work for quite some time now. I’ve had a few false starts, but have been finding it hard to get motivated to move on anything. There are a few things I’ve started, though, which might be worth returning to and finishing. If I were to do that - or start something new - which of these do you think might be worth my time?

  • FeedMagick2 - web command-line toolkit for munging and filtering feeds, written in PHP 5
  • XoxoOutliner - a browser-based outliner with a REST API, written in PHP 5
  • Learn Django or Pylons, do social networky stuff and explore OpenID and OAuth?
  • Explore CodeIgniter or Kohana further, do social networky stuff that can ideally be installed alongside WordPress and PHP 5?
  • Something else? OpenSocial? Keep hacking on my Centro’s Blazer browser and do something silly and Web 2.0?
  • Level my troll to 70 and work on getting sweet PvP gear?
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Got me a Centro

January 3, 2008 – 3:37 pm

So after taking a lazy look at a variety of smartphones and whatnot for my next upgrade, I figured that I just couldn’t beat this cheap Centro, and so far I’ve not been disappointed.

That’s partially because it’s cheap, and partially because Palms and Handsprings have been my main mobile platform for almost a decade now. Seeing as my last one was a Treo 600, this thing is a big upgrade.

Now, let’s see how well this blog-by-email thing works.

By l.m.orchard | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (0)

An Accumulator for all my stuff

December 25, 2007 – 12:25 am

No one’s really noticed, but I’ve changed email providers about a dozen times in the past decade. And, that’s because my email address hasn’t changed — thanks very much to the wonderful and awesome Pobox.com.

Likewise, I’ve hopped from platform to platform in blogging and writing and generally emitting memelets from my brain. In contrast to Pobox.com though, anyone who could be bothered to follow me would have had to keep track of every new feed and site which happened to strike my fancy. Knowing myself, I don’t expect that my wandering ways to change — so the number of feeds in which my stuff lands will only increase.

So, I’d like to fix that. In case you haven’t seen it, I’ve started building an Accumulator for all the various feeds and accounts between which I’m distributing my attention and User Generated Content these days.

I’m hoping to make this the definitive one-stop-shop for following me and my crap, eventually offering feeds at the root of decafbad.com with facilities for picking and choosing what to include and what to leave out. Hopefully, this will leave me able to just simply point interested parties at decafbad.com, and let them explore from there — rather than wandering over to this blog that’s mostly quiet these days.

And, of course, if in the end no one actually cares about my spew anyway — at least I’ll have had fun with yet another new project.

Oh, and Happy Holidays to you and yours!

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wow, eve, and delicious

November 20, 2007 – 11:20 pm

Come see me try to write big words on my new blog about what I hope is not a new MMORPG addiction, while I work through the aftermath of this thing having been hacked.

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hacked?

November 13, 2007 – 9:52 pm

Crap. Somehow, someone’s gotten access to edit my posts on this blog and have crapped in loads of viagra linkspam. I’ve probably destroyed the evidence already by deleting the spam as soon as I saw it — and as soon as some friendly readers emailed me pointing at more. I’ve done the obvious, changed my password and tried to lock down the admin pages a bit. But, I don’t know who, how, or why. Ugh.

So, my apologies if anyone sees any offers for penis pills around these parts. A heads up would be kindly appreciated as I scour my records and grumble.

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cheating on my “real” blog

November 12, 2007 – 8:00 pm

decafbad recaffeinated is what I’m so far calling the Tinderbox-built blog with which I’m cheating on both my OPML blog and my “real” blog. Come take a look, if you’re so inclined to watch another of my experiments. (Update: It’s recaffeinated, not recaffinated. I ar gud speler.)

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Outsourcing creativity via APIs

November 1, 2007 – 2:17 pm

Tim Faulkner at Valleywag: “I blame Twitter. It’s not enough to be a website anymore. Oh no. You must be a platform. Have an API. Court developers. Build an “ecosystem.” Whatever. You know what an application programming interface really is? An admission that you’re too poor, cheap, or uncreative to build all the features your website needs.“

Welcome to Web 2.0, Tim - we’ve been doing this thing for most of a decade or longer now. I know this is coming from Valleywag and fine-tuned as trollbait and all, but this just struck me as particularly dumb.

It’s probably because most of my job right now is working on APIs and feeds for delicious, and I’m partial to the concept in general. Because, yeah, really: An API is an admission that you haven’t the creativity or time to build everything your website needs. No one does. Anyone who doesn’t make (or denies) that admission is either lying, clueless, or sadly mistaken. Anyone who starts with that admission and manages to open up to let users fill in their own gaps has a chance at hosting something really interesting.

And, yeah, thanks to the swooning hype over Facebook and others, it’s a little over-exposed right now and tickling curmudgeonly snark-emitters. But, that doesn’t mean the concept’s a bad one or that it’s going away.

By l.m.orchard | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (2)

Twitter’s Mojo Bubble

October 17, 2007 – 10:36 pm

Michael Gartenberg: “First, it’s another queue to check. … It looks like I could add Twitter into the flow of RSS feeds but do I really want to do that?“

No, you don’t want to do that.

If you’re “checking your Twitter queue” - you’re doing it wrong. You should be using something like Twitteriffic or a good IM client that semi-unobtrusively surfaces recent Twitter activity in the periphery of your screen. Things either catch your eye occasionally, or the messages pass you by. It’s okay to miss things. In fact, it’s mandatory to miss lots of things at a fully attentive and conscious level.

And, if you think “I’m going to post to my Twitter Blog now” - you’re doing it wrong in that way too. You should be absentmindedly emitting something barely edited and pondered from your stream of consciousness every now and then. Maybe drop something a little more well-considered every now and then. But, spend any more than 3 seconds or so at a time spewing something into the ether, and you’ve likely missed the Twitter magic.

This stance toward Twitter interaction is where I find the mojo. Outside of those fine lines, the Twitter soap bubble bursts and the magic smoke escapes.

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