This Site Design = FAIL – Tell Me How Much It Sucks
Monday, March 24th, 2008 | New Beginnings | No Comments
I’ve been fooling around with a bunch of different blogging options for this new site, from using a completely different platform to converting projects that I’ve done in the past into pseudo-WP themes….. but have looked at my various homespun designs long enough to realize I can’t make my mind up on what Addicted to 1s and 0s should look like…. so I’ve done what every frustrated 5 year old does…. throw my hands up and pout. I’ve reverted the stylesheet and template back to an old hack job (and not in the good sense of ‘hack’) of one I came across a while ago…fonts mis-matched and all.
That’s where you come in –
What font family would you like to see on here, any particular header font (gotta love sifr)…. layout – 2 column, newspaper style, 3??…..features….? You give the opinion, I’ll code it. If the idea’s good enough, i’ll even scrap the whole template that it currently is doing a disservice to and start from scratch (which i’ve done about 4 times yet never could settle on a design). What do you get in return? Linkage from here and my advertising blog – www.brentter.com, a solid review from me on your own services/site as well as a permanent place on the “designed by” byline in the footer and depending on the suggestion, i’ll even name the sucker after something representative of you and your design prowess.
Rip this place to shreds, pile on the suggestions, tell me how much it sucks, send me death-threats because of its’ hideousness, bring it on!
Let me know how bad this site really is.
You can reach me via twitter at www.twitter.com/brentter
You can reach me via email at brent (at) addto10.com
Or the easiest way is by just using the contact form I’ve placed on the site.
There’s also linkage to just about every other way of reaching me in the sidebar to the right, use whatever way you feel most comfortable to reach me.
I’m suffering from designers block, so I want to hear what you have to say about it. What direction should I take the site-design in?
What should I add, remove, burn?
Pew Pew Pew – The next Lolcats?
Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 | Funny, Random | No Comments
Sorry, I was just sent this one and couldn’t resist – could Pew Pew Pew be the next Lolcats? Lolchurch perhaps?
Sent from friend, but obviously from the Lolcats HQ itself – icanhascheezburger.com.
For those who are really confused, it’s an internet phenomenon similar to stuffonmycat.com, where users submit photos of literally just stuff placed on their cat. Here’s the definition (thanks to Wikipedia) of what constitutes as a lolcat (and yes, there’s also a Loldog version out there called ihasahotdog.com):
A Lolcat is an image combining a photograph of an animal, most frequently a cat, with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption in (often) broken English referred to as Kitty Pidgin, or lolspeak.
Enjoy.
[image source]
SocialThing – An Interactive Social-Site Aggregator
Thursday, March 13th, 2008 | Beta, Mashup, RSS, Tools, WebApps | No Comments
Introducing SocialThing, the latest in social-media site aggregators.
It’s still in beta mode, but as of 12:45pm EST the invite code: “techcrunch” still worked.
Interesting site. Instead of just asking for the location of all of your public feeds like FriendFeed does, it actually has you enter in your login and password to each of the social sites it pulls information from. This is what makes SocialThing different than FriendFeed (and other similar services) – It uses the various API’s, including OAuth with each site so that you can interact with the various feeds as if you were on the site itself. For example, If someone were to send me a message via twitter, I wouldn’t have to leave SocialThing’s site in order to respond. The same goes for the rest of the sites they currently aggregate (Facebook, Pownce, Twitter, Flickr, LiveJournal, and Vimeo).
The purpose of the site is to “Get your digital life together.” And once they start adding more social sites, this should kick services like friendfeed in the rear as it will allow you to actually use this site as a one-stop-shop for your social-networking needs, whereas other social aggregators tend to be just pretty representations of all your RSS feeds. Needless to say this could turn out to be a very useful tool, especially if they were to create some sort of application that could interactive with it (perhaps using Adobe AIR?), a la what twitter + pownce have done.
Taken from their site, it allows you to:
“See everything that’s going on with your friends in all the sites you use, easily figure out where you’re missing connections with your friends, interact with multiple sites at once, and more!
Socialthing! makes it easy to see all the things your friends are doing. It’s a news feed for every site that you use in one place.”
Now lets just see if this thing can actually take off, it seems like every day a new social-feed aggregator is released….I guess that goes to show you how its never good to be first in the sandbox… all it means is that the next killer app to come out in your genre will just incorporate all your positive innovations and most likely learn from your mistakes.
Dual Boot Your iPhone!
Thursday, March 13th, 2008 | Apple, Hack, iPod, Tools, Utilities | 1 Comment
A big problem with the iPhone is that every time Apple releases a software update, those that have unlocked or used some sort of Jailbreak software on it find themselves with an expensive phone that no longer works. A combination of this and the recent release of the iPhone SDK had me thinking about whether or not it would be possible to run multiple versions of the system software so that if an update (or an application I might be testing) were to ruin the phone, there still would be another, working copy available.
This would prevent me from having to do a full-reset anytime I screw up, and/or find myself with a dead phone…… the question then becomes, is it possible to dual-boot an iPhone?
YES
I came across an article last night which tells you exactly how to be able to dual-boot your iPhone in different versions of the system software.
A word of warning though, this is no easy task and primarily involves using the command line, so I would not suggest this for the novice user.
The article was written in part by Jonathan “NerveGas” Zdziarski, a programmer notorious for his iPhone hacks as well as author to recently released book, iPhone Open Application Development. Zdziarski was also the creative mind behind a whole gamut of other iPhone innovations – everything from a Nintendo Emulator to even developing an initial technique that would enable the usage of SSH in your iPhone apps. You can find his blog here – www.zdziarski.com/ but if you really want the most up-to-date scoop on iPhone enhancements/hacks, head on over to their irc channel – #iPhone.
In case you just upgraded your iPhone’s firmware to 1.1.4, here’s a post regarding how to jailbreak it from cre.ations.net, or you can go directly to the source and download ZiPhone.
[original source - iPhone Atlas -- photo credit: the Boy Genius Report]
Yahoo Wants You To Stalk Your Friends – Introducing Fire Eagle
Friday, March 7th, 2008 | API, Beta, Mashup, Tools, Twitter, WebApps | No Comments
Yahoo recently launched Fire Eagle, their first Rails-based web-app that enables you to share your location with other users/services in a variety of ways. It’s still in “beta” mode, but they were smart and came up with a clever way for you to instantly get an invite – By using an already-made mashup incorporating the instant updates. In this case, they chose to use Twitter to interact w/ their api. And after looking at the sample code, it’s pretty easy to setup too. In order to get an instant invite to check-out this beta-release for yourself:
1) First you must have a twitter account (which if you’re reading this blog i’m assuming you already do, even if it was only used once to see what the whole “Twitter” thing was about), you will then need to “follow” DangerDay. That can be done by clicking on the follow link in his profile page or by simply twittering “follow dangerday”
Danger Day will then immediately return the favor by following your twitter account as well, thus enabling you to be able to direct message each other.
2) Now that you’re following DangerDay, you need to get an invite, so next up is direct messaging dangerday with the word “invite”. Once again, this can be done by twittering “d dangerday invite”
DangerDay will then respond with a link for you to follow, enabling you to sign-up on the FireEagle page for an account…what a nice guy
3) Now once you’ve got your account squared away, why not test it out with dangerday? In order to update him as well as the entire Fire Eagle Service as to your location, all you need to do is direct message him again with “u location_here”.. for example: “d dangerday u Atlanta, GA” – that will let dangerday AND Fire Eagle know that I’m currently in Atlanta, GA.
This service, like all other social-dependent ones, will live or die based on whether or not developers get involved and come up with interesting mashups. Right now there are already popular sites that could benefit from being able to twitter or IM an updated location (or be automatically fed coordinates via GPS enabled phones), a good example would be the social travel site Dopplr. This dependency on developers adopting their free Yahoo service isn’t something that I feel is lost on the guys behind this project either – they’re using standardized, open-source tools like OAuth that coders are already familiar with. If they make it easy to incorporate, then they’ve got a better chance of someone using it in their application, even if just for fun. If it was incorporated into a web-app, just using the user’s IP would result in knowing their location and being able to update the service….so the possibilities are endless.
It’s already been incorporated into Facebook so that you can easily stalk follow your friends, I’m sure they’re always just dying to know where I am at all times. Although I will say this – A service like this could come in handy if you were part of a big group trying to meet-up in a crowded location (i.e. somewhere in Austin this weekend for SXSW). One SMS sent to Fire Eagle and then all your buddies would know where you were (i.e. “Already at the bar waiting for you guys to get here!”). And if your phone has GPS enabled, I wouldn’t have even had to send the text, Fire Eagle gives you the option of letting your phone auto-update their service with your whereabouts. Now to find out where another user is, you would only have to use something as simple as the twitter or AIM example from above. So to show you how this works, let’s go back to our good friend dangerday. Direct message him with “q brentter” and it’ll respond with my most recent location (for you non-twitters, that means you’d type: “d dangerday q brentter” but without the quotes).
With the recent release of the iPhone SDK, I can only imagine this service being experimented with alongside the new framework – Erica Sadun in fact has already released an application for your iPhone called firefindme that does just that but without using GPS. Instead she uses another Yahoo service called Zone Tag, which was initially released as a way to geo-tag your Flickr photos based on specific “location tags” that you would assign them (or if you had a phone w/ built-in GPS, it would automatically do it for you).
So far the Developer section of the Fire Eagle site has been steadily growing, with it currently showcasing quick starts, examples api code (right now though only in javascript, php, perl, python, and ruby), and options on various open-source ways to authenticate user sessions. It also looks like they’re hoping to build an application gallery/showcase into the site.
This has some pretty good potential, although personally I feel it’s somewhat of a stretch for it to be utilized in anything major.
And i’m not even going to get into how privacy goes through the window if your phone is sending a webservice updates on where you are. Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb shares similar concerns about the idea of allowing others to track your every movement (You are given the option of it not automatically pinging your GPS enabled phone to update your location, but just like when Facebook announced their new “mini-feed service,” it just gives give me a the creeps)
[source for some of this information came from Jesse Newland's Blog - SoylentFoo]
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