freeform goodness

Chris added location stuff to his blog and blamed me. :) His solution was a little more technically involved than mine— he used an actual framework, where I just parse a feed into its constituent atoms (pun intended.)

(Disclaimer: as Chris argues, and I fully agree, I’m not worried about the privacy implications of the service— my stored location is only updated when I choose it to be, and I completely control the update frequency and geo-resolution of the updates)

I signed up for Yahoo’s Fire Eagle long ago, back before I even had an idea of what it could be good for. I liked the architectural purity of putting location data in one place and permitting apps to use it, as long as I could opt-in / opt-out at will. Rather than updating several “silos” with location data, Fire Eagle provides a location store and a defined API for apps to fetch it. Fire Eagle looked like it would be fun to play around with, but I didn’t do anything at all with it for a few months:

1. I didn’t have a handy way to update my location,
2. Even if I did go through the trouble of doing so, there weren’t any turnkey ways to get the data back out and do anything useful fun with it.

A few months ago, that changed. I signed up with Brightkite during their closed beta. Brightkite is a social network that lets users leave 140-character updates, photos, etc. (sound familiar?) but with one killer extra feature— every update has a geographical component. Optionally, you can just use it to “check in” at locations. When you do so, your Brightkite location gets updated, and if you “connect the dots” so does your Fire Eagle store. They’ve got a very nice mobile site and an even better iPhone app.

A guy named Richard Metzler wrote a mashup-enabler called Eaglefeed that talks to the Fire Eagle service and provides location data in several easy to digest forms: namely, Atom, JSON, and GIF. I julienne the Atom feed with the feed parser and plop the peelings into the left sidebar of the blog along with a PNG version of the map graphic. Like almost everything else in the sidebars, I display the location info statically, refreshing it once an hour— since I generate my blog pages dynamically, making the sidebars static keeps page load times reasonable.

:: Dave Walker 17:01 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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For the 0.0 of you who care, I did some long-overdue cruft cleansing from the ffg front page. The template shrank in size by nearly a third, and (more importantly) I dropped two old script files that were almost never used. I haven’t profiled it, but it certainly seems to load faster now.

:: Dave Walker 12:10 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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I spent about 10 minutes in Dashcode (and really, that’s all it took) making a better Mobile Safari version of this site. It’s nothing fancy, it just repurposes the Atom feed and wraps it in some CSS and JavaScript.

It’s probably not useful to anyone other than me and Dad. :)

:: Dave Walker 06:28 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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I’d heard about Tumblr before, but I’d never quite figured out what it would give me that I couldn’t already achieve via this blog, or Twitter, or del.icio.us, or moodmat, or any of the other places I sporadically attempt to bore people. I’ve finally figured it out — it works best for things that are a little too substantial to be tweets, are more than just random linkdrops, but don’t quite justify a full blog entry (general purpose nor music specialty). So I have fractional horsepower freeform goodness.

The stalker feed covers it all, anyway, and then some.

:: Dave Walker 09:52 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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The newly free NetNewsWire has this way of letting you know that your weblog isn’t updated enough — it turns its display of the feed title a lovely Zune-y brown:

I’m in Philadelphia for the week, if anything fun happens I’ll let ya know.

:: Dave Walker 20:54 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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OK, not really. I’m about to move to Leopard on the machine that hosts this blog, so, if it doesn’t come back and you can’t read this, you know why. :).

:: Dave Walker 14:30 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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Quiet over here but we’re posting like crazy at Moodmat. Take a look.

:: Dave Walker 16:02 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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Yeah, I’m an idiot. I’m blaming it on the anaesthesia.

:: Dave Walker 11:57 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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As mentioned earlier, things are starting to crank over at moodmat. Just because I haven’t posted here this week, it doesn’t mean that I’m not blogging somewhere.

:: Dave Walker 17:00 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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Hello dumb-as-dirt comment spammer. It’s been a while since we’ve talked. After I added CAPTCHAS, I guess you decided you didn’t like me much anymore. Recently I’ve noticed you cautiously edging your way back into my company, looking bashfully at your shoes as you post links about bestiality, incest, and various quasi-legal pharmaceuticals. Here’s the thing, though — you have to manually post your comments with a web browser, and I have a UNIX filesystem-based blogging backend. You have IE for Windows, and I have find, grep, xargs, sed, and rm. It’s like bringing a knife to a gunfight, kid.

:: Dave Walker 12:02 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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