Ministry of Intrigue

Heh, I had a little fun this afternoon writing a little Django app for my site that will regularly import my public Pownce notes and allow me to display them in the sidebar. It’s really just a modified version of the app I’m using for my Twitter statuses, except that it has some additional logic for handling the different types of Pownce notes.

The thing I’m most happy about is that if I post a public Pownce event, it will display the event with the appropriate microformat markup. Events also include a link to a Google Map of the location, as well as a link to an iCal file for the event. Those last two are provided for free by the Pownce API, so it just seemed to make sense to use them.

Eventually, the look will get redesigned as I redo this site’s design, but for now I’m pleased with it.

Happy Powncing!

In case you missed it, Pownce announced the release of the second revision of its public API today. The new API is much more elaborate than the previous version (which was honestly kind of a joke), and promises to be robust enough that interested parties could use it to rewrite the Pownce desktop app from scratch without losing any functionality. This will really encourage a lot of third-party apps to be developed for Pownce, and will probably be the thing to get the adoption of the service to really take off. I hope they have a nice caching solution for the API, because I suspect a lot of folks will be hitting it up soon.

You can find the API documentation here. I haven’t had a chance to give it a thorough review, but my first approximation is that it is just dripping with awesome-sauce. If prompted, I might even go so far as to say, “w00t!” 

Hack away, folks!

Hopefully not too many people tried to stop by the site today, because I had a pretty severe outage due to my own foolishness. I’ve been trying to implement a few new features to the site, and in one particularly bad move I managed to wipe an important file that isn’t stored in my SCM because it is server dependent. I keep it separate to help simplify testing between different servers and in the general hope that one day I’ll be able to abstract away the code for this site so that it can be packaged up and deployed easily to other people’s servers. Anyway, I had wiped the file and replaced it with a shoddily written copy, and when that failed to work I panicked and wiped everything to redeploy my entire installation.

Not my finest moment, not by a long shot.

Anyway, there are a few new features now, only one of which is actually visible to the user, because when you are coding for yourself, you should always put yourself first in line for awesomeness. I made some improvements to the composing process, and did some caching and database backend work. For the user, I’ve made the link roll omnipresent on the site, because links = love and expanded the purpose of the front page a bit. Previously, I would display a heavily truncated edition of my most recent blog post, and my most recent link. On the new front page, you will have more of a short tumblelog of recent activity. Under the advice of my good friend DHP, I’ve made sure that the most recent blog post remains sticky at the top, with the recent activity in all categories down below.

Honestly, I’m still conflicted on this new look, as I’m also tempted to just display the latest item in each category (blog, links and photos), but that seems not much better than I was doing before. I’d love to get your feedback regarding whether you feel the front page is an improvement, or whether you would prefer a tighter summary of each category and quick access to the footer.

I’m amassing quite a todo list for the site, and for my own benefit as well of those of you who are strangely curious, I will share. Here it is in no particular order:

• Finalize front page design (of course)
• Fine tune the caching so that it stays responsive and unobtrusive.
• Develop style sheet for mobile browsers
• Refine default style sheet to improve readability
• Add additional media types for some new projects 
• Finish XML-RPC interface
• Improve internal search application
• Improve Akismet integration (I report spam/ham, but via the command line. Need to add it to admin page)
• Connect OpenID logins to Django auth system to take advantage of native features

That should keep me busy for a little while, I expect. I’ve also got a number of other posts that have been sitting in the queue as drafts including a few reviews I’ve been procrastinating on, so I’ll be finishing those too. Yay, for new content!

Hopefully, I’ll get all of this done soon, but in the meantime you can stalk me via the interwub. Please consider leaving me some feedback either by posting a comment or by emailing me at daniel at andrlik dot org.

Just another quick post that Dan and I just recently did a short podcast on Mahalo. Our contention is that Mahalo, while ostensibly a search engine, has far more in common with Wikipedia than anything else. We also discuss what advantage branding it that way may have, and come to the conclusion that Mahalo is Portal 2.0, but in a good way.

Listen to it here.

<clears throat>

This is actually just a short post to warn you that there will be a pretty major overhaul to the site in the near future. The majority of this will consist of a redesign to improve readability, as well as making the site play nicer with mobile browsers, specifically Opera Mobile and WebKit. I may add a few new features as well, such as a few different media types. Right now the site has clear demarcations for browsing the different types of media, although I am considering also enabling a more tumblelog-like experience. Right now, you can get the tumblelog interface in the primary feed for this site, but I’m going to present a way of getting that experience on the site itself.

I also have a few other surprises in the works that I’m not ready to talk about yet, but they should be pretty cool.

Stay tuned.

On recommendation of far too many people to mention, I’m checking out Google Reader again.

I remember peeking at it when it was first released, when I was stubbornly intent on sticking with browser/desktop based reader, and I remember being less than impressed. In typical Google fashion the initial interface was so sparse and ultimately gave me the initial impression of it being a fairly weak client. In fact, I was so turned off by it, that I never gave it a chance beyond feeding it a few test subscriptions before going back to using Sage.

Ultimately, it would be Bloglines that converted me to web-based feed reading. I fell in love with its simple interface and powerful key commands, as well as the convenience of accessing my feeds everywhere. As I began to imbibe more and more of the Web 2.0 kool-aid, I began to manage more and more of my life on the web. I’ve been using Bloglines for at least nine months now, and I’ve been quite happy with it. The Bloglines notifier held a place of honor in my Firefox status bar, right next to theGmail manager extension.

Now, when I started hearing people recommending Google Reader to me again, I was suspicious that the Google fanboy virus was to blame. However, upon reflecting on the wonder that is Gmail, not to mention Google Calendar and the fantastic overhaul of Google Groups I decided that I’d give Reader another try.

All I have to say is, “Wow.” I’m really impressed with the new interface, it seems to blend the best features of Bloglines, Gmail and more tag-based service like Rojo. The key-commands are similar to Gmail, and uses tags/labels just like Gmail as well. The interface is really nice and I find the interface far more visually pleasing than Bloglines, and not nearly as cluttered as Rojo. I like that when I start reading a feed that items are marked as read when I scroll past them, as opposed to Bloglines which marks every item as read as soon as I open the feed. Also, while I don’t make use of this feature as much, I really like the way Google integrates their feed sharing features into the service. Every feed has the option to be shared, as does each feed item, and each feed item can be emailed with a single click. Very slick.

Those sharing features are also available in Bloglines, but they seem more prominent in Google Reader. On the whole, GR seems more polished, although I do enjoy the simplicity of Bloglines. It remains to be seen if I’m going to switch for good, but I think I’ll run them both parallel for a while and let you all know about the experience.

Incidentally, if you want to try out Google Reader, I’d recommend checking out the Google Reader Notifier extension for Firefox, by Mark D.B.D. It rocks.