I’ve given Yahoo! 360° a bit of a spin (damn, am I witty or what?) and so far it looks interesting. To fill in my lists of stuff (movies, books, music, etc.) I just copied and pasted my stuff from Friendster, and that worked pretty well. (Insert rant here about some open data format like FOAF so I could just point these things at a URL to fill in my data…)

My guess (I know, I’m so full of “insider info”) is that things are only gonna get better. I’m basing this off of seeing “Coming soon! Share your blog, photos and other RSS-enabled content on your Yahoo! 360° page.” which I’m hoping can make Yahoo! 360° into an uber-aggregator of sorts, but can they pull it off? Who knows?

Anyway, I’ve so far not had any problems, and so far can’t really rave about it. I’m going to reserve judgement until I get to kick the tires a bit more.

(Oh, if you happen to know me, and want an invite, let me know.)

Web site reporting… What to do?

Let’s see, I used to deal with WebTrends, though not by my choice - I hated it.
(Francisco Partners to Acquire WebTrends.) I know folks who looked at and tested using Urchin as well. (Google Agrees To Acquire Urchin.) Ah, there’s AWStats, as long as you don’t fall victim to any security issues…

Personally, I’m still an old school guy, and do just fine with Analog. Are there other good options out there I don’t know about?

web geek sez:

“if it ain’t got a url, it don’t exist”

That’s my quote of the day, because when anyone sends me an email or IM that asks some question about some site (of which there are many) my first question always seems to be “What’s the url?” Because really, if it’s a question about something that should happen, or not happen, or display, or not display, and it’s in relation to a web site, there must be a url involved, right?

Wow, last week on Upcoming.org:

Within the next seven days, I’m committing myself to finishing some long-requested features on the site…

Now, this week on Upcoming.org:

As promised, some huge changes to Upcoming.org! The short list: support for personal and self-promotional events, tagging of events, a complete API, improved visual design, and e-mail/SMS reminders…

That’s right, new stuff, including (everybody loves) tags and most importantly, a RESTful API!

I started dropping some events into Upcoming.org last week, so now I’ve got some data to play with. If I get a few free minutes each week (is that likely?) I will try to add more. Heck, if anything I’ll at least add the events that I plan to attend. Maybe you should do the same?

While just letting the OpenPodcast.org material play, I came across some band podcasting their practice. Genius! What a use of podcasting!

The band is the nineteenthirteen massacre, and here’s a bit from their bio:

Formed in February 2005, the nineteenthirteen massacre quickly implemented an RSS feed to offer listeners an alternative to mass media controlled propaganda. D.I.Y. in their punk roots, and disgusted with the direction in which music industry is headed, podcasting and the nineteenthirteen massacre were a natural match…

Even if their music isn’t your cup o’ tea, these guys are breaking new ground. If I was 15 years younger, it’s exactly what I would have done. ;)

Hey, you wanna hear some dork talk to another dork? Then check out the most recent Weekly Ramble.

(This is the longest you’ve ever heard me talk on a podcast, guaranteed!)

I went out EasterSkating today… What is EasterSkating? It’s when you go out skating on Easter. Any other day it would be called RasterSkating, but we’ll make an exception today. I mean, it’s not like Easter is really observed as a holiday anyway, not like Groundhog’s Day, right?

The details? It was sunny out, and over 40 degrees, and I went about 2 miles. I didn’t fall (came close once) took about 4 breaks to stare at the river, waterfall, lakes, etc… Perhaps in the summer I’ll offer RasterSkating Tours of the area… Well, that’s if my RasterCanoe Tours idea doesn’t take off.

I’ve got the search working again, this time using mnoGoSearch, which I must say I’m finding extremely nice!

It’s all written in C, and it’s fast, and it stores data in MySQL and you can use templates, and blah, blah, blah…

I first saw mnoGoSearch about 6 years ago when it was called UdmSearch, and it’s improved quite a bit since then. Hooray for open-source search software.

I’ve still got some work to do customizing the template, and in setting up an indexing schedule, but so far I’m very impressed, as are the people I’ve shown it to. Neat!

Ok, it’s time… 2005 is the year I will actually learn Java. No. Really. I mean it this time. Of course I’m excited… No I’m not being sarcastic! Really.

In fact, I’ll be in Minneapolis for the No Fluff Just Stuff Java Symposium next month.

It’s been many years since I’ve been to Minneapolis, so that will be interesting. I’m not actually sure I will make it, but if the RasterMobile! can make the trip, I will be there.

I mainly need to learn a lot more about JSP, since I’ll be hacking at that this year. From my experience so far with JSP, it’s pretty much like PHP, or ASP, or (shudder!) ColdFusion, But with, you know, Java.

It’ll be nice to be forced to… I mean, able to learn something new. Heck, who knows? I might even release some JSP-based app? (Of course I won’t actually run it on my server, since I don’t run Tomcat…)

Ok, come on now, I’m serious, it will be cool to learn more Java. There, I’m done.

(If you’re going to be at the No Fluff Just Stuff Java Symposium in Minneapolis April 29th through May 1st, let me know…)

Back when Google Maps showed up, the cool thing about it (from the hacker’s perspective) was that the URL’s were simple and elegant, and you could use something like this:

  http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=43.116%2C-88.491

Where you stick in your latitute and longitude and get a map. Nice eh? It’s not exactly a standard, but it’s sort of how everyone does it (more or less) and makes it easy to write a plugin to use that data.

In contrast Yahoo! Maps didn’t seem to be able to do this. Their URLs were long and scary and obfuscated. Or so it seemed… I managed to figure out that this will work:

  http://maps.yahoo.com/maps_result?lat=43.116&lon=-88.491

Am I the last one to know this? I mean, it will redirect you to one of those long and scary and obfuscated URLs, but it will actually work, and you’ll get a map. (Add the parameter mag=4, or some other number, to affect the magnification.)

So I once again hacked at the Geo Plugin and added Yahoo! Maps. It should be working now on this site. I may switch back to Google Maps in the future. I’ll leave that option open. You never know who will have the better API. ;)

Oh yeah, just can’t get enough of Flickr! Can you? Of course not!

See A day in your life…:

21st March, 2005 is being documented in front of our eyes. A group of Flickrites have formed a group called a day in the life of…, where members can contribute 5 photos to the group’s pool to show the world what they’re up to.

Of course you could just use my Flickr Search and search for “life” with a start and end date of 2005-03-21.

Besides, it’s quite shortsighted to use the tag dilomar05 because when March 2105 rolls around, well, what are they gonna do then? Hmmm? Have we learned nothing from Y2K?

I’ve changed the name of RasterWeb! to RastrWeb! (note that I’ve had the ! for many years already.) I mean, Flickr is just over a year old, and Yahoo! buys them for a zillion dollars, right? (note that RasterWeb! is 7.5 year old!)

Ok, now since RasterWeb! has been around more than 7 times longer than Flickr, you would think I’d ask 7 times as much for it, but since we probably don’t have quite as many users, and our API isn’t done yet, we’re willing to cut a deal.

Come one man! I’m down with the Flickr API and the Yahoo! API…

Yahoo! are you listening? Buy me now before those fools at Google make me an offer… You think I wanna be the next Blogger?

(Crap! Do you think I should have went with RastrWb? Note: I would be willing to change the name again if needed.)

Oh wait, I meant to say Yahoo! buys Flickr, and you know what? I think that’s ok…

Yahoo! has been doing the right things lately, I’ve mentioned the Yahoo! API and what fun that is, and how Yahoo! seems to be listening to suggestions, and heck, with someone like Jeremy having an influence on things, I think we’re doing ok.

As for the Flickrization of Yahoo! I’m all for it. I hope the Flickr folks can give Yahoo! that extra kick it needs to really be the prime example of next-gen web-think.

Is it a weird concidence that right after I toyed with the Yahoo! API, I started toying with the Flickr API?

So with all that, I present to you, my Flickr Search, using a bit of Perl and the Flickr API. Let me know what you think.

Sigh, poor US Cellular. I had to stop by their store yesterday to handle a billing issue (whereby they had credited an old account, but didn’t really make that clear except by putting CR next to the amount it said I owed) and while Britt was quite helpful in the matter, when she was done she asked if she could do anything else for me. I asked if US Cellular used GSM phones at all. She said no, though it seemed as though she really felt bad about it. I said I was looking to get a Series 60 phone, possibly something like a Nokia 7610… Then is seemed like she was just bummed out that she had nothing to offer me, knowing that US Cellular only deals in CDMA phones, which I’m not interested in. As I left, Britt said something along the lines of “Ok, well, if you ever need a CDMA phone, keep us in mind.” Sure, Britt, will do…

I just had to share this one!

I’ve been working with the Flickr API to build collage-type images out of the square thumbnails when the two images in the center lined up and gave a little girl some very big legs. No, I didn’t plan it or fake it, I did however probably load 20 or 30 of the collages before I saw anything like this. Neat!