RasterWeb!I remember hearing about XAMPP a while back, but since I finally decided to do something about the old Fedora box at home with Apache, and an old MySQL, and no PHP, etc… I figured I’d give The Apache Friends’ XAMPP a try…
Can I say wow? After downloading, the install consisted of expanding the tarball into /opt, and then starting it up. So within minutes you’ve got Apache (with SSL!) MySQL, PHP, Perl, and other stuff that all works together!
Damn that’s cool… Thanks Apache Friends!
It started like any other day in Madison… until…
“What do we want?”
“Brains!”
“When do we want them?”
“Brains!”
As I mentioned in Shooting Zombies, I went to Madison, I saw the Zombies, they ate my brain… I’ve got a few photos on Flickr which aren’t that good, but that’s because I was also holding a video camera while trying to take pictures… (Video will be up soon.)
Zombies are everywhere:
I’ll add to this entry if I find more good links. I’m hoping to have some video online this week, it’ll be over at tinkernet. (I’ve got over 40 minutes to edit!)
Oh poor design (and usability) how you taunt me!
I keep finding that there are certain sites that I’d like to use, or sometimes have to use, but it just pains me to do so because the design is so bad! How bad? Sooooo bad! Often the usability is nowhere to be found either…
…and it hurts… Oh how it hurts!
1997: Blogging? Writing is best left to journalists, You need professional writing skills, the average joe can’t write…
2004: Podcasting? You need a radio voice and broadcasting experience, the average joe can’t talk the talk…
2005: Videoblogging? TV studios and Hollywood do video, the average joe doesn’t have what it takes…
Newflash: The average joes can sometimes kick the the big boys to the curb…
Remember del.icio.us? Of course you do! You probably use it daily… Don’t we all?
Heck, long ago I even proclaimed that del.icio.us is neat. gosh, I even wrote some nasty code named dir.licio.us, and some people even used it. dir.licio.us was a hack, and it’s got some problems, but with many things, it’s just a proof of concept to me. (Note: It’s a massive memory hog since it builds a lot of large hashes in memory while running.)
So what does this all have to do with Scuttle? See, Scuttle is neat. It’s bascially a GPL‘d del.icio.us clone written in PHP using MySQL. There is also de.lirio.us, which uses Rubric, which is written in Perl. Now, I’m a perl guy and installing Rubric was a royal PITA for me, so I gave up on it quickly. Scuttle on the other hand, was dead simple. (Grab the 0.5.0 version from cvs though.)
You could use either the del.icio.us or Scuttle web sites, where you get to leverage the social aspect of these apps, but are at the mercy of things you don’t control, or you could install Scuttle on your own server and control it, but lose the social aspect… What do to? Behold! Scuttle supports the del.icio.us API! This opens up a world of possibilities…
Ok, that last one is (sort of ) a joke, but the point is, for most of the complaints I’ve heard about del.icio.us, you can probably solve them with some combination of all of these things. del.icio.us servers down, or too slow, or doesn’t support private bookmarks? Scuttle not social enough, not enough users, lacking features? Fix, fix, fix…. (Need more ideas? See How to Make Delicious Not Suck.)
Code? Yes, I have some code… Right now my code pulls the entries from my del.icio.us account and syncs them to my Scuttle account, as well as a local install of Scuttle. I should get around to cleaning it up and releasing it, I just want to run it for a bit first to see if it behaves well…
Open-source, and just as important, open API‘s make it all possible. It’s exciting stuff!