RasterWeb!
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Believe it or not, this drawing was inspired by this tweet from jdavid. I like drawing cats, almost as much as I like drawing owls. I’m pretty sure I refined my owl drawing skills back in the 6th grade. Maybe next time I’ll draw an owl.
I’ve had a renewed interest in my data lately, and that’s manifested itself in making sure I’ve got copies of my data. Those bits and pieces we so easily create on other web site? I want them. I want them “here”, where here is under my own control, on my own site, my own server, not just living in the cloud somewhere, at the whim of some 3rd party.
See, I’ve been using Twitter for a long time… since September 2006 supposedly. I’d love to go back and see what my first dozen tweets look like, but Twitter doesn’t allow that. I’ve been kicking myself for not saving all of that data since the beginning, but with micro-content you tend to think that a. It’s tiny, so it doesn’t matter, and b. It’ll always be there. We’ve learned (time and time again) that this isn’t the case.
About 2 years ago I was doing some Drupal work and set up an aggregator to ingest my Twitter feed, which managed to back up a large portion of my tweets, but not all of them. It was more experimenting with Drupal than trying to create a good backup. Still, I was slightly happier knowing I had some sort of archive. I still wanted something that would display my own content (tweets) on my own site.
I then found Tweet Nest. Developed by Andy Graulund (@graulund) it’s a simple open source PHP/MySQL application that does just what I wanted. It grabs your tweets from Twitter using the API, and stores and displays them on your own site. Perfect!
The install was pretty painless, and I actually spent more time customizing the CSS (and I’m still not happy with what I came up with.) Of course two days after I installed it, it appeared to stop working. But alas, no worries, it was just a “rate limit freakout” with the Twitter API. After that, things have been smooth.
Tweet Nest also did a great job of grabbing all of my tweets as far back as October 2009. Not quite back to September 2006, but I’m starting to think that will never happen. But, I did manage to get tweets as far back as March 2008, thanks to another service called Backupify. Now I’ve got to find a good way to load the data into Tweet Nest, and I’ll have most (but not all) of my tweets stored on my own site.
You can find my archived tweets at rasterweb.net/micro, and just like my recent Delicious/Scuttle/bookmarks exploration, I now feel that much better about my data. (But I’m not stopping there. The next project may take quite a bit more hacking on my part, but it’s another one that’s long overdue.)
So go check out Tweet Nest if you want an application on your own server, or Backupify if you just want a nice, secure backup.
I’m typically not one to obsess over statistics related to the visitors of this web site, but I figured I’d take a look and see what the numbers might tell me.
Firefox is the winner here, which wasn’t too surprising to me. I was surprised to see Chrome ahead of Safari though, even if by a small percentage. Of course I’m saddened that Internet Explorer even shows up at all. At least Chrome beat IE. Also, welcome SeaMonkey user!
Too many Windows users! I’m kidding… sort of. I mean, I tend to write about things related to Macs, Linux, and open source… none of which are Windows. My assumption is that the people with corporate jobs who are forced to use Windows machines at work (but use Macs and Linux machines at home) tend to browse this site while on the job. Yeah, that makes sense. Also, welcome to both Android users, and that lone Playstation Portable user!
Firefox / Windows users take the lead! So at least some Windows users are smart enough to install Firefox. Not surprising, as I think it’s been at least a few years since even die-hard Microsoft fans realized that Firefox is a better/safer browsing experience than Internet Explorer. As for IE being second? Those are obviously the corporate drones who do not have privs to install Firefox. At least Safari made it into the list once… Also, welcome Mozilla Compatible Agent / iPhone (what is that exactly!?) and your friend using Mozilla / Linux!
Hooray for more pixels! Is no one visiting this site on their shiny new Netbook? I spent so much time optimizing for 800×600 when I got my Eee PC.. all for naught! Those 1920×1080 screens must be all the designers I know. And that 320×396? That’d be the iPhone.
So join me in welcoming all visitors to the site… be they Chrome / Windows users, or iPad users, 1024×600 screen resolution users. Welcome!
One of the reasons I love Mozilla so much is the diversity of projects that have come out of the technology they’ve created. Take for instance, the Pencil Project, which has a mission to “build a free and open source tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use.”
I spent a little time playing with Pencil in Firefox (there’s also a standalone version if you’re using Windows or Linux, made possible by XULRunner) and it’s a nice little prototyping toolbox.
Here’s what the Pencil UI looks like when run in Firefox on Mac OS X. The left side contains your typical drawing elements, bits, and pieces, and the right side is your canvas.
Here’s the “Sketchy GUI” collection, which simulates rough sketches of UI elements, allowing you to quickly mock-up what something like a web app control panel might look like.
Here’s a quick mock-up I did with Pencil. Wow, it looks just like an actual sketched mock-up of a web UI element… pretty amazing, eh?
Pencil also lets you drop images into the canvas and resize and crop them, so you could use it as a quick-n-dirty (somewhat limited) image editing application that runs within Firefox.
There’s much better screen shots at the Pencil site. There’s also guides for users, and developers, and plenty of other stuff to check out, so get prototyping!
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Do you have a Mobile Telephone? Is it 1995? You must have one by now…. They are all the rage! Everyone who is anyone has one! You should get one… I’ll call you when you get one. They are the FUTURE!
