Posted by sh1mmer on Mar 15, 2007 in
General So I have this enduring relationship with myself. I’m pretty frikkin’ awesome, at least I think so. However it’s sometimes good to hear how much everyone else likes me too…
With that in mind I’ve been using Technorati to gather the “buzz” about myself for a while. To see which bits of my writing engage the community, etc. More recently I thought I would like to monitor Google rankings. Unlike Technorati you can’t just do any old Google search and hit the feed icon. However Google Alert do something which should fill that gap. Right now I have my 3 narcissistic feeds: “tom croucher”, “tom hughes-croucher” and “kid666″ hooked up to my feed reader.
There are a few issues though. Unless I want to heft some cash, that’s my lot. Google Alert allows you only 3 search feeds before you have to show, the proverbial, green. Also when signing up the default option steers you down the path of getting spammed daily by email reports. You have to poke around a bit to get feeds out. While this isn’t a problem now they are set up, I’m looking for something better, something free-er, like beer.
So if anyone knows of a service or program like Google Alert that is also free, please let me know. Needing an API key is fine, I’m only planning to hit up my searches like once a day.
Technorati Tags:
feeds, google, googlealert
Posted by sh1mmer on Mar 14, 2007 in
Mac The software I use to edit my blog, Marsedit has been under new management for a while. Ranchero who makeNewsgator who own the excellent NetNewsWire sold it off to Red Sweater. However, it seems to be going really well!
Since the ‘takeover’ there have been a promising number of minor updates and the new developer Daniel Jalkut is really responsive. There is also now an IRC channel ##marsedit on irc.Freenode.net.
Daniel also posted about the ability to edit text in almost any editor by pressing Cmd+J. I now have mine set to TextMate for when the posts get a little hairy.
Keep up the great work Dan!
Update: Dan put me right on the business deal, I felt like Valleywag for a second.
Technorati Tags:
Mac, Productivity, blogs, marsedit
Posted by sh1mmer on Mar 13, 2007 in
General Gareth posted an update to the community Werewolf cards project this week. I love the idea because it allows any group which has photos on Flickr to turn them into Werewolf Moo card decks.
That said, I’m still kinda hopeful that someone will photoshop some up too. Not that Mr. Keith needs much help.
Technorati Tags:
Games, werewolf, moocards
Posted by sh1mmer on Mar 12, 2007 in
Accessibility Desert Skies has a post about the new GW Micro Blog. I met Doug recently at an internal Yahoo! developer conference. It’s really great to see an Assistive Technology vendor take steps to engage with the community. Doug is a really great guy and it’s going to be really interesting to keep an eye on what they are doing.
Technorati Tags:
Accessibility, Windows Eyes, blog
Posted by sh1mmer on Mar 11, 2007 in
General In case anyone is wondering what happened I wrote a whole lot on my trip to San Francisco / Sunnyvale, however I worked a whole lot to.
While I am pleased I did find some time to write I didn’t find the time to clean-up and post properly. So I didn’t. Now, on the plane back I’m tidying up a week’s worth of writing to get back posted. Sorry for the deluge of posts.
Posted by sh1mmer on Mar 10, 2007 in
General So I’m flying east today. That means I loose 8 hours. I start at 4 in the afternoon on Saturday, and arrive at 10 in the morning on Sunday but I travel for 10 hours.
Beating out jet-lag is possible two ways, either not sleeping and catching Zzzs at night British time, or getting making yourself sleep on the plane at 7pm San Francisco time and waking up for a new morning when you arrive.
I’d like to do the later but will probably end up doing the former.
Posted by sh1mmer on Mar 9, 2007 in
Photos After a trip to the Castro we saw San Francisco from the top of market street up by twin peaks. Just gorgeous. Phone camera could be better, mind.
Technorati Tags:
sanfrancisco, twinpeaks, thecastro
Posted by sh1mmer on Mar 8, 2007 in
General Wow! Let me say that again. Wow. Tonight we went to what was possibly the best veganista¹ restaurant I’ve ever been too.
The Millennium Restaurant is an entirely vegan restaurant in the Hotel California on Geary Street in San Francisco. It was interesting, I had read great reviews about it, but heard mixed comments from friends.
My friend and fellow Yahoo! Ted Drake said that he had found it a bit over-hyped. So I planned not to go. However the way things turned out we ended going there anyway. The starter I had, Sesame Cornmeal Crusted Oyster Mushrooms with cucumber mint salad, sweet & spicy apricot ginger coulis
, was really awesome. A perfect blend of flavours.
However, what Ted said did catch up with me for the entrée. My tempeh with mash and mixed vegetables was marginally better than average entrée. I know what they were trying to go for, a vegan version of posh bangers ‘n’ mash. They just didn’t pull it off, the vegetables were cooked with a varied range of success and I make better mash myself. The tepeh was good, but I felt it was too soft for that particular meal.
The desert totally made up for it though. The desert would make up for anything. Had I the pennies I would fly to California just for desert like this! I had a Mexican chocolate torte with toasted pumpkin seeds
and it was oh, so sublime. If you are vegan, or not, and eat nothing else in San Francisco, try their desert.
¹ Veganista
is a Joe Clarkism along with Homosexualist
and other quirky gems.
Technorati Tags:
vegan, cake, restaurants, millenniumrestaurant, joeclark, veganista, sanfrancisco, gearystreet
Posted by sh1mmer on Mar 7, 2007 in
Accessibility Wow, what a busy week. Today we had the first day of an internal conference at Yahoo! about Front-end engineering or as they say in internal acroynization F2E
.
There are two things that I notice in particular:
- We have so many really really smart people at Y!
- We are in a great position to offer accessibility training
While the first point may seem a little like propaganda, I really don’t mean it to be. I’m always very proud of our European team, with people like Heillman and Drew to just skim the surface. However, being in the crazy Yahoo! land that is the Sunnyvale campus I was blown away time after time by the people I met.
The YUI Team are a bit obvious, but people like Scott Schiller and Philip Tellis and many others are also a joy to spend time with. We had dinner last night with a new Yahoo! and it was interesting to see him be a little shell shocked by the general knowledge people displayed at the table. You guys are really scary, you know that?
, he said after a discussion about JSON security. Half a year ago I would have said the same thing, now it’s starting to become normal.
The second point refers to the high quality of talks at the conference this week. One of the main themes was accessibility, and there is some great material being presented. I particularly enjoyed seeing Victor Tsaran‘s work with the YUI Team. I hope to see more stuff like this, and open up as much of our accessibility material to the community as we can.
So, Yahoo! really has the best web front-end developers in the world. I’m so pleased to be here. I guess my brainwashing is complete, but hey, may my blood run purple.
Technorati Tags:
Web Development, Accessibility, training, yahoo, scottschiller, philiptellis, victortsaran, chrisheillman, drewmcclellan
Posted by sh1mmer on Mar 6, 2007 in
Mac I was a bit sceptical about TextMate at first. However, the more I use it the more I’m persuaded that it really is a true challenger to BB Edit.
The main thing that makes me say this is bundles. It the crazy extensibility of them that blows me away. I still admit I’m not totally savvy with the lingo. However seeing the amazing integration of tools people have made with bundles is great.
One of the things I especially like right now are the ability to create new grammars which include other grammars. This is amazing because it allows you to simply reference another grammar for inclusion. So anything that is updated in the grammar proper falls through to the included grammar. This means that if you have a language like HTML it’s possible to easily deal with complexity like embedded Javascript, for example.
The Javascript bundles that deals with minification and delinting rocks, that kind of stuff should be just part of your IDE and the way text mate does it, that becomes something that the community can provide.
Finally, Macromates have a great resource with training screencast videos. It’s available as a podcast from that page if you want to stay updated. Well worth a look to quickly buff up on how to use aspects of the interface.
Technorati Tags:
Mac, Productivity, Web Development, textmate, bbedit, javascript, jslint