I should be getting my Pebble soon, and I can’t wait. I don’t really care about the fancy watch faces, I care about bringing timely information and notifications out of my pocket and onto my wrist. As far a I’m concerned, this is one step closer to something like Google Glass.
NOTE: I am fully aware that at times in the review below, I sound like a ridiculous book-critic or something. I do not care. Also, links to Amazon contain my affiliate id.
A few weeks ago I attended the New York Times‘ TimesOpen Open Source Science Fair on behalf of Automattic/WordPress.com. As part of my “thank you” bag, I got a copy of Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline. I left it on my bedside table in a stack of other books which I’d thus far neglected to start, let alone finish (not to mention all the unopened titles on my Kindle).
On Saturday, I attended the 2012 New Times/TimesOpen Hack Day. It was a long day, but I had a lot of fun. I sat in on an intro session to Arduino which was pretty cool, and also a session on the EchoNest API, which I ended up using in my project. You can find out all about my project on the Readtrack project page.
It’s a bookmarklet-powered little app that analyzes the page you’re looking at (using the AlchemyAPI) and then tries to find related music (using the EchoNest API) which it then plays back to you in your browser (using rdio). I got a “runner up”/honorable mention prize 🙂
One of the most visually-polished projects was “Story Arc”, which showed a visual representation of the frequency of mentions of keywords over the NYT archives. Probably the most fun one was a set of drivers for a DDR pad, hooked up to commands for things like deploying code!
I’ve made a bunch of updates to WP Email Login (local project page) recently, and it’s still rocking along. If you’d prefer to log into your WordPress install using the email address associated with your user account, you should check it out.
Last night, I preemptively tweeted about the upcoming release of Jetpack 2.0:
I can't wait for the very-near release of @jetpack 2.0. It is loaded with awesomeness and magic.
— Beau (@beaulebens) November 7, 2012
This post continues on from a previous post: Where is Your Digital Hub/Home?
In a previous post, I talked about POSSE and PESOS, and publishing on your own site vs other platforms, syndicating content back and forth and content ownership. I mentioned that I’d opted for the PESOS approach, and that I was publishing content on other platforms, then syndicating it back to my own site. Let’s take a look at how that happens.
First of all, I’m running WordPress. Since I’ve been working with WordPress for years, and since my full time job has me working with it as well, this made a lot of sense. Even without those motivators though, WordPress has a huge community, is open source, is a really solid publishing platform, is built from the ground up to be completely customizable through plugins, and has an incredibly powerful themeing system (which basically allows you to do whatever you want).
One of the other things WordPress has going for it is a long history of providing data import and export tools. You’ve always been able to get data into and out of WordPress with relative ease, so it seemed like getting a bunch more data in there would be a reasonable goal. With the advent of Post Formats (in WP 3.1), WordPress also has a native way of hinting at how different types of data should be displayed, plus Custom Post Types (since WP 3.0) mean that if you really want to get crazy, you can step completely outside of the normal “Post” model and get really custom.
One of the things that got me started down the road of actually getting control over my content was “The Great Twitter 3200 Tweet Debacle” (I made that name up). Because of technical constraints, Twitter only allows you to access your most recent 3200 tweets. I’ll give you a few seconds to let that sink in. Twitter. Only allows you to access. Your most recent 3200 tweets. Your own tweets. Has that hit home yet? Here you are producing all this stuff, thinking it’s yours, and Twitter actually decides what you can and can’t access. Before I hit that 3200 mark (I was up to around 3100 at the time), I vowed that I’d get something figured out to get a copy of all of my tweets stored somewhere that I controlled.
I’ve been using WordPress to power my own website for a while now, and working with it in some way or another for even longer. Over the years, I’ve developed the belief that it’s a pretty perfect platform for people to build their own “digital home on the web”, considering the range of plugins and themes available, the flexibility of the publishing options it offers, and the fact that it’s completely open source, so you can do whatever you want with it.
That last bit is important in more ways than you might immediately think. Apart from just being able to write my own plugins or tweak my themes, this also means that I own my own data. I think in this MySpace/Facebook generation, people are all too loose with the data trails they create — giving up ownership of their digital self at the drop of a hat. In case you didn’t realize, when you use something like Facebook, it is not the product, you and your data are the product.
I’m working on a new WordPress theme (for this site, and it’ll be released for download once complete). The theme is deeply integrated with Jetpack, and one of the things I wanted to do was have the Jetpack Sharing buttons appear in a location other than the very end of the content. Normally they are applied as a filter on the_content, so they just appear right at the end. I wanted to relocate them into a different location, and it turns out that’s really easy to do with the power of jQuery.
jQuery( document ).ready( function( $ ) {
// Relocate Jetpack sharing buttons down into the comments form
jQuery( '#sharing' ).html( jQuery( '.sharedaddy' ).detach() );
} );
The #sharing selector is just the DOM location where I want to move the buttons to, and the .sharedaddy one is the container that Jetpack places its buttons in normally. We just detach it from the normal position and then dump it into the new location exactly as it was.
I’ve finally gotten around to moving this site (along with all my other random sites) onto a single server. It’s all now hosted at Media Temple, on a 512MB (dv). We’ll see how that goes. I’ve got a bunch of things to write up once the move is complete, but if you’re seeing this then it looks like we’re most of the way there.
There’s definitely some more tuning and tweaking to happen, but at least I have my memory usage below 100% 🙂
If you’re working with Facebook’s API and trying to record some stats around the values being sent via their fb_source parameter, you might be forgiven for thinking that you could get a definitive list of valid values from their official documentation. Hah! Think again.