• JavaScript DSL. It feels gooood.
  (tags: Javascript YUI Design-Patterns)
• Metaprogramming JavaScript Presentation
  (tags: Javascript Design-patterns metaprogramming)
• Microformats at Barcampblock - Community Meetup
  (tags: microformats barcamp video)

• My Bloomin’ Friends
  (tags: semweb socialNetwork social_graph)

I have been following the Social Network Portability(SNP) group setup at Google. The conversation there has been lively and dynamic at times. But the conversation always seems to boil down to the need for a centralized approach to managing friends. I just don’t see where that is much different than using Facebook. And why is it everyone is always trying to reinvent the wheel? Create their own “unique” protocol or data format.

Henry Story from Sun Microsystems chimed in yesterday with a fantastically detailed dialog on the whole social graph or SNP problem. What I found really interesting about the whole post is that he never attempts to develop a new standard, format, or protocol.

Henry dives right into the elephant in the room, security. Stating the obvious: “Not everyone lives in the open the same way” He is the first one to make me understand the beauty of the mbox_sha1sum. Then he goes on to give an example of providing different foaf’s based on the amount of trust you assign to each person.

This was a fantastic read and I highly recommend it.

Trying to find that one ring to rule them all seems to run counter to the whole reason this conversation is happening. It’s time to turn the conversation to a truly open system, much in the way DNS or even OpenID is.

I admit that I am a huge fan of Spokeo. For those of you that haven’t used it, the deal just got a little sweeter. Spokeo guarantee’s you’ll love their service or they will pay you $5 for your time.

It’s a great service so I suspect everyone will be satisfied.

Spokeo is a highly refined RSS reader that gives you the ability to group your friends and follow their lifestream data no matter where they choose to hang out online. All you need is their RSS info and you are set. They have also made it easy to add friends from some of the more popular social sites.

To top things off they just launched a new template that makes posts pop off the page. If you use bloglines or Google Reader or are still in the stone age using a desktop reader and want to keep up with your online connections, then this gives you a no risk reason to give them a try.

Dave Winer began posting about sending a photo from his iPhone to Twitter via flickr recently. (here and here are just two of them)

I thought this was a great idea so I decided to write an application and possibly offer it as a service. Well the service thing fell to the wayside rapidly because you have to have the Twitter username and password to post the Tweet. I didn’t like that idea, so decided just to give the app away. Use it, don’t use it, complain about the coding style, or whatever you like.

The application is fairly straight forward. It doesn’t depend on the iPhone, you can post photo’s anyway you like. You tag the photo’s so that the application knows which photo’s to upload. Run it from a cron job on your server and away you go. The parameters necessary for all this to work are fairly well documented. You need things like a flickr api key, flickr username, Twitter username/password, the tag to grab and a couple others.

One thing to not is I had to subtract 900 seconds from the timestamps that I send to flickr otherwise I would miss photo’s. It seems from my tests that flickr tends to indicate that a photo was uploaded before it was taken. Without subtracting that time I would miss uploaded photo’s due to the time I last checked was after the time reported by flickr’s api for the photo. You can adjust that time if necessary.

I hope it works for everyone, enjoy. I have only tested this in my environment so your mileage may vary. And thanks to Dave Winer for the terrific idea.

This application is written in PHP and should work in PHP4 or PHP5

Download Photo2Twitter

Well that is what Dare Obasanjo thinks anyway. I think we can forgive this short sighted thinking because it’s systemic in the culture of his employer. (ouch! Shameless Microsoft dig. I promise not to do it again.)

Yes. He is absolutely correct that an API is better. And to be fair, he does point out that that microformats are a good fit in situations where the client must parse the entire HTML page anyway. To see samples of good ideas in this situation check out this slide show.

I don’t see microformats replacing RSS/Atom feeds. But I can see where microformats will strengthen a conversation. When I get a trackback, my blog could automatically fetch the pages and assemble a page of notes on the post. The software could assemble a pseudo bibliography from the trackback I received and follow the chain down. Making it easy for me to follow the conversation and how it got to this point. Now replying is simple. I didn’t have to track it all down. I let the computer do the work.

That is just one idea that I thought off the top of my head. I am sure smarter people than I have even better ideas.

I don’t think Dare Obasanjo really meant it when he said microformats are a stupid idea. It was a tongue in cheek statement. I think he brings up some good points to ponder while furthering the conversation. Frankly, I am glad the conversation is playing out at all.

Having read 0xDECAFBAD’s post on the PHP framework CodeIgniter, I got excited to try it out for myself. I have been examining every PHP framework I can find and, frankly, they all suck. Then I turned to Ruby-On-Rails. It was love at first sight. Beauty, elegance and style in a programming language and framework, total harmony.

Then it hit me that I would need to learn an entirely new programming language while still supporting all of my clients on PHP, reconfigure servers, and learn the Rails migration strategy. Seems like a nice challenge for the long haul, but I have short term needs that this just wasn’t going to fill.

Thats when I met CodeIgniter. Straight forward. Will work in both my PHP4 and PHP5 environments. The documentation is to die for and digging in to code took the watching of two webcasts and a quick jaunt through the documentation. It uses a nice MVC structure and has a good depth of built in (did I mention these guys document their code) functions ready to handle most common everyday tasks.

Moving to any framework is a challenge, but relearning an entire language to standardize things is rough approach. Throw in the fact that the documentation of most of the other packages is obscure in either clarity or existence makes the task down right daunting. Throw in the fact that, like nearly everyone else we are just beginning to migrate to PHP5, I need something that will hang with us while both feet are on either side of the line.

I can’t say it’s a perfect framework, I have only been using it for less than a day, but I can say that it beats the others I have played with. I will let you know how it goes.

If you haven’t heard of Streamy you should read my earlier post on it here. I strongly urge you to watch the webcast that is in that post. It will make your Streamy experience much better.

I have some invites left so anyone interested in checking Streamy out post a comment part of my comment process asks for your e-mail so no need to help the spammers and I will send you an invite. At least until I run out.

The blogoshpere has been has been buzzing with talk of Microformats, FOAF, XFN and various other formats and would be formats in response to the Brad Fitzpatrick post about the Social Graph. So if you need a good place to start I ran across a site that has assembled some very well put together tutorials on Microformats.

I am just beginning to warm to twitter. I live in Wisconsin (go ahead find it on a map) and technology seems to lag here. Twitter is useful if you are exchanging notes amongst a group of people, but up here cell phones are just gaining popularity. I think of it like charity work amongst the technologically challenged.

This post at 0xDECAFBAD blog has an interesting thought one how to tag in twitter. He has come up with the idea of sticky tags or persistent tags. Basically you tag your message and those tags persist across every message until you remove them. Then to follow a thread you simply use http://twitter.com/yourname/tag or http://twitter.com/yourname/tag+tag. I like the idea of keeping it simple. So if I want to follow only your tweets on barcamp but am not really interested in the rest I could use http://twitter.com/yourname/barcamp