Fun times in the iPhone App Store: “But will this app provide a good noodle environment for me?”
Posted on | January 21, 2010 at 3:21 pm | No Comments
Anyone familiar with iTunes knows the user reviews are a total cesspool of morons, but did you know about the special level of crazy happening in the App store specifically? It’s really wonderful.
Here we have a review (#10) of an Alice in Wonderland app. This app provides you yet another vessel to digest Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece and, well, that’s about it. One reviewer discovers that it actually is so. much. more.
Noodle Master!
Weirdest random image I’ve found today
Posted on | January 7, 2010 at 12:54 pm | No Comments
Wordpress plugin: Photo Gallery XML Export v1.0.0
Posted on | December 6, 2009 at 5:06 pm | 3 Comments
This is my first attempt at a Wordpress plugin. I implemented it on The News Tribune’s homepage several months ago and there haven’t been any disasters, so I’m considering it a success.
This plugin takes post data from your Wordpress blog and creates an XML feed of that data. I suppose it could have several uses, but it is optimized to feed data to Flash photo galleries with info from the Title and Excerpt fields as well as each post’s permalink.
Download the plugin: Photo Gallery XML Export v1.0.0
I’ve also added the ability to include up to five custom fields (good for thumbnails) and the option of limiting to just one category.
Here’s a screenshot of the options page:
How you might use this in the real world:
If you have a photo blog or a blog that usually includes at least one photo per post, you could use exported XML data from your blog to feed a Flash content rotator that you would use to promote that blog on another page of your site.
Or, if you have a special feature on your blog — say, “Recipe of the Week” — that includes a photo, you could assign that special feature a category (like “recipeoftheweek”) and use exported XML data from just that category to feed a Flash content rotator to promote that special content.
Here’s an example of my blog’s content as XML generated from this plugin:
And here’s a live example of a Flash content rotator that’s pulling data from XML generated by this plugin:
A few suggestions for Flash content rotators:
• Flash Image Rotator using XML Playlist
Some notes:
1) The XML declaration is hard-coded to be: <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?> … I don’t have any plans to change that unless I get requests for other declarations.
2) You can name most XML elements however you see fit, but right now the parent element is hard-coded to “images” and each blog post parent element is hard-coded to “pic.” I’m hoping to make that customizable in the future.
3) If your excerpt isn’t populated, it will pull from your blog post. Not entirely ideal, but that’s how Wordpress excerpts work by default.
Mapping the manhunt
Posted on | December 2, 2009 at 3:22 pm | No Comments
After four Lakewood police officers were shot at a Forza coffee shop in Parkland on Sunday, November 29, police from Seattle and Pierce County scoured the region for the suspect, Maurice Clemmons. During the 40 or so hours following the crime, there was a dizzying amount of police activity in the region, including a failed hours-long standoff in the Leschi neighborhood of Seattle.
View Manhunt! in a larger map
I live in the nearby neighborhood of Mount Baker and was on news-junky high alert as helicopters circled Seattle’s central area all night long. After the police came up empty from the standoff in Leschi, they headed to Beacon Hill and Columbia City on separate tips, both neighborhoods that border mine on the south side.
Because it had become a national story at this point, family members and friends of mine in other states were asking how far away the police activity was happening from where I lived, so I created a simple Google map to show them. After I sent the link, it occurred to me none of the stories online were using a map to tell this particular story yet. So I kept adding to it from what I was learning on news sites, the police scanner and Twitter via the #washooting hash tag. Local media big and small started taking notice of the map, linked to it and traffic started pouring in.
Two things this unintentional experiment taught me about breaking news online:
1) People crave simplicity when things get complicated. There will always be a need for someone to distill information and make sense of it. I think maps, in general, are overused in the news business. But in this case – with this story – it couldn’t be told without a map. Seattle residents were worried about the police activity and having a suspected murderer on the loose. They wondered when it might affect their neighborhood or when it might stop affecting their neighborhood. There was an overwhelming amount of information out there, but scattered in a hundred different places, and not everybody has the patience to sift through all of it.
Side note: The best use I’ve seen of this type of breaking news via Google map came from the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2007 with their wildfire map. Another instance where residents felt surrounded by the news and needed to make visual sense of what was happening.
2) West Seattle Blog must get a SICK amount of traffic. At least half of the traffic sent to the map came from West Seattle Blog. Local advertisers would be crazy not to get their businesses on that blog asap.
Tags: cop > google map > lakewood > leschi > maurice clemmons > news > police > seattle > shooting
My first post from iPhone
Posted on | November 25, 2009 at 3:28 pm | 1 Comment
Please don’t touch the Chipmunks.
How to post iPhone voice memos to Twitter
Posted on | November 14, 2009 at 12:06 pm | No Comments
I recently found myself wanting to tweet a message with audio I captured from my iPhone voice memo app but discovered there isn’t an app that does that (yet). There are a couple of apps out there like TweetMic that you can use to capture audio and tweet, but I really like the ease of Voice Memo’s editing feature. And, in general, I like using native applications whenever possible, so I stumbled around for a bit and set up a flow that works great for me and is super easy to do after an simple initial setup.
Posting iPhone voice memos to Twitter
1) Set up an account at Posterous.com. To do this, simply email anything to post@posterous.com and your account will be set up for you.
2) Once you’ve logged into Posterous.com, go to Manage > Auto-post > Add a service and authorize Posterous to post to Twitter.
3) From here on, whenever you have a voice memo you want to share, email it to post@posterous.com or twitter@posterous.com and voila!
The subject line of your email will be your tweet and the headline or your Posterous post. You can add more text to the body of the email that will show up in the body of your Posterous post, but not the tweet.
Videos I want to watch but don’t have the time for right now
Posted on | July 28, 2009 at 12:31 pm | No Comments
I’m selfishly doing this so I can close these browser tabs and move on with my life with hopes that I’ll click these links later. Maybe you have time for them now:
• Vogue Evolution to be first gay crew on America’s Best Dance Crew
• William Shatner reads Sarah Palin speech as poetry
• The Yeah Yeah Yeahs create a brooding short film
• Joan Rivers’ promotional video for her upcoming roast
• Two gay Spanish guys having a cat fight
Tags: America's Best Dance Crew > Joan Rivers > Sarah Palin > William Shatner > Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Kuroshio Sea on YouTube is kinda breathtaking, I ain’t gonna lie
Posted on | July 24, 2009 at 1:48 pm | 3 Comments
Gorgeous internet distraction for a Friday at the end of an annoyingly long week. This is a video of the almost-2 million gallon tank at the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan. According to my buddy Logan – and confirmed by the world wide web – the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta trumped the size of this one with an EIGHT POINT ONE million gallon tank. Like, whoa.
Be sure to check out the HD version on YouTube but, as always, please don’t bother reading the comments there. They ruin everything. As always.
RIP Michael Jackson
Posted on | June 25, 2009 at 5:21 pm | 2 Comments
Such a complicated, tragic figure. His death makes me genuinely sad and also a little relieved. He made a lot of mistakes and did some bad things, but did a lot of good too … in a strange way like the rest of us, except on an intensely enormous, twisted scale.
Kid, I can relate
Posted on | June 10, 2009 at 1:11 pm | 1 Comment
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