Archive for December, 2005

Win a free iPod from Mike Davidson

Friday, December 30th, 2005

While looking through my feeds yesterday, I came across a link posted by Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users to the entries in a contest being hosted by Mike Davidson of Newsvine. Mike’s contest is fairly straightforward:

The theme of the final Mike Industries iPod Creativity Competition of 2005 is to design a movie poster featuring Steve Jobs. … Just feature the man we all know and love in a cinematic role, keep your image exactly 418 pixels wide, and insert your entry inline in the comments of this post.

Ok easy enough, right? My first thought was the movie 8 Mile, with the underlying theme of the underdog having to battle for success.

Now, I’m certainly not as talented as some of the other entrants, but did I do the idea justice?

Here are my other favorites, both by Sean Liew

i,Pod
Enemy of Bill Gates

Which ones do you like best?

Posted in Design | No Comments »

Google Reader Feed API on the way

Wednesday, December 28th, 2005

Microsoft’s Robert Scoble wrote today that Google will be announcing an API for their feed reader. Scoble links to an article written by Niall Kennedy of Technorati - but the real fun was a day earlier on Niall’s site where he reversed engineered the Google Reader backend. Niall provides us with the proper way to access the information you have stored in Google Reader through the API. What I find interesting is that Google apparantly built the API first, and then built it’s Reader to showcase what could be done.

Niall provides examples of how to access your information through a Google URL such as:

google.com/reader/atom/user/[user_id]/state/com.google/reading-list

He mentions that the [user id] is assigned by Google - it’s not your Google account login.

Google Reader users are assigned a 20-digit user ID used throughout Google’s feed system.

If you are looking for your own user id to start experimenting, you can simply load Google Reader and view the source of the page, you’ll find your own 20 digit string at the second occurance of the term “USER_ID”.

I’m very excited to see the potential applications that will be built on top of this. I forsee some very interesting new newsreaders built on this API. The applications won’t even have to worry about storing the user’s data, as it will all be stored directly with Google.

If you know of any applications already built on this, post them here!

Posted in Development | No Comments »

Welcome!

Friday, December 23rd, 2005

Hey there, and welcome to my blog. I decided that I would finally jump on the bandwagon, and for Christmas this year, I gave myself a blog. After testing a few, I’ve decided to move foward with Nucleus CMS, due to the fact that it’s one of the only ones I could get up and running with no problems (on my home WinXP machine).

You probably won’t find a whole lot here to interest you at the moment - give me some time to get used to being a “blogger.” I haven’t had a blog since about 1997, when it all had to be done by hand.

You’ll get the default Nucleus template for a while, until I get around to figuring out how to customize it, but hopefully that’ll be ok if I can get some interesting content up for you.

I wouldn’t expect a fast start (I’m the sort of person who can’t jump into a cold pool - it takes me a good half hour at least), but I look forward to getting to know you a bit better over the next year.

With that said, happy holidays, and let’s look forward to a great 2006.

Posted in General | No Comments »