Monthly Archives: April 2005

Frustrating Amazon

Some days Amazon just drives me batty. Part of it may be the fact that I have 3 distinct accounts on Amazon, all with the exact same login, but which one I get depends on on what password I use when I log in. One of these accounts gives me the discount for using A9, the rest don’t. Depending on which one I logged into last, my A9 search history is hosed. The wishlists are in various states of upkeep, and all different. It’s confusing and frustrating and really turns me off from Amazon. I wish I could just delete all those accounts and start fresh. (If they let me export my wishlist first.)

How Flickr Was Made

Everybody I know loves Flickr and it’s one of the slickest web applications most of us have seen in a long time. I recently found out that Cal Henderson, the lead developer of Flickr from Ludicorp, is going to be giving a workshop called Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget – How We Built Flickr on June 20th here in San Francisco. It’s also fairly cheap for what you’re getting, so if you’re in the Bay area or can make it here for June 20th I’d highly recommend coming out, I’m planning on going myself. It’s put on by By Designers for Designers who also use WordPress.

A Calendar Problem

So here’s the scenario: I have a work calendar on Outlook 2003 which gets all the work meetings. I use iCal on my Mac to keep a calendar with mostly personal events and it syncs via DAV online. I would love to combine all of these and sync them together and to some sort of web interface, and make all the events and alarms go to my phone, a Motorola RAZR. Is this even possible? Update: Groupcal looks like exactly what I need.

WordPress Direction

The WordPress Mission in response to a discussion that came up a few days ago on the WP-Hackers mailing list. By the way, I hope by this time next year to have eliminated all of the WordPress mailing lists. In thinking about how they’re currently handled I started making a list of how they need better archiving, more permanent URIs, better formatting, more searchable, and basically ended up describing a blog. The mailing lists should become a distributed, threaded aggregator where anyone with a blog can participate in the discussion given they pingback the proper URIs and/or use the proper tags.

Rosie O’Donnell

This is too crazy — Rosie O’Donnell of talk show fame has a WordPress blog in which she writes poetry-like entries daily that get hundreds of comments. (And the site is very snappy, this is why more and more high-traffic publishers are switching to WordPress.) It gets better — she’s also on Flickr. I feel like I just stumbled into an alternate universe where celebrities are using software I helped write. Hat tip: neiljmorrow via email.

XHTML Friends

XHTML Friends is a site doing some very interesting visualization of XFN data across the blogosphere, though it’s dataset is pretty new. Remember adding XFN info to anyone in your blogroll is simple as a couple of checkboxes, so you have no excuses! It would be great if XHTML Friends was the first service to suppor the “me” value for aggregating disparate identities. Some may have noticed that Technorati profiles now sport the “me” XFN value. I wonder why? 🙂

Ken Ham Blog

I tend to link to the more liberal organizations using WordPress because that’s what I hear about, but WP is becoming popular on all sides of the spectrum, which is fine by me. Stephen Steele wrote in that famous creationist Ken Ham has a blog now. He’s also video- and podcasting.