comment on this photo at flickr

Things are getting a little old and dusty around here as a result of me being quite busy with work as well as contributing more elsewhere on sites like flickr, ma.gnolia and newsvine.

To honor its crusty-ness I’ve aged the site’s color palette some, like a fine, aged, um, newspaper? Enjoy.

Seems like a good time for a little update on my contributions to other sites around the internets…

I’m looking for your vote, if you think the shot is worthy, on this image of seedlings for the JPG Magazine ‘Breakthrough’ theme for their next issue.

And last weekend was the Lunar New Year parade in Chinatown, the weather was pretty good and the costumes better. A bunch of photos from the event are now up in a new Flickr Set

Just getting around to some much needed maintenance on some of the projects around here and had to chase down something that was plaguing Place Name Where? for a few weeks now. Though I looked at it when it first came up I just didn’t see the cause of the “Node no longer exists in…” messages that PHP5’s SimpleXML was throwing.

Turns out the cause was as simple (pardon the pun) as a string change in Flickr’s RSS feed

The media namespace URL was changed from “http://search.yahoo.com/mrss” to “http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/” (note the new trailing slash) which meant that my application was no longer addressing those elements properly, manifesting in it not loading the Image and Thumbnail urls properly. GRRRRR.

Always the little things I guess. All better now!

[Warning: The following post is not safe for Molly.]

Picking my head up from a few projects to pimp my latest flickr postings… My South Mountain Reservation Photo Set is about to hit 80 photos. All taken during my various strolls around the area including these from this past Saturday:

A week or two ago I posted some comments about working with CakePHP for an upcoming project. Well, I’m happy to announce that that project—Place Name Where?—is up.

Place Name Where? is a personal information aggregator that tries to reverse the trend of decentralized content contributions that seems to be one of the core features of “Web 2.0” sites.

Web 2.0 is great, but at a certain point one can feel too distributed. You’ve got news stories here, pictures of your pet dust bunnies over there, and in the cellar you keep your favorite wines. Each service is kind enough to provide ways to include the content you added to their site back into your own site, but typically this is limited to a presentation that doesn’t go further then “hey, look at the last 10 things I did on this other site”.

The site works by regularly grabbing several feeds associated with my accounts on the selected services and then permanently storing a copy of the data on my end. Once I’m free of the restrictions of RSS feeds, APIs or JavaScript embedding techniques I can build much more elaborate views on the data like displaying recent activity across all services or looking up all things tagged with nhl regardless of the type of thing it is. I dubbed it a “Web of Web Things” after the discussions of similar tagging and aggregation of real world Web, or Internet of Things (call them spimes, blogjects, or whatever you’d like) by Bruce Sterling, Adam Greenfield, and others.

This aggregator isn’t intended to be a stand alone site forever—though it does work fairly well as such. I need to find some time to spend working on design and integration issues, but I hope it won’t be too long until the ideas behind Place Name Where? are integrated into this site and appear both in place of the current “link” lists as well as integrated into tag lookups and maybe search results.