a while ago i read this article on wired about twine, a new social bookmarking app.  it was supposed to revolutionize the concept of social bookmarking, pushing links that you might be interested in into your email box.  manage my digital life by  feeding me interesting stuff?  sure!  sign me up!

at the time it was (and is still) in beta, which meant you had to wait for an invite.  so i did. finally it came.  and it was a joyous day.

the way twine works is you feed it links.  other people feed it links.  supposedly it matches your links with their links and figures out what you like.  sounds brilliant!  all i need to do is tell it everything i like!

trouble is, there’s already a big social bookmarking app that i use pretty extensively, del.icio.us, and to date there’s no way to import the hundreds of del.icio.us pages i’ve bookmarked into twine.  what’s more, in order to get any kind of updates or interesting links sent, you need to be subscribed to a particular twine, sort of like a user group on a focussed topic.  by default it subscribes you to the beta feedback twine — so you get daily emails about not-so-interesting development suggestions and whining about why this feature doesn’t work or that feature isn’t included yet.  i managed to join the wordpress twine, and i did get a couple good links out of it.  but the whole thing is just way too much work. i have to find the things that i think will be interesting to get the links that you think that i think will be interesting??

where’s the social bookmarking application that works like last.fm, where all i need to do is feed it my links and i get suggestions the way last.fm suggests artists i might be interested in based on the music i listen to?  so, twine, you were an interesting idea, but you’re way too broken, i’m gonna have to break up with you.

wired ran a blog post on what everyone in the tech biz is thinking (namely the iphone).  it’s called wordle and what it does is take a body of text, or a blog, or something, and creates a tag cloud (like what i have on the right) based on the word usage.  a  pretty one at that.  so i decided to run my own based on content from the blog and my wordle looks like an ad for thinktank studio.  not that this is a bad thing.  at all.  (in fact, i’m kind of trying to up my thinktank page ranking by talking about it and linking to it a lot in the blog…so far it’s not working.  this also brings out some of the particular idiosyncracies of my vernacular, which is interesting.

so it’s been bugging me for a while.  why is it that in the comments of my posts, there are avatars (or generic, blank avatars), but no way to use/change/update/upload your avatar?  i even poked around in the user preferences in the blog several times trying to find where “upload avatar” was located, to no avail.

finally, i stumbled on — literally stumbled, i have no idea how or where i found it and i can’t find it since — the source of wordpress’s avatar implementation.  wordpress uses Gravatar which stands for Globally Recognized Avatar.

aside from sounding like some kind of lost Transformer (in actuality, Gravitar is a long lost Atari arcade game), Gravatar-enabled sites allow you to use a single avatar across the board without the need to re-enter all your profile info, upload a picture, etc.  now, to date, Wordpress (well, and Gravatar) is the only thing i’ve found using this.  however, it’s a neat idea.  having a centralized location for all your profile info is a good idea for that matter.  one place to register and then you can use that account (it verifies by your email address) across the board for everything.  sort of like the failed Microsoft Passport theory, except, you know, functional.  of course, Gravatar suffers from the same flaws of Microsoft Passport, which was participating sites…

anyway, i created my gravatar account and got my pic uploaded and voila, now my comments have an avatar.  so make your own gravatar accounts, people, because i’m sick of looking at those empty avatar shells.

i’ve decided to learn RubyOnRails.  Rails is a programming language/framework that comes with some prepackaged “programming shortcuts” which allow developers to write programs much faster.  it’s more of a “do this” and the app actually does that sort of thing as opposed to writing lines and lines of code for weeks to make it “do this.”  i learned about RoR months ago when the lead developer for ampache was talking about possibly using it instead of php for the new version.  so i wiki’d ruby on rails and thought it sounded interesting.  still, i hate programming and it still sounded like a programming language.

 then i read this article in the new Wired.  it still sounds like a programming language but the fanaticism surrounding it sounds like it comes from taking much of the coding out of programming.  and so it sounds like the language for me.  maybe.  i mean, we’ll see, but the possibility of being able to create “a simple blogging application in 15 minutes” makes it sound pretty damn promising.

 so i asked erin to think of a web 2.0 type app that i could try to write to learn rails and she said an image slideshow since people always want that.  and so that is my new project.  i will try to keep the collective you posted.

okay, so, yes, i’m one of the, like, 12 people who cares, BUT:i’m cleaning up a site for a friend of mine that i work with who runs a nonprofit.  and he shows me the site on his macbook and there’s some huge glaring layout problems including a gigantic DONATE button smack in the middle of the donations page (on top of the text).  when i go home and look at it in firefox (and then ie to try to find the same problems) i got nothing, so i figure it’s one of the few occasions that safari freaks out in a way totally unique that doesn’t freak out other browsers.  and since my client is working on a mac, my job is to make it look good on a mac.so i hit google.  and i look for “web developer safari pc” hoping to find some emulator or hack or some trick to reproduce the crazy css problems that only safari was having.  and lo!  there’s a safari public beta!  at first i couldn’t believe that it was actually a version of safari that could run on a pc until i found this headline: Safari Public Beta 3, now available for Windows! so this post is brought to you by safari. sure, i can’t not use firefox because of my dependence on the 80 million extensions i have installed, but i can’t deny that safari seems to run a lot faster and better than ff has been lately.  and it still sucks less than internet explorer.  …ps.  i was going to post about my xbox media center fiasco and frustrations but i never got around to it and this was more surprising and exciting news. 

file this under: i didn’t know you could do that

i am now effectively feeding my blog into facebook.  that’s pretty f’ing spiff.

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