Interesting Developments

Dearest Delicious, a breakup letter

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 05:37:00 +0000

Dearest Delicious,

You were so beautiful to me. We walked in the clouds. We discovered so much together—about ourselves, about the world. Everything was magic and rainbows.

But you withdrew. In hindsight, I had sensed a distance growing between us.

Still, you promised you would change; that we'd be back to the way things were, and everything would be better.

And I believed you. I stood by and supported you through the rehab. I dared dream of another serendipitous future.

But there were new problems. Stacks of them. Yet I kept coming back, again and again, despite all the little ways in which you continued to disrespect me. Until one day I you gave me that about:blank stare for the last time.

I awoke… finally. I could see I was only staying because of the way things had been, because of the memory of the way things used to be, because of the thousands of ways in which you had changed how I think and who I am.

But in no way did you love me in equal measure. I see that now.

And so I'm leaving you, for I love myself too much to keep doing this. There's this other service I met at some blog over a year ago. It cares. It cares about me. It listens when I ask it to change.

It is probably true that I wouldn't be leaving if I didn't have some place to take my stuff. You can reach me here, and a mutual friend will be in touch about my things going forward.

I wish you the best of luck and hope that you find a happy future.

[Postscript: As Isabel said to Ebenezer Scrooge, "I release you with a full heart, for the love of who you once were. May you be happy in the life you have chosen." ]

Your Tweets in a Calendar in Two Clicks

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:43:00 +0000

Bonus click: Just one more click will download an offline archive of your Tweets.

Tweets on a ~~plane~~ calendar! What's not to love? And since every Tweet has a timestamp, it should be pretty easy to feed that data into a Google Calendar (in fact, it's been done). And it's interesting to look at how my patterns have changed since I started using Twitter.

Now this is the kind of thing that Yahoo Pipes is great at—taking data from one service and reshaping it to fit somewhere else. Now if you're a prolific Twitterer, it can take some time to process all that data, so enter your username (no authentication required—this won't work if your updates are private!) below, and start the process. It will be one click to start importing your Tweets into your Google Calendar (note: it may take a few minutes to render all your data. Only works on your last 3,200 updates.). This is set-and-forget, so once you've subscribed, your calendar will update automatically.

Generate an iCal feed from your Tweets

Reading this post in a reader or on Facebook? You'll have to visit the page.

The JSON can be saved to your hard drive as text if you'd like the peace of mind of knowing that your data doesn't live in one spot. Since Yahoo Pipes powers this, you can see how everything works—here's the Pipe that does the magic of spinning updates into events. Once it was built, it was pretty easy to modify it to output the important data in JSON, which is essentially data you can download and squirrel away for safekeeping (Pipes doesn't output plain XML). If you have any questions or strangeness to report, let me know in the comments.

Simple trick to make your accounts more secure

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:53:00 +0000

Q: what do the hacking of Sarah Palin's email account and the exposure of hundreds of confidential Twitter documents have in common? A: Hackers broke into both the same way—not by knowing the password, but by figuring out the answers to security questions.

While people have gotten better about choosing good passwords, those are just the keys to the front doors. What happens when you've forgotten your key? You get in through the "back door", which is usually locked with questions like, "What street did you grow up on?" and "What's your favorite food?" Many of the answers to these questions can be guessed with clever Googling. And if you've ever used a Facebook Quiz or App, you've granted it access to a wealth of personal data. Whether or not a developer has evil intentions, that data goes into a database somewhere, and THAT database could get hacked (Facebook's terms of service won't stop the leaks). If you assume the worst—that the answers to those questions are discoverable—then how can you secure your account? Like this:

Pick a short phrase, like "supersecret23" (shhhh, don't tell it to anyone!)
Pre- or append it to the answer of every question on every service

Example: What's your father's name? Old answer: rob New answer: supersecret23rob Now that you've got a system in which only you can know the answers, the only thing left to do is to go to all the important services you use and update the answers to your questions. Oh, and you should probably write down your magic prefix/suffix somewhere safe. One last tip: you may not think of your email as something requiring high security, but you should, since many services will send a magic link to reset your password via email.

Prioritizing Podcasts with Google Reader

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:36:00 +0000

Summary: my story about how incoming podcasts list became overwhelming, so I tamed them using Google Reader. Essentially, I use Google Reader to scan my “podcast inbox”, star only the ones I want to hear, and use that as my personal, filtered podcast.

The problem—there are a ton of great podcasts to listen to. Some of them are so good that I listen to every episode. But others are better suited to grazing, for instance the NPR Most Email Stories podcast or Science Friday. Eventually I had so many feeds that just navigating between them became a chore. Something had to be done…

So I started by subscribing to my podcast feeds in Google Reader…I bundled them all together by tagging each feed with “media,” which collects into a single folder. Once a week I navigate to that folder and scan through the list of new episodes, expanding any that sound interesting and starring just those that I want to listen to.

Next we have to get those starred items out of Reader. Under the Settings > Folders and Tags tab, you can choose to share things publicly:Notice the orange “public” icon on the right. Just to the right of that is a link to the public page for the folder/tag, which looks like this: … and notice the orange icon called “Atom Feed.” This is syndicated content that can be pulled right into iTunes (copy the feed URL and paste into “Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast”):Notice that even though I star a lot of items, iTunes ignores those that it can’t recognize, leaving just those things I want to hear/see, including video (notice the TED Talk). [Extra tip: add “?n=100” to the end of the Atom Feed to include the last 100 items rather than the default of 20.]

Going Further

If you use iTunes, you can stop reading… but I have a Nokia N800 tablet, and Canola can’t handle the atom feed from Google Reader. Yahoo Pipes to the rescue!The Google Reader Podcast pipe above takes the atom feed from Reader, blocks anything that has no MP3 link, and then remaps fields appropriately. Now Canola can handle the RSS output from the pipe: That pipe takes a URL as an input, so it is easily configured to run on any Google Reader atom feed.

10 Minute Guide to Monitoring the Web

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:43:00 +0000

or how I stopped worrying and learned to love persistent search

Here's the problem: you want to know when certain things get mentioned on the web, but you're not about to search it every day. Wouldn't it be great if a search could persist over time and alert you when new results appear? Good news--not only is it possible, it's also pretty easy, and by the end of this tutorial, you'll know how to do it.

Step I: Crafting smart searches

The most important part is to discover the magic search words that return what you seek. These are called "search operators." To get up to speed, Google supplies an overview and a cheatsheet. If that's too much reading, play with the advanced search available on any Google search, and you'll see something like the graphic to the right. For this example, we want to watch for any mention of Howard Rheingold by the New York Times, Boston Globe, or San Francisco Chronicle. This can be broken into three parts:

We need Howard's complete name, so we put it in quotes
```
"Howard Rheingold"
```
To restrict it to a specific site, so we use the "site:" operator,
```
site:nytimes.com
```
But we want to search several sites, so we use the "OR" operator
```
site:nytimes.com OR site:boston.com
```

Putting it all together, we get "Howard Rheingold" site:nytimes.com OR site:boston.com OR site:sfgate.com

Step II: Creating the alert

Next we'll use a Google Account to create a Google Alert. Take the well-crafted search phrase from Step I and use that as the terms. Since we're specifying the sites to search, we choose "comprehensive" as it is the least limiting. And the smart way to receive our search hits is by having it delivered to us as a feed in Google Reader. If you end up getting unwanted search results, you can edit your Google Alert. For example, if you had read enough about smart mobs (sorry Howard), you could add a

-"smart mobs"

... and it would prevent those hits from ending up in your search results (though be careful, as you wouldn't want to exclude a hypothetical page that offered a "related posts" section that mentions "smart mobs"). If you don't use Google Reader (and you should!), you can set the Google Alert to send you an email. This might be useful if you wanted to create a list of people to send updates to using filters in gmail, but that's a post for another time. Congrats--now you know how to create persistent searches using Google Alerts! Use it for vanity searches, to stay on top of a brand, etc. I use it to find out whenever anyone favorites any of my Tweets.

isolation

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 12:33:00 +0000

isolation, originally uploaded by nj dodge.

Floating Island

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:06:00 +0000

Floating Island, originally uploaded by darkmatter.

lines

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 14:20:00 +0000

lines, originally uploaded by antimethod.

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 18:47:00 +0000

, originally uploaded by SF buckaroo.

BABY UNDER GLASS

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 12:25:00 +0000

BABY UNDER GLASS, originally uploaded by snowriderguy.

metra seat

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 17:21:00 +0000

metra seat, originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

that's fabulous

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 16:23:00 +0000

that's fabulous, originally uploaded by The 10 cent designer.

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 13:57:00 +0000

, originally uploaded by rosemary*.

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 19:13:00 +0000

, originally uploaded by cymagen.

No more love [4]

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 16:47:00 +0000

No more love [4], originally uploaded by Tous les noms sont déjà pris... pfff....

Bowling Night - Polaroid SX-70

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 14:23:00 +0000

Bowling Night - Polaroid SX-70, originally uploaded by Tubes..

pigeon feet

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 14:24:00 +0000

pigeon feet, originally uploaded by a m e l i a.

Generate an iCal feed from your Tweets

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 16:00:00 +0000

, originally uploaded by [brett walker].

the crown fountain pt.III

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 22:53:00 +0000

the crown fountain pt.III, originally uploaded by Nachosan.

superflash

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 17:56:00 +0000

superflash, originally uploaded by pbo31.

Organization

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 20:40:00 +0000

Organization, originally uploaded by alterednate.

Inevitable

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 14:00:00 +0000

Inevitable, originally uploaded by Ed Karjala.

Keep away from the bokeh

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 13:57:00 +0000

Keep away from the bokeh, originally uploaded by Ed Karjala.

lights overhead

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 13:54:00 +0000

lights overhead, originally uploaded by jessiqua.

neon in las vegas

noreply@blogger.com (Marsh Gardiner) — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 13:41:00 +0000

neon in las vegas, originally uploaded by jessiqua.