Web services in the console (bash) • 06 Jun 2020
I spend a lot of my day in a terminal window, and I love automating stuff with bash scripts. Sometimes those scripts need to do perform actions based on external conditions: location (country), weather, bandwidth speed …
When the API returns an image • 15 Jan 2020
I see more and more Image-Response GET APIs. With this term I mean: the API is called with a GET URL, and the response is a (JPG/PNG/GIF/WEBP/SVG) image, either directly or after a redirect. So the API can be used through a simple <img src="[IMAGE GENERATING URL"> HTML tag. Let’s call these IMGSRCAPI‘s.
Idea: preview service for URL shorteners • 16 Nov 2009
I was using my iPhone to read my Twitter feed (Twitterrific) and Facebook and when comparing the two, I liked one thing about Facebook that Twitter/Twitterific does not have: when some one posts a URL, you get a preview icon and a short text. This way you can have a rough idea of what the link is about, and whether or not you’re interested to click it. In Twitter it is even worse, since the service uses URL shorteners (bitly, …) so that you don’t even have the original URL to guess what the link is about, like e.g. youtube.com/watch?…...
Wordle and famous movies • 19 Aug 2009
Just the other day I was reminded of the existence of Wordle (via the Music Zeitgeist project). Wordle makes an esthetically pleasing word cloud of any assembled text you throw at it. “The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.” Ithought: let’s see what that gives with movie scripts. So I made a tool that will read a .SRT subtitle file and return just the pure text. I can then copy/paste that text into Wordle.
Seth’s bandwidth vs synchronicity graph: it’s a start • 05 Aug 2009
Seth Godin came up with a visualisation of ‘means of communication’: bandwidth vs sync(chronicity). He took a number of ’old’ (postal mail, radio) and ’new’ (blogs, YouTube and -of course- Twitter) technologies and ranked them on a 2D graph according to ’quality’ (density or bandwidth) and ’sync’ (speed of reaction).
FM Brussel playlist live on Twitter • 16 Apr 2008
Via Pietel I heard of a Twitter account that publishes the playlist of StuBru in real-time. Interesting, but I listen to FM Brussel. How hard would it be to make the same thing for FM Brussel? Not that hard, it appears. After some twiddling with curl, twitter API and other PHP, here is the Twitter account for the playlist of FM Brussel.
What Google Agenda currently misses • 22 Aug 2007
I am using Google Agenda as the central repository for the milonga.be Belgian tango agenda, which I edit together with half a dozen other tango enthusiasts. While the principle of a central, hosted calendar storage works wonderfully, I (have to) use a modified PHPiCalendar to display different views on the agenda (‘only Brussels’, ‘only workshops’, ‘1 week in advance’, ‘1 month in advance’, …). There are actually a couple of features that I’d like to see in Google Agenda, and what better place to list them but here:
Popurls: why I like Reddit and Del.icio.us better than Digg • 12 Jan 2007
A site I use often to keep a view on “what’s happening” is popurls.com. It show lots of links, pictures and videos (Flickr, Youtube, iFilm, Wired …) but the part I use most is the top of the page: the 20 new hot links from the social bookmarking sites Digg, del.icio.us and Reddit.
LeWeb3: the Babel effect • 14 Dec 2006
I went to see the movie “Babel” recently, and I liked it a lot. At some point I was asked “what is it about?” The best I could come up with is “bad judgement”. If you still plan on seeing the movie, skip the next paragraph (spoiler).
There are no Flash websites • 13 Dec 2006
Never say “we have a Flash website”; there is no such thing. You might say: we have a website and it features, amongst a lot of relevant information in HTML pages, a Flash movie and/or application. You might say: we did buy a domain and we decided that a real website would be too accessible for our customers, so it only has a Flash blob on the ‘homepage’.
Off to LeWeb3 • 10 Dec 2006
I’m leaving for Paris with Clo and Fre to attend the LeWeb3 conference. We will be joined by a whole bunch of Belgians: Bart, Kris, Maarten, Luc, Robin …
2 days of networking, schmoozing and lots of good food (at least, that’s what we hope!)
Le Web 3 in Paris • 23 Oct 2006
Based on the excellent experience of last year’s Les Blogs, I just registered for the conference “Le Web 3” in Paris on Dec 11th and 12th, organised by SixApart/Vox.
A picture a day: Flickr’s storage growth • 16 Oct 2006
Just how many pictures does Flickr receive every day? I found a way to estimate the # of images that they add to their database, and another way to get average (original) file sizes for those images. The result? Their storage growth, i.e. their upload bandwidth, and the growth rate of their storage system (how many days to reach a terabyte?)
How to visualize a timeline • 06 Jul 2006
I am working on a timeline of animation movies: specifically to see when Disney started to fade and Pixar/Dreamworks took over. What films were made when, who made them and in what way do they coincide with activities of e.g. Steve Jobs. Oh, and to see where that new contender, Blue Sky Studios (“Ice Age”) fits in.
Storing the SQL queries in the database • 31 Mar 2006
I want to outline something I developed something like 5 years ago, and that I was kind of happy with at the time: a way of saving all SQL queries inside the database itself. The reason for writing this is that it would really fit in with all the RubyOnRails and other programming frameworks that are created these days. If someone feels like creating a component/plug-in for it, that would be so nice…
Web-based web development • 22 Mar 2006
Writing code in your browser, it’s coming this way, I tell you! Some indications:
Barcamp Brussels: May 2006 • 19 Mar 2006
Last year we organised a fairly successfull blogger’s dinner in Brussels, and now we’re gonna try something different:
next May we will have a Barcamp Brussels event.
Google buys Writely • 09 Mar 2006
Google has just confirmed to have bought Upstartle, the creators of Writely (Writely Blog/GoogleBlog via Om Malik). Apart from being good news for the founders of Upstartle, this also indicates Google’s determination to make the fat client history and allow users to do all their business through on-line services.
Entrepreneurship 2.0 • 03 Feb 2006
Dave Hornik recently explained to his 8-year old son what his job entailed (Dave’s a VC) and the response was as follows:
DIY Web2.0 Flowchart generator • 28 Dec 2005
You might know I like visualizing stuff, so I worked a bit on my Get-Remix-Deliver flowchart to make it into a scratchpad to play with.
RAD frameworks: development bliss in 20 min or less • 21 Dec 2005
Ruby On Rails started a nice trend: post a screencast of 20 minutes or less where a (gifted) developer starts and finishes a simple development task (build a blog software, build a wiki, …). It gives a feeling of how much coding is still involved and how much the framework does for you. I collected some screencasts in the following playlist: RAD Framework Screencasts (Webjay).
These are the fancy ones:
Wiki markup languages: syntax confusion • 17 Nov 2005
In the last couple of months I have been working with Twiki, PhpWiki, MediaWiki, WordPress and PBwiki (oh, the joys of being a freelancer). They all have their own pros and cons, but unfortunately also almost all have their own markup dialect. With markup I mean: the way you should indicate in regular text which parts should be bold/ italic/ heading/ code/ links/ …
It’s so cool to be anti-Web 2.0 • 12 Nov 2005
Not only that, the very 2.0 in Web 2.0 seems carefully crafted as a way to denegrate the clueless “Web 1.0” idiots, poor children, in the same way the first round of teenagers starting dotcoms in 1999 dissed their elders with the decade’s mantra, “They just don’t get it!”
I’ll do my part. I hereby pledge never again to use the term “Web 2.0” on this blog, or to link to any article that mentions it. You’re welcome.
(from joelonsoftware.com)
Contextual advertising without JavaScript • 26 Oct 2005
A recent article on Jensense: Monetizing from those with javascript disabled made me ponder a bit on the possibilities of contextual advertising *without* JavaScript. This would be primarily for places where you cannot add JavaScript (e.g. in RSS feeds, in blog posts). And I think I have found a solution.
Jakob Nielsen: design mistake #5 • 20 Oct 2005
Jakob Nielsen has published his updated Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes. One that I recently have tried to fix (before Jakob published his article, honestly!) is #5: “Classic Hits are Buried”.
Jason Fried: lessons learned building Basecamp • 19 Oct 2005
An interesting speech on the IT conversations podcast from the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference from Jason Fried, the founder of 37 Signals. He explains what he’s learned while creating the Basecamp application (web-based project management).
For instance: his 5 criteria for hiring people in small teams. They have to be …
Web 2.0 mememap overview • 29 Sep 2005
After I saw Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 mememap (via readwriteweb.com) and Dion Hinchcliffe‘s visualisation of Web 2.0, I realised they didn’t cut it for me. They were somewhat confusing and chaotic. So I decided to make one myself.
RSS is a hammer • 27 Sep 2005
We’re all excited by the promises of Web 2.0, we’re all awaiting the next really neat remix application/service of data, meta-data, analysis and presentation. But let’s not fall for the “I have a hammer, so all problems look like a nail” trap. In my opinion, Dave Winer goes one step to far when he says:
Web 2.0 conference in Brussels • 13 Sep 2005
The guys from Shoob are organising a Belgian Web 2.0 Conference in Brussels on October 6th.
There is a MEDIA 2.0 track (“challenges for traditional media”):
Folksonomizer: generic folksonomy service • 06 Feb 2005
Just read a post on Paolo Massa’s Blog, where he requests to add a Flickr/ del.icio.us/ Technorati style of tagging to Webjay music playlists. In hip speak this practice is called a “folksonomy“.
Information overload: blog filtering • 04 Jan 2005
I recently stopped reading blogs with SharpReader. It’s a great product, but I had over a hundred feeds that I was monitoring and that’s just too much information coming in. No way to get through all that and still get your job done. I now started from scratch with BlogLines and am trying to think twice before adding a new feed (currently at 10).
Blogs and Wikis: how about a bliki? • 27 Aug 2004
Wikipedia.org is awesome. Who would have thought that building a knowledge system based on voluntary contributions from just about anyone who wants to, would work?
Collaborative filtering on dating sites • 04 Jun 2004
Out of purely technological interest (obviously) I’ve been researching some dating sites recently. One feature I discovered most of them have is a kind of ‘short-list’ of people you like. You look around and add the profiles you find appealing onto a list so you can access them easily when you’re aiming for a next victim. Sometimes, the subjects in question are aware of their presence on your short-list, sometimes not. In any way they consist of links between people, links they’ve chosen to add themselves.
Port redirection in Windows • 01 Jun 2004
We use port redirection/proxy often on our platforms. In the production setup, separate (Linux-based) servers take care of this, but for our development and testing environment, we need port redirection for Windows system. I generally use 2 command-line packages:
Organizing my CD collection • 24 May 2004
I don’t know if it’s because I’m a Virgo or because it’s Spring, but this weekend I felt the irresistible urge to empty my CD racks and re-organize my CDs. I have about 400 CDs, and I have a tendency of messing them all up if I have no structure I can follow. It’s not as bad as my cousin Quasi-Modo, who keeps dozens of CDs and DVDs on one large stack, and owns LOADS of empty boxes, but anyway … (Weird, he’s a Virgo too?)
I spend a lot of my day in a terminal window, and I love automating stuff with bash scripts. Sometimes those scripts need to do perform actions based on external conditions: location (country), weather, bandwidth speed …
I see more and more Image-Response GET APIs. With this term I mean: the API is called with a GET URL, and the response is a (JPG/PNG/GIF/WEBP/SVG) image, either directly or after a redirect. So the API can be used through a simple <img src="[IMAGE GENERATING URL"> HTML tag. Let’s call these IMGSRCAPI‘s.
