whoisi

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on delicious

January 9, 2009 in del.icio.us, whoisi | 2 comments

I post a lot of links to my twitter account.  I can imagine that it gets a little overwhelming for people.  So I’ve started keeping a lot of that on my new delicious account.  Feel free to follow me there or keep following me on whoisi.  I already added it there.

a little warning about flickr feeds

October 18, 2008 in Flickr, RSS, whoisi | 2 comments

Last night I discovered the hard way that flickr uses slightly different GUIDs in its RSS and Atom feeds for the same entries.  The format looks something like this in the Atom feed:

tag:flickr.com,2005:/photo/12345678

And in the RSS2 feed:

tag:flickr.com,2004:/photo/12345678

Notice the difference?  The photo ID is the same, the tag (a year, probably?) is slightly different.

I converted everyone’s Flickr feeds on whoisi to use RSS2 instead of Atom because the RSS2 feeds contain the thumbnail as part of the <media:thumbnail> element instead of having to make a separate call to the Flickr API.  This makes things like preview and adding new sites super-fast and it will probably let me remove a thousand lines of python and JS from the whoisi source code.

But the side effect was that with new IDs every entry looked new.  And I suddenly had a few thousand new entries in my unseen page on whoisi.  I spent some time last night and this morning cleaning up the database to reflect the proper GUIDs in flickr feeds.

unread on whoisi

August 25, 2008 in whoisi | 4 comments

I’ve added a new feature to whoisi. It will now keep track of things you haven’t seen:

To see the new items in your follow stream click on the link like the one above that says “318 Unread.” When you’ve read them, click on “Caught Up” and you’re returned to the normal follow page.

Note that right now the update count is only updated when you visit the follow page. And it takes too many clicks to figure out if there’s new unread content and to view it. I’ll be working on that shortly, but having the early feature in place makes things much more useful.

Enjoy!

whoisi API docs

August 9, 2008 in whoisi | 2 comments

I spent a couple of hours last night writing API docs for whoisi, something I probably should have done on day one. You can find the API docs on the API page which is also found at the footer of every page. Enjoy!

this whoisi feature is brought to you by joe shaw

July 22, 2008 in whoisi | 8 comments

My good friend Joe did some coding for whoisi a few weeks ago and I finally got around to merging it into the production code base. He’s added a really handy little feature: recommendations.



If you’re following a few people on the site and you’re looking for other people who might be related to them, the recommendation feature tries to make a guess based on other followers of the same people. In order to get the best out of the feature you need to be following people that have been on the site for a while and might be followed by other people. It uses other people’s following habits as the basis for recommendations so in this sense it’s pretty similar to the way that Netflix’s recommendation system works. (Although I’m sure the actual algorithm is very different.)

It should be fun – try it out and thank Joe if you see him!

whoisi activity stream for OSCON 2008

July 18, 2008 in oscon, whoisi | 2 comments

In my original post on whoisi I made a remark about wanting to keep track of events:

You also might notice that I have an entry above that just says “@fisl2008″. This is me just playing with events. One thing I’ve always wanted is the ability to say “I’m going to be at this event and I would love to see others who are doing the same.” In this sense it’s like saying “I was @ FISL 2008.”

Over the last couple of evenings I put together some code that made that possible and decided to make a stream for OSCON 2008 since I will be there:

I go to a few conferences a year and I’ve always wanted to have access to information about who was there and what they were doing during the conference. So I’ve tried to create that experience with this. Want to keep up with who is going to dinner where? Or who found something really interesting? Following this stream should help.

If you look at the events page there’s a quick tutorial on how to add yourself or someone else to the event. It’s easy. And thanks to a suggestion from Jeff the aliases in profiles now link to the respective event and/or group. That should make it easier to discover events from people’s pages.

There aren’t that many people listed right now. About 34 last time I counted. That’s about the number of people who responded to my request the other day. But if you’re interested in the feed or you’ll be there feel free to add yourself.

Have fun!

going to be at oscon this year? drop me some mail.

July 15, 2008 in oscon, whoisi | 2 comments

I want to run a little experiment. If you’re going to be at OSCON this year take 2 seconds and drop me an email. If you want to include your blog or whoisi ID I would appreciate it, but if you’re feeling lazy don’t worry about it. I’ll find it. Thanks!

added del.icio.us support to whoisi

July 4, 2008 in del.icio.us, whoisi | 2 comments

I added support for del.icio.us to whoisi this evening. Let me know if you see problems.

Update: There are still server throttling issues so sometimes adding del.icio.us urls doesn’t work. Still working on making the polling stuff smarter about that.

another whoisi theme

July 4, 2008 in whoisi | 1 comment

Garrett LaSage put together a user theme for whoisi.com. He’s got a link to the screenshots on his blog. It works with either Stylish or Greasemonkey. So cool!

upcoming travel and event schedule – guadec, oscon + more

July 3, 2008 in Fennec, Firefox, Kicking My Ass, Mobile, Mozilla, Open Web, Speaking, Travel, whoisi | 1 comment

July is going to be a pretty intense travel month for me. Here’s a rundown of where I will be:

  • July 6th-July 10th: Istanbul, Turkey. I’ll be there for GUADEC and I’m speaking on Wednesday. Hopefully to re-iterate how important the web and its users are, talk about some of the cool stuff coming down the pipe and how GNOME might be able to take advantage of that.
  • July 15th: Boston, MA: I’ll be at this Web Innovators Group: Boston event. I have no idea what to expect from this. Maybe some innovation or something. On the web. Come and talk to me about Mozilla, Firefox or Whoisi if you want. I’ll be the one standing in the corner looking lonely.
  • July 21st-July 26th: Portland, OR: I’ll be out in Portland for OSCON Open Mobile Exchange. I’ll be speaking on Monday about Mozilla + Mobile and the awesome work we’re doing. The wife and very cute baby will be with me on this trip and we intend to take most of the rest of the week off hanging out with friends and seeing that part of the country.
  • July 26th-August 1st: Vancouver, BC: Firefox summit plus one day early in Vancouver to explore it. I’ve never been and I hear it’s a nice city.

If anyone wants to meet up to discuss things, let me know. I’ll be around!

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