Monthly Archives: March 2010

Tweetability and Readability

Robin wrote a good story: Last Beautiful.  http://ur1.ca/sees
I thought Robin’s writing was “twitterish” – most of the sentences were under 140 characters. http://ur1.ca/seex
Maybe microblogging pushed him to write better, snappier sentences? http://ur1.ca/sewq
Sounds like a hypothesis – let’s make that story easy to parse: http://ur1.ca/sefl
Time to break out the python and turn this story into tweets: http://gist.github.com/348616

Continue reading Tweetability and Readability

Android Scripting Environment is heating up

The Android Scripting Environment is to the Android phone as Greasemonkey is to Firefox.   It’s a simple place to do quick hacks for your phone without having to build a full plugin or application.

Two cool scripts that just got released are Silent Night and Droid Track. Continue reading Android Scripting Environment is heating up

Project Idea: Context Free or Processing Header Plugin for WordPress

An iteration or so of the website ago I hacked in a random art generator into the background of the title of my website using ContextFree.js by Aza Raskin.  It was a cool little hack, but what would be really nice is to make it shareable.

I’d like a WordPress Plugin that finds the heading of your website and inserts a little Canvas element, includes either processing.js or contextfree.js and picks a sketch, then plops it in the background of your website’s title.  How cool would that be?

How to show WordPress page hierarchies

Got a request for help from some the Eyebeam list. 1 The folks organizing the Urban Wilderness Action Center for the international Electrosmog festival 2 wanted some usability help.  Navigating between subpages of their projects was too confusing.

If you like the way the sub pages are listed out on, say, the Berlin Micro-Turf Expedition – here you go.

<?php
// Does this even have a parent?
if($post->post_parent) {
$parent_title = get_the_title($post->post_parent);
?>
<a href="<?php echo get_permalink($post->post_parent) ?>"><?php echo $parent_title;?></a>:
<?php } ?>
<?php
//ok let's find our sibling pages, but we don't need to list the current page
if ( ($post->post_parent) && (get_post($post->post_parent)->post_parent) )
$children = wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->post_parent."&exclude=".$post->ID."&echo=0");
else
$children = wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->ID."&echo=0");
if ($children) { ?>
<ul style="display:inline">
<?php echo $children; ?>
</ul>
<?php } ?>
  1. The Eyebeam folks are doing a cool skillshare on how “Tools and Models for Online Collaboration”  (back)
  2. It starts March 20th!  It’s completely free!  Go!   (back)

The Magic Ruby vs the Url of Excel: a short story with long code

Once there was a hacker who needed to rescue a beautiful princess from her prison on a creaking ship moored in the middle of the sky.   He made it onto the noisy old ship, slipped past the guards and tiptoed down the swaying halls to the room where she wept, chained to an excel spreadsheet.
Continue reading The Magic Ruby vs the Url of Excel: a short story with long code

Volunteer Your Computer to Keep Privacy Possible

The good folks over at Wild Bee have an excellent article about how you can use your computer to help the world while you sleep. Lotsa people run SETI@home – I think it is because of the screensaver. Instead of a looking for aliens, you could help political dissidents in repressive regimes, protect anonymous whistleblowers, and even protect our intelligence agents overseas. Install TOR and volunteer your computer for global privacy.