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9 Jan 2008
After the moderate success of 24 bingo, and in response to a couple requests for the use of the code after I used it for MetaFilter bingo, I'm releasing my single-page JavaScript-powered HTML Bingo into the world. Enjoy.
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8 Nov 2007
A web user is looking at page A. He clicks on a link for page B. That page has a META Refresh to page C. What is the value of HTTP_REFERER for that last request? What if the redirect was a Status 307? Or a location.replace() JavaScript call? What if he's using Opera? I've been doing some redirect referer tests this week and I have results for some the most common browser/OS combinations. I hope to expand them further.
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28 Oct 2007
Sometime during the planning of our two parallel Halloween parties, Chris and I realized we needed some way to allow the two groups to communicate. Videocasting was our first thought, but we didn't have the equipment or the knowledge. But when it came to taking photos and putting them on websites, we had all kinds of both. Using something Chris had written a while ago as a guide, I wrote a quick script to pull the photos off the camera, resize them to a reasonable resolution, and upload them to our web server. I then wrote a CGI that would pick a random photo from each location and place them side-by-side. Chris asked me to make the algorithm weight towards newer photos, which was far easier than it would have been if we had been uploading to a service like Flickr or something.
After a rough (and late) start in Boston, things went well. Philly took some naughty shots early, which got people riled up here and for a period of time, things were pretty lewd. Eventually it became family-safe fun time party photos and some gentle photo-jabs were traded between the sister parties. Sometime around midnight, Chris texted me "this is the best thing we've ever done." I agree. That said, we learned things. The script had all kinds of bugs (mostly because I wrote it without having the camera we were going to use or the software). The CGI was too weighted towards new photos. And whereas Chris had done this before and had a neat photobooth setup (a side room, tripod, IR trigger), Boston had a camera that had to be hand-shot and plugged back into the laptop every few minutes.
Will we ever be able to learn from the mistakes we made, and try out a new iteration of the script? I certainly hope so. Maybe we can hook in a third city. California friends, I'm gesturing in your direction.
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7 Sep 2007
There's a serious dearth of FeedWordPress filter plugins out there. I aim to rectify the situation. FeedWordPress Collapse Filter will collapse multiple posts being imported from a single feed into a single post. I use it here on Plutor.org to keep Flickr photos (which I frequently upload by the handfuls) from overwhelming everything else. Each syndicated feed can be separately configured to collapse (or not) with a different time threshold.
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26 Sep 2006
We're trying to find a new location for trivia night that's a little more central than the current destination in way-north Somerville. So I whipped together my very first Google Maps mashup. It includes all of the Stump trivia locations as well as the T subway lines and stops.
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27 Mar 2006
The domain GoMetric.org is expiring on April 24. Should I renew it? Does anyone use it? It averages fewer than 20 hits a day, and it's unclear how many of those hits are anything besides robots.
Update 5 Apr - Fine, sheesh! I didn't realize people actually still used it. Gometric is now renewed for another two years, and I have some ideas for some updates and whatnot.
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4 Jan 2006
I wrote Three words, five minutes this morning after about a year of procrastinating. It was initially going to be big and complicated, but since that was the source of the procrastination, I made it a single frameset with Writeboard as the writing interface. TWFM makes it surprisingly easy to just go and get a little writing exercise, and even if it doesn't inspire something longer, then it was worth it.
Nomad has been ignoring work with it all day.
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8 Dec 2005
I was inspired yesterday to work on a new Greasemonkey script. Reminded about Jesse Ruderman's Bash.org Instant Voting script, I made a similar script for flagging posts and comments on Metafilter. Metafilter Asynchronous Flagging allows you to flag posts and comments without having to go through the two interstitial pages and losing your line of thought in the thread.
(I had to flag one of my own comments approximately thirty times while I was testing it. I wonder what Mathowie thought about that.)
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23 Nov 2005
I updated the Greasemonkey script "Flickr More Home" today. It used to get its data from the RSS feelds, but I'd had problems with the feeds not actually showing my contacts' most recent photos. Plus they'd always be missing non-public photos that I had access to.
So now it uses the HTML pages to get the list of photos instead. I don't know if that's harder on Flickr's servers (it's certainly less elegant), but since it caches them, it's only really two more hits per Flickring session.
Update 14 Dec - Fixed to work with Greasemonkey 0.6.4
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25 Mar 2005
I discovered the Firefox extension Greasemonkey in early March 2005. I had probably heard of it before then, but I don't know why it had taken so long for me to really look at it. It's exactly the kind of thing that appeals to me: injecting Javascript (often with DOM actions, possibly with Ajax) into any web page. Every once in a while, I come up with an idea for a one-off script. They're all available from my profile on Greasemonkeyed.com.