the singularity of being and nothingness
Archive for May, 2008
Cool Ways to Extend Twitter
May 5th
Okay, so I've been getting into Twitter quite a bit lately. I like being able to just post random stuff for people to read that does not require the length of a blog nor the time investment of an IM.
During my experience with Twitter, I've come across some pretty cool ways to extend it that make it easier and a lot more interesting to use.
The first, and most important, is Snitter. Snitter is a desktop client for Twitter that allows you to do pretty much everything you'd do in Twitter, but from the convenience of your desktop. Currently, it has a cap of a certain number of actions per day, but I think that will change as they upgrade their servers and web services. Definitely worth checking out.
The second is Twitty Tunes. This plugin for Firefox and FoxyTunes (you are using Firefox, right???) lets you post any song that is being played straight to Twitter. Additionally, you can use it to post web pages that you are browsing.
Finally, a new site has launched-twistori-which is a pretty interesting experiment with Twitter keywords. This application simply scrapes Twitter for all posts that contain certain keywords (like 'love, hate, believe, etc.') and displays More >
Yet Another Way to Waste My Time…!
May 4th
A while back (probably 3 months, or so), I ran across moshimonsters.com through an online design gallery. At that time, the site was nothing but a landing page, so I paid little attention-other than appreciating the shiny-ness of the design.
Today, this site popped up again on another design gallery, but this time the full application was live. Needless to say, I neglected other responsibilities and dove right in.
Moshi Monsters is an online "monster pet" game. Each person gets to create their own monster, name it, decorate the monster's house, etc. Pretty standard stuff. Oh, and there's the obligatory "games" that help you earn points towards buying food, furniture, and booze for your Moshi Monster.
I've done a million of these before, and have quickly lost interest. What is unique about MM, however, is that it has brought the "digital pet" genre into the Web 2.0 world. Not only can you network with your friends that have their own Moshi's, but the game also integrates nicely with Facebook (and other social networking applications) to extend the experience beyond the confines of the moshimonsters.com site. Plus, the site itself is very enjoyable as it is very professionally animated, and contains alot of fun easter-eggish More >
First Crack at WordPress
May 3rd
So normally I REALLLY prefer custom development to canned solutions. Sure, the pre-built software peices are nice in that they provide out-of-the-box solutions: but the problem is that the solution is not always very useful. End soap-box.
Today I began my first-ever implementation of a site design to WordPress. I've used WordPress for blogging before, but I've never really messed with it from a design standpoint.
My initial impression is that it's okay. Just as with Blogger and other similar services, the plugging in of functionality is sensible enough (although Blogger's tag-based version seems a bit more intuitive…). There are fifteen-billion functions available for getting dates, user scopes, etc. So that's all fine and good.
I guess my biggest objection-and this is true of all software like this-is that styling the default WordPress widgets is a PAIN. There's a lot of un-classed generated code that one has to wade through to get down to very mundane-yet extremely design-important elements like <a> tags. What's more is that these default plugins appear to live outside of the "themes" that one can build. So if one is not interested in traversing several levels of inheritance just to apply a different color to a "Most Recent More >
