QuirkeyBlog » Web Apps

Recent Project: Wejetset

AQ — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 19:39:40 +0000

Sexy and cool and full stuff is wejetset.com, an online store + blog, highlighting some of the neatest travel and general awesome products available.

I coded this application from scratch and I can say that the back-end is pretty sexy too. E-commerce sites aren’t always the most fun to work on, but with this gorgeous design – a collaboration between Staple Design, friend and stranger and Intersect – I can easily say I was very proud to be a part of this project.

Its gotten some good press already. I kind of want to buy everything in the store (action books? Sweet GTDness.).

rid.onkul.us returns

AQ — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 14:30:39 +0000

One of the first Rails projects I ever coded (then abandoned) has returned.

rid.onkul.us is kind of like a “tumble-log” but more ridiculous. Kronenberg, my constant partner in hilarity, is co-captaining the ship of absurdities, and we’ve been off to a good start.

The main use of ridonk is to have a place to store all the daily crap that Kron and I amuse ourselves with.

There’s also a feed (of course) and future plans for comments and anything else we can cram into this pretty crude blogging platform I built and rebuilt in a couple days.

RSS should be big

AQ — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 17:29:26 +0000

I’ve become a bit of a feed evangelist over the past year. I want RSS to succeed. It has so much potential not only as a tool, but as a medium. RSS isn’t just for podcasting, or even just for blogs. I am invested in this. I’ve spent more then a year, with RadioTail, discovering the nuances of the feed and finding ways to optimize and use it in interesting ways.

If you haven’t already, get a feed reader.

If you publish feeds, here are some ideas.

First make sure you make use of XHTML auto-discovery tags. In the of your document you should place something like

<link href="FEED_URL" rel="alternate" title="RSS" type="application/rss+xml" />

This will make browsers like Safari (> 2.0), Firefox, and even the new Internet Explorer (7.0) show a little link in the address bar to subscribe or view the feed. It’s very useful to place on pages where users may not expect a feed. It gives them an extra little hint and direction to discover more and maybe even subscribe.

No matter what make sure you include a very visible and easy to access link to your feeds. Though not necessary, its helpful to use the universal feed icon. If you’re not a fan of the orange and white, FeedIcons.com has a great collection of editable versions of the icon so you can make something like the icon I have at right. It incorporates the feed icon (a nice and large one) puts it in a prominent place, and even gives the text clue as well.

The main lesson is please don’t hide your feeds. Unfortunately, the default WordPress template, puts the only link to the feed at the very bottom of the page in a tiny text link.

If I had it my way, all pages would have feed links, and they would all

incorporate the universal icon
be before the fold
and be bigger then 16px

I’m not blind, I just want everyone to promote their feeds, thus promoting the feed.

F– up Fast

AQ — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 21:44:27 +0000

“We did all kinds of dumb, stupid things. But our unofficial slogan was, “F—up fast.” Make mistakes rapidly, learn from them, and move past them.”

—Caterina Fake, Flickr Co-Founder. (via BrainSparks)

I love this mentality. One of the most beautiful parts of building web apps is the ability to constantly update and fix and change. To constantly release.

I’ve seen a lot of great ideas crumble up and die, unreleased apps of genius that will never see the light of day. What better way to learn “what works” then by letting your users tell you. I love the Flickr interface, and you can tell its a constantly shifting landscape. Its fun to find new things to do every time you visit. It’s better to make mistakes and learn to shift and jive then retain an expectation that your app will ever be perfect.

I do think, before I eat my words, that a distinction has to be made between making mistakes and making buggy untested crap. Test, prod, poke, finesse and fix your code. Don’t release something that doesn’t work, but don’t wait to release something until the 100000 features you have planned are built. Don’t be afraid to do something stupid, the fact is – we all do something stupid sometimes. Assume somewhere near the worst, and get over it.

stu.dicio.us: Why didnt they have this when I was in college

AQ — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 03:06:19 +0000

What a great idea. Social college notebook-ing. Evan showed me this the other day, and at first I wasn’t so impressed. Of course, in that first glance I missed the killer feature – offline editing. This app is so simple, It was almost too easy to overlook that big bonus.

Great apps solve serious problems, or at least ones that you consider deathly serious. When I was in college, especially in Art History, I would want to take notes on my laptop. Most of these class rooms didn’t have wifi (though there’s a pretty good chance thats changed). The thought of taking notes in a web app without an internet connection would be ridiculous, but stu.dicio.us solves with some simple javascript.

The social aspect, too, has the potential to be really powerful. I feel like social web applications work when the act is something that you would share outside of the web. del.icio.us works because on one level its a replacement for emailing sites to friends. In that way sharing notes is something natural. I’m a little worried that once this app catches on there are going to be a lot of cases of plagiarism and the possibility of people just sticking whole papers up on the site.

Try it out and play around. Either way a great job on a mostly javascript application that really works.