Strategies for Internet citizens
As several folks rightly pointed out in comments here, a community site based on tagging and syndication is exquisitely vulnerable to abuse. In the first incarnation of the photos page, for example, a malicious person could have posted something awful to Flickr and it would have shown up on that page. Flickr has its own … Continue reading Trusted feeds
Freebase is aptly named, I am drawn like a moth to its flame. I realize it can be annoying to discuss things that folks can’t try out for themselves, and I can’t (yet) do anything about that, but I hope that a few more observations will be welcome. The comment attached to my first item … Continue reading Like a moth to the Freebase flame
When Doug Kaye first told me about the idea that was launched today as PodCorps, he had me at hello. Every day there are events somewhere that might usefully be audio-recorded and published on the Internet: lectures, meetings, political rallies. In many cases the participants would be happy to have their spoken words recorded and … Continue reading Doug Kaye’s PodCorps launches today
I’ve been searching for a pithy phrase to capture an idea, and the title of this piece takes my best shot. For ages, we’ve imagined that non-programmers can, on some level, learn to adapt the software that they use. Many did, most dramatically by engaging with Excel’s programming features, but most did not. And though … Continue reading Tagging is declarative programming for everybody
My longtime correspondent Raymond Yee, who I finally got to meet when I visited Berkeley last year, is writing a book on remixing data and services. The book mentions my elmcity.info experiment but, when Raymond visited the site the other day, all he saw was the text of the FastCGI script that runs the whole … Continue reading The personal service management console
To follow up on last week’s item about parsing the kinds of dates and times that people actually write, Google Calendar’s Quick Add feature looks like the clear winner. Here’s a test page with expressions like: Third Saturday of Every Month, 10 – 11:30 am Let’s try the Chronic module from Ruby: irb(main):007:0> Chronic.parse(‘Third Saturday … Continue reading Syndication of rules versus syndication of data
This post is part one of a series in which I’ll summarize what I know about publishing calendars openly on the web, for free, using popular calendar applications including Outlook, Google Calendar, and Apple iCal. Outlook 2007 With Outlook 2007, you can publish for free to calendars.office.microsoft.com. You’ll need a Live ID account. If you … Continue reading Free online calendar publishing, part 1: Outlook
This post is part three of a series in which I’ll summarize what I know about publishing calendars openly on the web, for free, using popular calendar applications including Outlook, Google Calendar, and Apple iCal. Apple iCal If you have a .Mac account you can publish your calendar there, but .Mac isn’t free, and the … Continue reading Free online calendar publishing, part 3: Apple iCal
I’ve cobbled together a way to turn an Internet data feed into a video crawl that can run on my local public access cable TV channel. Before explaining how, I need to explain why. Here’s the short answer: As much as I want everyone to use the Internet for all it’s worth, most people don’t … Continue reading Turning Internet feeds into TV feeds
Last week I started looking into ways to Internet feeds into TV feeds. Although I did come up with a way to turn a data feed into a video file, that wound up being overkill. It turns out that the local station is willing to broadcast the signal from a computer display. To create that … Continue reading More ways to turn Internet feeds into TV feeds
Next month marks the tenth anniversary of RFC 2445 (iCalendar), the specification that describes how Internet applications represent and exchange calendar information. The authors of RFC 2445 were Frank Dawson (now with Nokia) and Derik Stenerson (now with Microsoft). I asked both to join me to reflect on the past, present, and future of this … Continue reading Celebrating iCalendar’s 10th anniversary: The best is yet to come
In a recent series of items I discussed ways of turning an Internet data feed into a video crawl for use on a local public access cable television channel. In the last installment the solution had evolved into an IronPython script that fetches the data, writes XAML code to animate the crawl, and runs that … Continue reading An Internet-to-TV feed with IronPython, XAML, and WPF
Paul Pival noticed a problem with the browser widget I made the other day to search Google and Live side-by-side. The service invoked by that widget, at dualsearch.atsites.net, fails when your query contains double-quoted phrases. It’s an easy fix as I’ll demonstrate here. There are three ingredients: A itty-bitty web application A simple XML file … Continue reading Dual search revisited
Next Thursday is World Usability Day, a distributed event that will happen in lots of places. One of them is Putney, Vermont, not far from my home, where I’ll be speaking at the New England venue, Landmark College. The program says: A description of Jon’s talk is forthcoming, but we’ve asked him to help the … Continue reading My upcoming World Usability Day talk
In July 1995 I wrote a column in BYTE with the same title as this blog post. It began: One day this spring, an HTTP request popped out the back of my old Swan 386/25, rattled through our LAN, jumped across an X.25 link to BIX, negotiated its way through three major carriers and a … Continue reading Hello World
For about a week now, I’ve been running a service in the Azure cloud that aggregates calendar events from Eventful.com and from a diverse set of iCalendar feeds. As I mentioned last month, my aim is to recreate and then extend my experimental elmcity.info community information hub, while exploring and documenting the evolution of Azure … Continue reading Azure calendar aggregator: Part 1
If you check the elmcity.info events page for March 7, 2008 you’ll see that Beau Bristow is performing at Keene State College at 8PM. The Eventful item that has syndicated to the events page doesn’t say anything else. There’s no link to beaubristow.com, though it’s easy enough to find. And there’s no more precise venue … Continue reading Lightweight event syndication with trusted feeds
In my last entry, I sketched a strategy for maintaining lists of the Eventful and Flickr accounts that I consider trusted sources for the elmcity.info event and photo streams. I didn’t spell out exactly how I plan to maintain those lists, in the Azure rewrite of the service that I’m now doing, but David Hochman … Continue reading Databasing trusted feeds with del.icio.us
For me, one of the 2008’s most important (but least remarked-upon) ideas was spelled out in this post which details how Ward Cunningham implemented Brian Marick’s notion of Visible Workings. The idea, briefly, is that businesses can wear (non-confidential aspects of) their business logic on their sleeves, observable to all. In a year of devastating … Continue reading Visible Workings (redux)
If you were tuned into the blogosphere back in 2001, you’ll recall lots of chatter about RSS feed validation. RSS came in multiple flavors. Anyone could whip up a feed purporting to be in one or another of those formats, and many of us did. There were all kinds of questions about how and why … Continue reading Feed validation revisited: The parallel universe of iCalendar feeds
In part one of this series I gave an overview of my current project to recreate the elmcity.info calendar aggregator on the Azure platform. In this installment I’ll focus on test-driven development in Azure. Because I’m doing the core aggregator in C#, I’m using the popular NUnit software to automate the running of my test … Continue reading Test-driven development in the Azure cloud
This week my ongoing fascination with Delicious as a user-programmable database took a new turn. Earlier, I showed how I’m using Delicious to enable collaborative curation of the set of feeds that drives an aggregation of community calendars. The service I’m building in this ongoing series has so far collected calendars only for a single … Continue reading Collaborative curation as a service
2013-10-18 Somebody wrote today noticing this space was silent and wondering if the project were also. Nope, it’s alive and well, I just haven’t been documenting it here. The best summary of the current state of play is a screencast I made today. 2012-08-16 The URL pattern http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/ID — so, for example, http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/BlacksburgVA — now … Continue reading elmcity project status
In the spirit of keystroke conservation, I’m relaying some elmcity-related questions and answers from email to here. Hopefully it will attract more questions and more answers. Dear Mr. Udell, I am looking for a flexible calendar aggregator that I can use to report upcoming events for our college’s “Learning Commons” WordPress MU website, a site … Continue reading elmcity and WordPress MU: Questions and answers
I’ve long wanted to be able to add Facebook to the list of sources that my elmcity service queries for local event information. It was never possible before, but the recent changes to the Facebook API (and terms of service) prompted me to take another look. At first glance, it seems doable. Here are some … Continue reading Surprise! Your Facebook visibility isn’t what you thought it was.
Last week I said that confusion about the visibility of events in Facebook had thwarted my plan to include Facebook as an event source for elmcity hubs. The day after I wrote that post, though, Stephen Judd noted in a comment that a new data entry method has appeared — one that clears up the … Continue reading Facebook is now an elmcity event source
