We’ve been playing around with various services and API’s and decided to put some of our technology to work. The result is the Grazr Twitter Reader! Adam wrote a post about this project and our API with more details as well as some of the inspiration for some of the functionality. The basic “friend browser in opml” idea was inspired by a “twitter friends” tool designed by Tom Morris.
Using our widget, grazrscript, and a custom grazr theme I think we’ve come up with a pretty compelling little application for roaming around inside the twitter network.
We also made a custom Facebook application using the same foundation that can be installed using this link. All of our Grazr functionality is still present so you can republish these as widgets, look at them in your ajax start pages, as well as looking at it on the iphone. Sometimes it’s neat to step back and look at all the pieces of our platform and how they work together. It’s only going to get better.
Just upgraded to MarsEdit 2.0. Some cosmetic differences and a few new options but overall looks pretty similar. I really like MarsEdit though so I want to support it’s continued development.
Now if I can only get the time/discipline to actually put some blog posts up here.
Using Grazr as a dynamic bibliography.
During a meeting with Dan Bricklin (who’s a member of our board, can I say again how cool it is to be able to meet with him), the conversation briefly turned towards Grazr on the iPhone and its interface model. Dan mentioned he was writing a post about gestures in human-computer interaction and was going to create a “further reading” resource list using Grazr and our new drag-and-drop resource editor.
The goal was to present information and research at the end of his essay, adding it as a sort-of dynamic bibliography. Since gestural inputs are a topic I also have some interest in, and have done research on, I created my own research list and Dan cross linked my list from his. Then Dan also added a list created by one of our biggest users Fred Zelders, who had also collected useful information on the iPhone and ipod touch. The results are that with just three dynamically cross linked resources, a ton of information is captured in a small space and can be explored, remixed, shared, published and edited.
One of the really cool things about Grazr 2.0 is how the tool has evolved into a powerful data sharing system. Adam made a video describing it as a “New medium for online collaboration and publishing”, and while that sounds somewhat hyperbolic (we even acknowledge it in the video) there is something to it.
One of our two data centers (two different hosting providers) lost network connectivity recently and we’ve been dealing with the repercussions of that event. You may experience some grazr site and widget hiccups while we sort out moving our traffic to different machines. I apologize if this is causing any problems for anyone.
I was looking at my twitter stream and saw a tweet from Brett Nordquist
When all else is equal, I’m giving my business to the company whose founder keeps an up-to-date blog.I did a quick check and this blog hadn’t been posted to in over three months (98 days to be precise, yikes!). We’ve been furiously at work on lots of new features for grazr.com, our feed processing engine, as well as getting close to releasing some really core functionality we’ve had in the lab for a while now. I realize that although we’ve blogged when releasing new functions (feed subscribe, auto posting to twitter and blogs, etc..), without Adam or I communicating between feature releases, we tend to leave everyone in the dark.
Focus is good but it’s sometimes necessary to take a moment and take a breath. I need to try again to really refocus and be rigorous about posting to this blog (even when inside the whirlwind), it’s time to time to dust it off and clear out some of the cobwebs.
We actually did a fairly major code upgrade today, unfortunately it led to a few minutes of downtime. We hadn’t planned on the outage but the team pulled through and got the servers back on their feet in good time. I apologize if anyone was affected by the outage.
This major code upgrade is in preparation for some cool features we’ve had in the pipeline for a while. They won’t be visible for a few weeks but now that our infrastructure is upgraded, we’ll start turning them on as we test them.
A stream of all the things in my subscription list.Tech Tuesday coming up next week on May 13th.
Dan Bricklin just posted a quick reminder on his blog about the upcoming Tech Tuesday, tech meet-up and asked for those attending to relay it. I went to the first one and had a pretty good time talking to people and giving a quick demo.
I missed last months due to last minute battles to get the latest Grazr rev live but I do plan on going to this months.
Tech Tuesday coming up next week on May 13th: “We’re coming up on the second Tuesday of May and it will be time for the next Tech Tuesday in Waltham, Massachusetts. Take a look at the last several posts on my blog for details of what it’s like.
The event is open to all. It’s free for employees of member companies and students, only $20 for others. You can sign up in advance at the Mass Tech Leadership Council web site or just show up. Bring your friends! It’s from 6pm to 8pm at The Skellig Irish Pub, 240 Moody Street in Waltham, MA. There’s free parking behind and public transportation nearby.
(Via Dan Bricklin’s Log.)
I’m experimenting with blogging over at mikepk.com. “blog.grazr.com” has seemingly become all about our outage messages, which thankfully have been infrequent but they always seem to be near the top of the blog due to my lack of posting. That’s frankly kind of depressing. We’ve agreed in the company that what used to be Adam’s blog, is now our official company blog: feedonomics. I may do some posts over there as well. I’ll see if I continue on mikepk.com and we redirect blog.grazr.com, or if we re-purpose this blog for something more “official”.
Refresh.