There is hope for mankind. Our imagination will save us. Or something.
What do you do if your wife cries uncontrollably at the end of every single movie you watch? Clearly you buy the domain cryingwife.com and post videos of her weepy film reviews. As a bonus there is her hysterical railing against the injustice of it all, such as at the end of 2012 (not referring to the waste of money). Subtitled for your convenience. Hilarious, somebody hire these two for something.

Here’s a story about just how easy it is to make a cool piece of tech whose usefulness outpaces anything you might have imagined when you created it. Twitter engineer Alex Payne describes the way that the minimalist masterpiece downforeveryoneorjustme.com came into being, and why he sold it.
Very refreshing to read a success story motivated by a love for tinkering rather than a dollar. I respect the effort even more when he says he was making ~$300/mo using Google Adwords (in this context, I’m pretty sure he meant Adsense).
Cultivate and trust those little moments of inspiration. More than that though, doesn’t this remind us that some of the best stuff in tech comes from a wacky idea upon which we execute?

Chiphacker bills itself as user-edited Q & A site for Electronics & Robotics Hardware Hacking. Not the first of its kind, but simple and well executed, and I’ll point to it just because most geeks I know have parallel interest in physical computing. I love the smell of solder in the AM, how about you?

Feel like a little user interface inspiration on a Friday? Take a look at this representation of relative sizes of a coffee bean down to a carbon atom, controlled by the user with a slider. Talk about form and function working together.

Call them programming challenges for grownups, or skill sharpeners or what ever you want, but Programming Praxis has great exercises for programmers to keep the brain in shape if the challenges at work are getting too easy for you! Nice site.
via O’Reilly

OK, maybe a better title for this post is: insider trading tip-offs. What does it have to do with programming and web development? A Canadian law student and programmer has created a website that will tell you, supposedly within two minutes of the SEC making the information public, when an insider has made a trade in any company you’d care to follow. Simply enter the ticker symbol and leave your email, and you’ll receive ‘instantaneous’ alerts. Yahoo! HackU was the original inspiration for this idea, and I guess it’s too useful not to continue. There is another proprietary system that gives insider trading info, but it’s neither free nor real-time. Talk about one programmer taking the bull (as it were) by the horns and doing something really subversive. He even makes the source code and YQL tables available, allowing anyone access to real-time SEC data:

“The main RSS scraper for this application is a YQL statement that trims down the SEC’s feed and spits it out in JSON.”

Bingo. The site is a triumph of simplicity.

A little background: insider trading is by no means necessarily illegal. ‘Insiders’, often officers of a given company, are certainly allowed to buy and sell stock issued by the company for which they are officers, but they must do so within strict guidelines established by the SEC. Sophisticated traders/investors often use insider trading stats as one of dozens of indicators that might help them accurately forecast stock prices.

At a time when it’s seen as critical to keep your site design and marketing efforts optimized and right on the bleeding edge, how can it be that one of the most visited sites on the internet shuns these ideas and a whole lot more conventional wisdom, yet continues to grow? With just 30 employees.

I guess the short answers are ‘free’ and customer loyalty…. still, what an enigma…

A small detour from all things Ruby on Rails, PHP and Twitter today.

Recently I’ve formed an opinion about who has the Best Online Chess site. For years I endured the rudeness, the primitive interface, and the time spent wasted just trying to find a game with the Yahoo chess experience. No more. Chesscube made online chess fun again for me.

Not that I’ve played them all, but I’ve played a few other chess sites and there were either too few players, or it cost something to play, or something… Not only is Chesscube is free and very active: the interface is absolutely stunning, like a step forward in time vs. yahoo, which seems to be stuck in 1996. This is what online chess should look like, and play like!

I don’t spend a lot of time studying the free videos, because I don’t think I’m smart enough to get much better, but it’s cool that it’s all there for the ambitious among us. Chess news, records of your games and comprehensive stats, there are all kinds of extras. Moderators attend to the chat stream but it seems like there’s a friendly community feel to Chesscube anyway. It appears to be growing quickly– head over and check it out!

Yow– there’s cool tech and then there’s hyper-seductive user experience, like what you’ll find in the site traffic analysis package Chartbeat. I signed up for the free trial– that was a minute and a half I’ll never get back–and got sucked right into the vortex. Find your sunglasses then hit the link to see the demo dashboard in action.

Cool huh? I know I should be more professional, but my first thought was “How can I turn this into a drinking game?!”

The real time functionality, refreshed every 10 seconds, includes:

*What pages of your site your readers are on, how many are on each page, and a heat map showing what part of the page they are on.
*The number of people reading/writing/idle. I got all excited when someone started writing (another comment!), then I realized it was/is me as I write up this post…
*The number of visitors you have right now, new vs returning.
*A geolocation panel– that’s a map, showing your visitors’ locations.
*A length-of-visit chart.
*Referrer details.
Recent inlinks and tweets.

It reminded me of the Mint stats package, but the Chartbeat graphics are much more prominent and engaging, perfect for folks like me who grew up looking at the pictures.

Oh, the things the net enables.
When was the last time you looked at an online dictionary or thesaurus that helped you really understand a word? These things read as though someone’s afraid that I’ll respond with a lawsuit if they get loose with a few examples and context.
What we need is a Facebook page for every word. Let me approach a word’s meaning through different angles, and snapshots of where it’s been and other words with whom it hangs out. Enter Wordnik!
Each word gets its page. You get:
**Formal definitions from several dictionaries.
**Usage from disparate written sources, ie the word as used in literature from various historical periods.
**Recent real-time usage from Twitter.
**Related words often used in the same context. More than synonyms and antonyms.
**Images from Flickr that have the word in question as a tag.
**Statistics: how often you will tend to see a different word. (I have my doubts on this one… hang out in *certain* neighborhoods and you might hear a word like ’supercilious’ a LOT more than you might prefer…..)
Even if you aren’t a student, journalist, or some kind of an uber-blogger, you have to take a look at Wordnik.