Je Suis Fryolator

Coming soon, it’s TagsAhoy!

Testing post for testing Yellow Card, a WordPress plugin for flagging down comments. Add insulting comments, watch them get flagged away!

A new toy for people who like words. Make lists of words, see who else likes the same words. Rock simple, surprisingly fun. Wordie, at:

http://wordie.org

Gooble has launched, and it’s called Squirl. It’s a site for collectors, where you can catalog your collections online and meet and interact with other collectors. We define collecting broadly — we try hard to meet the needs of hard-core collectors in specific categories (we have templates available for about 30 types of collectibles), but it’s also a fun list-making tool anyone can enjoy. You can register for free at http://squirl.info.

Please give Squirl a try, and let us know what you think — we’re going to slowly but surely be adding new features in the coming months, and we listen carefully to all the feedback we get.

WARNING: humorless post. Not like the rest are all that funny, but this is pretty much just a PSA for Rails programmers. The rest of you… just move along. Nothing to see here.

So yesterday I started looking into tagging for Gooble, and discovered two pre-built packages for Rails, both with the same name. Since I wanted to be able to tag across models, I chose the newer plugin version of acts_as_taggable, written by DHH. And since that version uses polymorphic associations for said cross-model tagging action (hot!), that meant I’d have to update to Edge Rails (from 1.0). And since that broke the engines plugin, I had to upgrade that, too.

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This Valentine’s day, nothing says I Love You quite like a Destroyer e-card.

Here’s a News.com article on the Web 2.0/ajax/software as services meme that’s been floating around the noosphere for the past year or so. The article is flawed — it seems to go out of its way to find dissenting views — but it does provide an overview of what is, essentially, the model Gooble will be following. I’ve been accumulating a giant undifferentiated heap of links related to these technologies and applications, which I just started to sort through; if you’re curious about this kind of stuff here’s the beginning of that effort.

The craziest part of all this is the fact that the term ajax isn’t even a year old. Here’s the original essay where the term was coined, posted last February.

We’ve decided on a name! We’re going to call ourselves Gooble.

In my second post I wrote about the criteria I came up with to evaluate potential ideas. Now I’m going to talk about the actual process I used to find one.

Once I had defined my criteria, what I did next was to sit around thinking “geez, I wish I could come up with an idea”. It sounds stupid, but it took me a little while to realize that that’s what I was doing, and that whining to myself about a lack of ideas was not the same thing as trying to come up with one. After that little epiphany, I wish I could say the process I came up with was elegant and beautiful, but, well, I can’t. It too was kind of stupid, except for the fact that it worked.

What I did was to regularly take stock of everything in my immediate surroundings, everything that was on my plate for the day, every piece of information that crossed my path or task I was working on, and ask myself, is there a tool that both meets my criteria, and that could help me with this?

This naturally lead to a lot of really lame ideas, and also to a few dozen that might have made sense, but that someone else had thought of first. Which brings me to an aside: I added a new criterion to my original list, which was that I didn’t need to come up with something original. It would be cool if I did, but more important was to find untapped demand. So if someone was doing what I envisioned, but not doing it well, or not serving a constituency, I could consider doing something similar, so long as I did it better.
Bad ideas, silly ideas, ideas already taken… I didn’t worry about it too much, the point was to just keep coming up with them. I thought that maybe there was some sort of constant yield rate — that, say, only .01% of all ideas are good. Which would mean that the only way to come up with a good one would be to first come up with 10,000 bad ones. Which I did. But after a few weeks something popped into my head, in the shower on the day after Christmas, actually, which seemed eminently useful, fun to build, met the criteria, and, to my knowledge, wasn’t being done. And as far as I know, it still isn’t. Yet

Of course I’m expecting one of the big boys to launch just such a thing any day. So we’re cranking away, trying to get this thing rolling before Google devotes 0.000000000001 percent of itself to something similar and crushes us.

Ok, that’s it for the teasers. Aside from not wanting to invite possible competitors to eat our lunch, I also don’t want to spoil the surprise of our upcoming super bowl spot. It stars our new spokesmodel, Abe Vigoda, and a bunch of talking ducks. You’re gonna love it.