Evan Sims

2008 Webware Awards are Up; Go Vote!

It’s that time again; the 2008 Webware 100 Awards ballot is up and ready for you to vote for your favorite Web 2.0 sites. It’s a nice way to show your love for those handful of sites and services that make your day just a little less of a pain in the ass.

As always, my choices are based upon who’s made the biggest innovations this year, and who I think is most deserving (whether I do in fact use them or not; which isn’t always the case.) Here’s my choices, for those curious:

Audio Amazon MP3, iTunes, Last.fm
Browsing Adobe AIR, Flock, Google Reader
Commerce & Events Amazon, Google AdWords, PayPal
Commuications Gmail, Windows Live Messenger, Skype
Productivity Basecamp, ConceptShare, Remember the Milk
Publishing & Productivity Flickr, Twitter, WordPress
Search & Reference Google, Google Maps, Wikipedia
Social Deviantart, Facebook, Second Life
Utility & Security Amazon S3, OpenDNS, OpenID
Video Viddler (obviously!)

Get your vote on, folks.

WP-Sightings Preview

So as you might have noticed, I have a little embedded lifestream on the left hand side of my blog here. It’s still just a mock up, sadly, and doesn’t pull live data. I’m working on changing that, though. Initially I was just going to slap some code together in my usual half assed fashion just to get something working, but I’ve instead decided to try my hand at making a WordPress plugin. So far it’s been surprisingly simple- WP has a fairly idiot proof API.

As of last night I finished the draft module architecture and administration UI, and will be working on the actual data pulling and scraping system today.

Continue Reading ‘WP-Sightings Preview’ …

Video Commenting

So thanks to the hard work of Colin Devroe and the rest of the Viddler gang, WordPress bloggers now have the insanely cool option of letting folks comment on their blogs using video. The plugin, which has been in beta for a few weeks now, is freely available on Viddler’s site, and requires just a few short minutes to get setup. Super simple, incredibly slick.

Nice job guys. I love it!

Back Online

Whoo, that took quite a bit of work. I established a dedicated server with my good buddy Ryan this last week, which entailed a large migration of wordpress data from across my various sites, among other stuff. A few days later, we’re back up and operational - and with a new design, no less. I’m pretty pleased with it, though I still have to whip together the code to make the ‘Sightings’ sidebar actually work. I’ll get to it this week, anyway.