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.

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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!

Announcing libGameFly

Tonight I’m releasing libGameFly, a PHP class for interacting with GameFly.com- the video game rental service. At the moment it’s very simple, just allowing you to expose your GameFly queue as a native PHP class and doing… well, whatever the hell you want with it. I imagine some pretty nifty WordPress widgets coming from this, much like we’ve seen in the area of Netflix widgets.

It’s sad that companies like GameFly still haven’t realized the usefulness of RSS and APIs; exposing this kind of data isn’t just useful for their users and developers, but it’s a vital tool for creating word of mouth on the web these days. The more eyes that see your product, the better off you are; no?

So, if you’re a PHP developer and want to play around with this, you can grab it from http://code.google.com/p/libgamefly/. Enjoy.

WordPress 2.3 Impressions

So as many of you are certainly well aware, the long awaited Wordpress v2.3 was released today after a long series of betas and release candidates. 2.3 has had the blogging community foaming at the mouth for one reason: tags.

You might ask yourself, if Wordpress has had categories since day one, why do we need tags? What’s so swell about ‘em? Well, my dear friend, allow me to enlighten you. Categories and tags, while similar at first glance, help you manage your content much easier than either could do alone. Think of categories like manilla folders, and tags as post-it notes on the folders. Categories help organize posts in a strict structure, but tags help identify the content of posts in those categories.

Take my Web Development category for example. I think it goes without saying- everything in there is somehow related to developing stuff for the web. However, how those posts relate to web development vary wildly. I have topics ranging from writing for APIs to setting up Apache on a Windows box. Tags allow me to mark what kind of content these posts have, and in turn makes it easier for me to identify relationships between topics. From a reader standpoint, it gives everyone a quick, one-click search for finding similar content in my site.

Continue Reading ‘WordPress 2.3 Impressions’ …