For some reason there isn’t a reasonable URL shorteners specific to Google Maps, so I decided to write one up. I thought of using bit.ly for shortening map URL’s, but I wanted a TinyURL domain that let users know they were going to get a map. So I decided to register myloc.info and build a simple TinyURL map engine.
UberTwitter uses a very similar domain, myloc.me. Their results send you to a Uber advertising page with a map in the middle. Not very mobile friendly, but free is free I guess. My version works great with the iPhone. It automatically pulls open the Map application. Normal browsers are redirected to Google Maps.
As an add on, I created a basic GET JSON API, so myself and others could easily incorporate this service into projects.
Last year I was generally lost in the crowd and didn’t have any good idea of what was going on at Bele Chere. On Wednesday of this week, I decided to write up a small mobile app for the Bele Chere festival. I wanted something basic to show my current location and the events going on around me.
What I came up with was belechere.mobi. It’s basically a google map with all the Bele Chere events and points of interest plugged in. I geared the app for the iPhone so I could use the built in GPS with Safari to center the map automatically. Also, I incorporated Twitter results with the #belechere tag, that way I could easily see what people thought was intresting or a must see at the festival. I also included list of music acts for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. It’s only a three page app, but I am sure it will be useful compared to what I had last year.
The app took me an evening and a morning to build, but I did have a legup with some Twitter feed code from my Twaper experiment. After some field testing yesterday downtown Asheville, I found that the GPS seems accurate to about 50 feet of your location and the point of interest icons are generally in the right spot. Sometimes though, the app forgets you allowed for GPS services and a website refresh is needed to get it back. There also seems to be a dead zone on College street between Lexington and Haywood.
Our local paper made some national news by becoming the nations first Twaper. When the site MountainX was visited on April 1st, users were presented with a number of twitter feed modules. Some of those feed widgets were filterable by twitter #hashtags.
The twitter.aspx page pulls down a copy of the twitter search results in Atom format. A XSL stylesheet converts the results to a friendly HTML format, which are then ported to a div tag using JQuery.
A nice straightforward cell phone video publishing website. They offer pretty good living streaming and video archiving. Below is quick test done while at The Dripolator in Asheville taken with my Blackberry Bold.
Last Sunday I took some video of the Asheville Mardi Gras parade downtown. After I got home, I realized that converting the 3GP format into anything web ready was a long drawn out process. I’ll use this site instead since they offer a download in .flv and .mp4 formats. They also include embed code with each post.
Today I posted a sturdy new version of the free yard sale software. I’ll be adding some live yard sales for this coming weekend so we’ll see what happens. As usual, I am testing the build on one of my own domains, so no clients were harmed in the process.
Some additions.
-Add up to 4 photos to a yard sale.
-Turn by Turn driving directions.
-Individual yard sale printer friendly pages.
-City Specific yard sale directory.
There is still the subscriber and email marketing section that isn’t reworked yet. I am going to research that a bit more before moving forward on that piece. After I’ve done some testing and finished coding, I’ll post a new build for download.
I have been using Google docs for some time and haven’t had an issue ( as for as I know of ). But every now and then I wonder if someone is spying on my stuff in the cloud. Here was an interesting article about Cloud computing.
Some of the issues that IT folks need to focus on as they consider cloud computing include security, privacy, availability, and performance. Governance requires applying policies, access controls, monitoring, and auditing to corporate use of cloud services.
One of the trickiest aspects of cloud governance involves just where data is located when it’s in the cloud. As Fratto notes, it’s not unusual for software-as-a-service and other cloud vendors to store data on servers managed by another company. In effect, there can be two or more degrees of separation between your company and your company’s data.
A while ago, I tried google adsense for domains, but for some reason couldn’t get it working and didn’t get around to figuring out why. I was able to put the unused domain to work today and got some more MySQL and Wordpress experience out of the whole process. Got more Adsense represented in my name so a productive day overall. Spent most of my time plugging in a new Wordpress template recommended to me by Don over at Makovision. I liked it, came out nice and somewhat professional looking I think.
Recently I received an unsolicited request, nothing new here, I am sure we all get our fair share of spam style link requests. But at the time I’d been enjoying the spirits and decided to fire off a reply to see if there was a human on the other end. To my surprise there was another web guy with his hand on a half finished beer and a crackberry in the other. So today I decided to review his website and see what links make sense to add.
A very well done notepad template, truly near and dear to me since I use notepad for just about everything as it makes for a great lowest common denominator among programming projects.
Bryant has a whole other list of other usable free templates that are really pretty good, the Notepad version takes a really specific personality type though.
Bryant Smith is Florida web designer: a professional web designer/developer/marketer located in South Florida.
The first stop on my vacation this year was Wallowa Lake Oregon, it’s a nice quaint little snowy mountain town in upper eastern Oregon. I stayed with some good friends, Angie and Keith Garoutte just outside town. Angie works as a news director at the local KWVR radio station and Keith is semi retired law enforcement. It was very sunny my first day here, but the second day it was a bit more blizzardy (sp) than I am used too. During my time at the radio station, we had some pizza from New York Richie’s who’s owner did some work on the A-Team and various other Hollywood stuff. I had a great time hanging out and watching the snow drifts and .
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