Merry Christmas 2.0!
Posted on December 25, 2008
Merry Christmas!
We’ve done christmas a little bit different this year.
- Hours spent in the malls: 0
- Hours spent online shopping: 0
Sorry, we can’t give it away just yet though…
By this time everyone should have heard our request for memories for grandma. Everyone wants to know what our gift was, and so rather than describe it, we thought we’d just show you.
To explain it, this is the card we gave her:
It was 1991, the year of the ice storm. Your house was one of the few which still had power. Mom dropped us off to spend the day with you. To keep us busy, you pulled out a few empty gallons of milk which we decorated and filled with warm water. You called them our “Hug Jugs.” When we got cold you told us to hug them to stay warm.
It is said that memories are one of life’s greatest gifts. They are like little hugs from the past that come to warm our hearts. This is Grandma’s Hug Jug. Inside, you’ll find cards which contain memories or pictures from your family and friends. Some contain thoughts of all the times you have made us laugh, others contain memories of how you have helped us to be strong or how you have touched the lives of those who love you.
When you feel the need for a warm hug or a few giggles reach in and pull out a memory or a picture from the past.
And finally, if you’d like to read over some of the memories people have, they’re all available below:
Thanks for everybody’s help who contributed, we couldn’t have done it without you!
Subscribe to Feeds using TwittFeeder
Posted on December 9, 2007
Twitter is a great update and notification system. You can send it messages with a variety of tools including Instant Messaging, Text Messages and the Twitter website itself. Twitter’s mission statement reads:
Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
One of the most useful features about ‘new web’ is feeds. Getting updated whenever the sites you check change is probably the best enhancement to come out of the internet. No more wasting time checking sites that haven’t updated yet.
TwittFeeder asks the question: What are your favorite websites doing? It allows you to easily subscribe to feeds using twitter. Once subscribed you’ll get updates via Direct Message.
To use it first start following TwittFeeder. Once you are it will automatically start following you. When it does you can start subscribing to feeds. To do so simply send ’subscribe http://feedurl’ to twittFeeder as a direct message. If you’re using one of the standard Twitter tools this is accomplished by sending the following message to twitter:
D twittFeeder subscribe http://feedurl
That’s it! once you’re subscribed twittFeeder will start sending you direct messages using any notification system you’ve already setup in Twitter. The great thing about this service is if twitter ever adds another notification type you automatically get your feed subscriptions sent there for free.
The notification system twittFeeder uses is whatever your notifications are currently sent to by Twitter since it simply sends you the updates via a Twitter Direct Message. If you’re not a user yet you should be but the notifications currently supported are:
- Text Message
- Instant Messages
- Twitter website
- Lots and Lots of 3rd party applications
To unsubscribe to a particular feed simply send ‘unsubscribe http://feedurl’ as a Direct Message to twittFeeder.
Disclaimer: at the moment twittFeeder is scheduled to run every 10 minutes so updates won’t necessarily be immediate. That number might go up or down depending upon usage and several other factors.
Dynamic Categories
Posted on October 25, 2007
I determined a while ago that I wanted to reduce the clutter on my blog and eliminate most of what’s normally displayed on the front page of any blogs. However I didn’t want to lose any functionality and wanted to always have the ability to add links and categories and have lists of them that were generated dynamically somewhere. I figured that adding a page for each makes a lot of sense so I wrote a dynamic content wordpress plugin. At the moment it has 3 hard coded keyword tokens that it replaces with corresponding content. However the next release will allow you to specify a keyword token and what widget to insert in its place.
Bug Fixes
Posted on July 22, 2007
I have fixed several annoying bugs in ZippyPhotos one of which caused directories to be displayed in the wrong order. It amazes me how easy PHP is to work with every time I make a fix or add a feature.
I also added the ability to specify the number of items currently displayed in the RSS feed. Right now the default is set to 10 but like everything else in Zippy, it’s configurable via settings.php.
Zippy Photos version 1.0
Posted on May 17, 2007
well… It’s out. I’ve (probably prematurely) released Zippy Photos 1.0. The biggest problem is speed. I know I know… with a name like Zippy it should be quick. I haven’t spent a lot of time with speed improvements, I’ve mostly concentrated on features but I gurantee It’s top on the list now. I have some things to try and with some luck we’ll see a dramatic speed increase.