hello, i make webpages

Hyping side projects

Posted on February 24th, 2008 | Link

A new side project coming soon: ræviews.com. Yes, I chose that name so I could make use of the under-utilized æ character. It's so snooty that it's awesome. I'm working on it with a coworker from MindTouch, so it's been a bit nice not having to do everything by myself.

The site's gonna let you review things, but in one-word only. Think of it as a test of creativity - how well could you describe movies in one word? Should be interesting...

Tabulas 2007 in review

Posted on January 2nd, 2008 | Link

In August, I rolled out some new code to power all the public-facing sites.

In October, I turned on Akismet comment filtering for all Tabulas accounts - this cut down spam by 98%! Akismet rules :)

In In November, I turned on domain aliasing for all accounts. This lets anybody point a domain name to their Tabulas accounts.

I didn't get as much done with Tabulas in 2007 as I wanted to (darn the day job!), but hopefully I can scrounge some spare time in 2008.

Listfoo as open source

Posted on April 23rd, 2007 | Link

You, too, can now run your own listfoo! Download the open-source release and run your own list-hosting site.

listfoo 1.1

Posted on November 1st, 2006 | Link

I released an update to Listfoo (version 1.1) over this past week. This release features a new user interface and internationalization support (UTF-8). I think this release is absolutely beautiful, and I hope you agree :)

I've added a list of features that will compromise the Listfoo 1.2 release (Probably late December) and Listfoo 1.3 release (Probably March '07).

swarmf!

Posted on October 23rd, 2006 | Link

I've recently launched swarmf.com in a private beta. Here's what it does:

swarmf.com allows you to create a collection of clippings that can be easily organized on a topic page. Think of it like creating your own online newspaper front page. You can easily add links to pages, podcasts, videos, files, and images. Reorganizing your front page is just a simple matter of dragging and dropping items in your columns!

The idea is basically to create one page with more powerful layout options than traditional online publishing tools like blogs and CMSes. It's an experiment in progress, and I've been getting a ton of feedback on it, so the evolution of this process should be quite interesting.

There's a whole category on it in my personal journal, so you can take a read if you'd like.

Minor updates

Posted on March 22nd, 2006 | Link

A lot's happened, so a recap of Tabulas updates in the past few weeks:

Our database server got smashed by a hacker, so I moved the database to a bigger server (a move I had been planning for some time now, the downtime gave me the opportunity)
I've shifted backup services to Amazon's S3 service, which means I don't have to worry about setting up and maintaining a mission-critical server for large file backups! Currently all images are being backed up to that site; I will soon be backing up media files over there as well.
Because I've freed up a lot of space, Tabulas has now increased the image storage for both free and patron accounts. Free accounts can store up to 150 images on their Tabulas accounts, while patron accounts can store up to 1000 images on their Tabulas accounts.

Tabulas comment spam

Posted on March 3rd, 2006 | Link

Over the past few weeks, I've been developing internal tools for helping me to combat the growing spam problem on Tabulas. Because Tabulas has always offered anonymous guest commenting, it has been a target for spammers. However, a global comment spam filter went live yesterday on Tabulas (nitty gritty details here), and there have been almost no comment spams since its implementation!

I've also updated Listfoo to allow for printing - this has been useful to me, as I print out daily todo lists.

Blogger API support and privacy

Posted on February 20th, 2006 | Link

Support for the Blogger API has been added to Tabulas. Coupled with our recent addition of the Windows XP uploader API, Tabulas is really making great strides to becoming an open platform for developers.

I've also updated the RSS feed generation for Tabulas - there is now better character encoding support and the addition of the guid element for all feeds.

RSS doesn't have an inherent method of "deleting" entries. For sites like Bloglines, they will keep a local copy of any entry posted to a RSS feed since there is no update to the RSS feed telling aggregators that an entry has been wiped clean. Therefore, Tabulas will start publishing blank RSS entries for deleted entries (while maintaining link and guid element values) so that these aggregators also have an opportunity to remove the entry. This is all part of my efforts in better supporting privacy of Tabulas journals since I discovered a significant number of Tabulas users value the privacy features.

Tabulas updates

Posted on February 13th, 2006 | Link

This past weekend, I put in a lot of work into developing the new API center for Tabulas; the end-goal of the API center is to offer many different APIs in different formats (Blogger, Atom, etc.) eventually. The first API to go live (albeit not really an "open" standard) is the Windows XP Web Publishing Wizard API.

The Windows XP Web Publishing Wizard allows users to upload files and images from Windows, thus avoiding the whole browser uploading experience. Tabulas users are no longer constrained to uploading 5 images from their browser; they can upload as many images as they want at once!

listfoo updates

Posted on February 8th, 2006 | Link

Some updates to listfoo:

Fixed up bugs for IE and older versions of FireFox that wouldn't allow for list deletion
Fixed a bug that was preventing new lists from getting the proper URL titles (only occured if you created two lists with the same name)
Added a new feature that lets you copy ANY public lists to your listfoo (hopefully this will be useful for sharing!)
Any URLS that are in list items are autolinked when viewing the list.
Changing the font size in edit mode also affects the textarea font size
Changed up the way I generate URLs - bad characters no longer will result in a '-' (For example, "Roy's books" used to convert to 'roy-s-books', but now it converts to 'roys-books')

I'll continue to add in bits and pieces to listfoo over the upcoming weeks as I have time.