Streams, my new personalized feed reader, is now live. It replaces the old blogroll and friends links. I use it to keep up to date on all the blogs I like to read and streams enables me to do so by splitting the old blogroll into more relevant subcategories.
You can add a Google Gadget to your Google Personalized Homepage that will countdown the days until an event takes place.
To do this, click on “Add Content” in the upper left hand corner of your Google Personalized Homepage, then click the little “Add by URL” link to the immediate right of the “Search Homepage Content” button.
Then copy-paste in this url, changing the date and and event name as you’d like:
http://dominik.net/hidden/days-until-xml.php?year=2009&month=5&day=10&event=Graduation
That particular date is the date I graduate from law school (982 days until as of today).
If you’re at Ave Maria School of Law and just want to add that without having to go through all the trouble above (which is only really necessary if you want more flexibility in terms of the date and event), you can just click this button here:
To expound on the customizability, you could Add by URL this address:
http://dominik.net/hidden/days-until-xml.php?year=2006&month=10&day=20&event=I turn 23
That would count the days until I turn 23 years old. I hope folks find this little gadget useful and fun!
I’m very happy to announce the launch of photos.dominik.net, my digital photo album, hosted through SmugMug. The nice thing about SmugMug is that for a reasonable yearly fee, I get unlimited storage and (practically) unlimited bandwith (the limit is 1 PB = 1,000 TB = 1,000,000 GB). If you’re looking to host photos, I highly recommend it. If you do decide to sign up, please use my referrer code (851GILQDGOtEs) to save $5 on the subscription fee!
To inaugurate the launch, I’ve put up my 1,568 photos from Tertio Millennio which recently concluded. It was a life-changing experience which I’ll blog more about in a bit.
photos.dominik.net will continue to evolve and expand as I go through my collection of nearly 30,000 digital photos and publish them online. Look for updates in the future :)
I’ve added a Reading sidebar as well, thanks in large part to the Now Reading plug-in for WordPress.
Before, a large reason I didn’t blog the books I read was because I didn’t want to take time to write a review or didn’t want to deal with linking to Amazon … this plug-in lets me add the book as soon as I finish reading it and takes care of linking to Amazon for me. Win win :)
You’ll notice there’s now a “Listening” sidebar that shows songs I’ve recently heard. This is provided via last.fm along with the WordPress plugin Scrobbler (which I hacked to appease my purposes). last.fm is pretty cool — it tracks what you listen so that it learns what you like so it can suggest or stream new music to you. A similar project is pandora, but their usability is pretty bad.
Also, to clean up the sidebar a bit, I’ve moved archives/friends/blogroll into a subsubnavigation bar underneath the page title. I’ve also broadly organized posts in the blog into supercategories, so readers can just read what interests them if they so choose — think of it as filtering. The entire hierarchy is made clear on the archives page.
More changes to come (I’d like a “Reading” sidebar similar to the “Listening” sidebar); most of the recent ones have been inspired at least in part by work I’ve been doing on bring-it.net… nothing quite like web design to get one in the mood for more web design.
Today marks the day that Bring-It, an online community for young Catholic men, went public; it has a booth at today’s Boston Catholic Men’s Conference where ~5k people will be attending.
I’m involved in building and maintaining the site and am excited to watch it grow, as well as learn from the challenges that will doubtless arise in the process of managing a dynamic community website.
Here’s a question I’ve been wrestling with for the past few days in depth, and you could say since 2000 (the beginnings of Framework 1.0 development — the software the runs dominik.net is Framework 0.9):
How to create a website design paradigm that allows you to create a blog and a site in a similar, simple manner?
Framework’s purpose is to enable the creation of content-rich community websites in a manner that is simple, efficient and elegant.
So in short, whatever I’m doing on my website, whether posting a blog entry much like this one, adding a new book review, updating my resume, changing my college classes, updating my schedule, adding a new poem, posting a map of my fantasy world… I want to have a similar simple interface to doing so.
Discussions with Nada Amin have hashed out that there are essentially two different categorization dimensions here — time and content. In a weblog posts are organized primarily in a time sensitive manner. On a static website, most content is organized in a content sensitive manner. If I update my resume, for example, you look under ‘Academic’ and see my new resume. You don’t have to dig back through the calendar to get the link from when I updated my resume.
What I want to do: build a framework that unifies the website and weblog paradigms.
I plan to release it under a Creative Commons license. Your thoughts and feedback are most welcome.