Easy come, easy go. Let the ideas flow. »

I *think* I'm already asleep for the night so I'll make this quick:

1. I put a little more work into StoryRank today so that it now supports a permalink and a short description about the permalink. I've got to do some updates to the site itself to explain it all, and then of course update a few more bits of code so that the descriptions are indexed along with everything else...but I think it's going to help make the widget/feature/site better so that makes me happy.

2. I was recently telling my awesome wife (who happens to be one of my two regular readers as well - HI honey!) about some ideas for projects I had been thinking about doing. One of them was the concept of 'temporary' bookmarks...basically for things that you come across that you want to check out but just don't have the time right now (and once you do get around to checking them out, you probably don't want to keep them cluttering up your bookmarks anymore)...well before I could even start to think about the idea in any sort of detail, I come across a blog post today saying that they guy behind Tumbler has just released that very service as it's own little site! Nice. That only marks about the 100th time that has happened to me, but again I'll say that at least it validates some of my ideas are OK

3. While doing more reviews.com work today I started to get really frustrated with how fragile systems still are. In one case, I've got a Ferret index I need to search set up on an admin box and I need to replicate it out to a few other boxes as well. It *should* be as simple as coping out the various files/directories and wah-la. But no, the versions of Ruby on each box are slightly different, as are some of the required gems...it's not a big deal, but it means having to first match them all up and the biggest part of that is just taking the time to do it (while nobody on the project side even realizes that it needs done or why it needs done). Plus when you do updates like that you have to go back and make sure you aren't breaking some other program or feature as you do it...so it really just becomes a big headache for us developers (par for the course I guess).

The second thing that frustrated me with reviews work today was a small RSS feed issue. We've had a feed running for a couple of years for recently published reviews and for some reason it crashed recently. When I went in to look at the code, it was just some simple little XML details that needed fixed (back when we first did the feed, the aggregator we were using didn't allow for the CDATA encapsulation and so we needed to do some serious work arounds to handle the snippets in our feeds; we now use feedburner [we may have always used them], and they now support CDATA so it was an easy fix). Anyway the frustration comes from the fact that there are already so many variations on RSS formats, services, and such...having just dealt with this stuff on this very blog (don't forget to subscribe btw!); I can say that it's close to being a big enough headache to barely be worth including as a feature...

4. A friend of mine that does a ton of NFL draft related stuff contacted me about doing a little project with him. We only got to chat about it for a few minutes today, but I think it's a really good idea and I'm looking forward to getting cracking on it soon...I'll release more details on it as we figure it out and get it started.

5. I'm thinking about putting together a Factor Quiz (just like the Haskell and Ruby Quiz things)...if I do it though, I would make it more web site driven than what the Ruby one seems to be (you are required to join a general mailing list for that one and so you get spammed with a million newbie questions and such on top of the Ruby Quiz bits -- I lasted about 14 hours on the list before I had to unsubscribe; and most of those hours I was on it I was actually asleep or away from my computer). Overall though, I like the concept of the Quiz both as a teaching tool and as a fun type of geek game. I think a Factor one would be especially fun for me because it forces a different type of thinking (for me).

5A: I'm thinking about doing a quiz/contest like feature for StoryRank as well. The idea being that we post a topic or a question on StoryRank and ask people to blog about it. When they blog about it, they make sure to include the StoryRank widget (with a special id for that specific quiz)...when people rate the post via the widget, we keep a running scoreboard of who people think has the best story/answer/post (plus all the usual StoryRank benefits related to the widget).

6. I spent some time catching up on Draftwizard today as well...it still has a really great core set of people who troll it, and I don't want to lose touch of them...so I have to figure out something good to give them out there...I also posted the latest results I'm getting about my 'expert' fantasy football rankings from the Fantasy Index Magazine (I'm sucking this year big time!)...

7. I've also been thinking about the idea of a personal history...a few people are already working on this idea from different angles (ie. what sites you've browsed, etc.)...I'm thinking about it more from a widget perspective...what I'm thinking is some type of widget that people put on their blogs that tracks say a user's IP (or maybe an openid but that would require a log in)...*if* enough people had the widget installed, you could then go to the central site to see a history of the various blogs you've visted (or that your IP has been to); the blog owners could see what different IPs are reg. visitors and such; and the killer part would be the ability to display things like "people who visited this blog also visted blog XYZ"...both the readers and writers would like that I think...

8. I'm heading back to the hometown (Eria, PA area) tomorrow with the family...it's supposed to be about a 7 hour drive (first time we are doing it from the new house) so it should give me some time to think over more of my ideas and plans as well as future blog post topics...but it may also mean posting is sparse of the next few days as I catch up with various friends and family members.

I guess that's enough for now since technically I am already sleeping and all ... ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ