Coder, Gamer, Runner, Husband.
I didn’t write as much as I had planned on doing, but nonetheless, here are a few of my “better” posts (subjective opinion, YMMV).
Have a good 2009.
The short story is: not going to happen.
I’ll be shutting escaloop down in about a month or so. It was a nice toy and a fun experiment, I’ve used it to get into Ramaze, but I have neither the time nor the energy to work on it any further.
I recommend moving over to FriendFeed or Lifestream.fm for all your lifestream needs. I am sure there are many more such services, just look around. :)
If you should choose FriendFeed, look me up if you want.
So Friendfeed opened yesterday. Naturally, I had to sign in to take a look.
When I got to the point where it wanted me to configure the feeds and services to grab data from, it first asked for my Google Reader shared items. Okay, can do. Then it asked for my Tumblr name, and this is where my eyebrows went down.
So Tumblr allows me to bundle many of my “activities” in one place. Flickr, blog posts, Twitter posts, links etc., you name it. It does so by querying your Flickr account, your blog(s), Twitter, your del.icio.us bookmark dump (to name a few) via their RSS feeds. And I believe many people are using this feature just for that. I know I do. So that’s usually the first (or even second) re-posting of original content.
Now lifestream services like Friendfeed come hopping along and are going to add another level of abstraction, in the form of aggregation of already aggregated content, or an RSS feed for the aggregated lifestream, or yet another social network layer, and/or by adding comments on top of that.
How much more meta can we go? This is some Zen shit, man.
I swear, one of these days someone will put yet another layer on this Crazy Content Cake of Doom and a black hole will open in the middle of the Internet and suck out all intelligence, reason and original content. (Yes, like Digg, just a wee bit worse.)
Also, I am well aware that I, too, run my own version of a lifestream service, and that my post might seem hypocritical, but by the Gods, there’s a reason why I try to keep escaloop simple.
Update: Added some clarifications.
As you might have noticed escaloop.com was down for a few hours last night. My hoster had to reboot the server after maintenance, and escaloop wasn’t restarted automatically. My bad.
Sorry about that.
Hi all,
so far, escaloop has a couple of services it’s supporting explicitly, which means there are rules to mark these services with their own service icon and maybe an adjusted wording when they are displayed. At the time of this post, these services are:
Everything else is supported implicitly, which means it’s processed and displayed, but has no special icon or anything, it’s “just” another source.
So my question today is: do you have suggestions for other services that should be explicitly supported? If yes, please reply to this topic and provide both the URL to service/site as well as (if possible) an example feed or two so I can take a look. I won’t promise to include each and every suggestion; unfortunately, my spare time isn’t unlimited, and also it doesn’t make sense to support everything explicitely, methinks.
Well, please tell me what you want! It certainly can’t hurt. ;) Many thanks!
(I’ve closed the comments here, please sound off on the escaloop discussion board instead.)
I’ve spent the last few hours bug testing, then deploying, then yelling at, then hotfixing, then re-deploying a new version of both escaloop site and badge. I didn’t include everything I was planning on initially, and instead decided to go for “release early, release often”.
A few highlights:
I hope you’ll like it. If you find bugs or have questions, let me know on the message boards, please! I’m all ears.
Just a quick heads-up: I am currently working on deploying the new version of escaloop, and ran into problems while doing so. So, for the next minutes (or few hours, God forbid), your badges may appear a bit wonky.
Not to worry, I am on it!
A few months ago I was talking to Hendrik about lifestreams, and in my ongoing struggle for his undying love (as a friend), I’ve whipped up a little somethingsomething using the wonderful Yahoo! Pipes.
“Lifestream?”, you ask. “What the deuce is a lifestream?!” A good question. A lifestream is basically a big bucket where all the updates and update notifications from your blog, your ADD-induced Twitter posts, your Flickr uploads etc come together in one concise way so it’s easier for others to ignore them. ;) Also, you only have one URL to hand out to hot women (or men) in pubs because the stream inadvertedly works as a hub page, too!
Now, while the prototype was quickly hacked together, it felt clunky. Sure, you can pass a dozen URLs or so to the pipe, but what if the URLs would change? Or if you wanted to add a new one or delete one from the list? Then it’d be a lot of tinkering with the script call in your HTML code.
So I had the idea to build a site where you could configure the list of URLs and the layout and everything, and which would give you a HTML badge for your blog or site, a snippet that wouldn’t change.
And today, I proudly open escaloop to the public.
I feel it’s good enough to test the waters, I believe. I’ve played around with it, fiddling with different implementations on different types of pages, and it looks okay. I guess I could try to think of every possibility for every site on earth, but we know how that would turn out.
It certainly looks fine on my own blog. (Considering that I don’t have that many active feeds, that is.)
So with that, I’ll release escaloop into the wild. It’s still a bit rough around the edges, and there might be bugs. That said: Please take a look, play around with it, build yourself a badge or two for your site, blog, MySpace page, whatever. If you have feedback, please let me know in the escaloop Google Group.
Have fun, Carlo
PS: You might ask what took me so long. In my defense, I am a lazy bastard. Also, I wrote the first rough draft in Python, then switched to Ruby. There I’ve wrote the first prototype using the Sinatra DSL, and finally settled to make use of nifty lightweight Ramaze framework. (By the way, Sinatra is nice, but not what I was looking for.)
During the last few months I’ve also had to put a lot of time into Mass Effect, which is a great game. You understand.
