Blog posts

On Tuesday the Center for Digital Government announced that Michigan.gov had won its annual “Best of the Web” award. You can see the state’s press release here. The site has introduced a number of useful new features over the past year. If it weren’t for their recent addition of news feeds I probably would have missed this story, and quite a few others, and their efforts to improve accessibility, and unify public facing services are to be applauded. But the fact that they won the award is a sign of the poor state of governmental websites in the United States. ...

Back from Greenbelt last night, I spent some time this morning trying out flickr’s new support for ‘geotagging’ by placing all my photos on a map. The interface is nice and hopefully as the API is updated and more uses for the geodata emerge, more and more users will geotag their photos. I’m imagining a map of the Greenbelt site that lets visitors see photos based on when and where on the site they were taken, opening up all sorts of navigational possibilities. ...

I was very pleased to hear that Chicago O’Hare finally has wifi available for travellers. They’ve been lagging behind other airports in that regard. Previously the only option for getting online were booths where you pay around $5 for 15 minutes access. The new system is not free, but it does seem to have pretty good coverage across the terminals. Unfortunately it is also painfully slow quite a bit of the time, making me wonder if the convenience of being online is worth the frustration of waiting quite so long for sites to load. ...

The first lyrics to grab my attention during a first listen to Lamchop’s new album Damaged were from the beautiful, sprawling first track, Paperback Bible: i have always thought That handguns were made for shooting people Rather than for sport Why not use a rifle in most other applications? You might find a rifle or a musket But you’ll never hear a pistol There may always be Someone looking for or finding some ...

One of the projects demonstrated by Andy Turner at BarCamp Grand Rapids was Mapufacture. Developed by Andy, with Guilhem Vellut and Mikel Maron, the site functions as an RSS aggregator with a difference. As well as pulling in the latest content from feeds, it also extracts GeoRSS data from those feeds and plots the results on a google map. You can read an announcement here. Mapufacture is one of a number of apps that are demonstrating one of the key ways that I hope the web is going to move on from the ‘Web 2.0’ phenomenon, showing how open data can begin to be leveraged using tools designed for average users. Open APIs are all well and good, but it’s only as their potential is opened up to non-traditional users that I think we’ll really begin to see the potential. ...

Rails’ RXML templates (powered by Builder) are a great way to generate various different types of XML output from your application, but the documentation could be lacking. I’ve been working with namespaced content for a while but I’ve spent quite a while today trying to work out how to add an element in an explicit namespace, with attributes and text content. To create an ‘id’ element is straightforward: xml.id 'my-id-here' and then to put that tag in the ‘foo’ namespace you need: ...

This weekend was the inaugural BarCamp Grand Rapids. I was only able to make it for the day on Saturday, missing the previous evening’s introductions, talks, and trip to Grand Rapids Brewing Company, but it was good to be able to attend, and even better to have it just a short bike ride away. It was a fairly small group that was gathered, so almost all of the sessions ran in a single room. Java developers were in the majority—probably not a surprise given that it was the local Java Users’ Group that put the event together—but those of us working with dynamic languages made sure that those languages got their share of mentions. ...

Little Miss Sunshine feels like a more mainstream sibling of films from last year like The Squid And The Whale and Me and You and Everyone We Know and unsurprisingly given the film’s wider distribution it doesn’t have the same psychological weight, deadpan humour, or dysfunction as those films. That may be just as well as several parents seemed to have chosen the film’s title above its ‘R’ rating and brought small children along to see it. Hopefully those children were able to enjoy the soundtrack—so well put together by DeVotchKa—and ignore the less appropriate scenes and language. ...

Last year I posted a few times about the aggregation code I wrote to allow Greenbelt to collect festival-related content scattered around the web and republish it. What I may not have gone into was how frustrating that code tended to be to work with, written in a rush before the festival and heavily patched while on site. This year, with longer to prepare, I decided to throw that one away and start again. I chose python as the language again, partly because I wanted to use some python libraries and partly because it seemed time to get some more python practice in. I also decided that rather than have the parsers for each service (currently technorati, del.icio.us, flickr, pubsub, and magnolia) each update the database, it was time for some abstraction and layering. ...

Jeremy Kemper has just checked in a change to Edge Rails that fixes my biggest frustration with has_many :through. Since it’s appearance a couple of versions back, has_many :through has been a great addition to the rails associations toolkit, making the use of join models infinitely cleaner. But until recently it was rather cumbersome to create those relationships. For example, if I wanted to add an author to a book where the relationship is defined as: ...