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When we lived in Grand Rapids, I did a lot of that living in coffee shops. Through my research for the (now rather neglected) Grand Rapids WiFi site I became a bit of an expert on the different outlets around town. These days—having an office—I spend a lot less time in coffee shops. Except when we’re back visiting the US and I’m crazily trying to fit work into the trip. This time around I got the chance to check out two new coffee shops in Grand Rapids: Sparrows and Madcap. I’d heard a lot of talk about the former and really enjoyed working there, surrounded by the magazines that it also sells. The United States has an incredible magazine culture with many, many fantastic titles. But most of the country is terribly short of good places to buy them. I would have loved to have a place so near our house to walk to and browse magazines when we lived in GR, and I’m very glad it’s there now. ...

This is a follow-on from my piece on how I got the (development version of) Catapult Magazine up and running with Rails 3.0pre. If you haven’t already done so, I’d recommend you read that first. Catapult makes use of the permalink_fu plugin which fails in Rails 3. It fails because of a reliance on the evaluate_attribute_method method which no longer exists in version 3. I’ve temporarily worked around that by replacing it with class_eval, but lately I’ve been using friendly_id a lot more and I suspect I’ll be focussing on porting to that if it works cleanly in Rails 3. ...

Last time we were in the States, Nathan Phillips handed me a CD-R of his then-new record Postcard. Nathan had played one of our Ambridge evenings with Julie Lee while touring with her, and I was delighted to have the record. It’s a beautifully understated home recording made over the course of a year, and numerous people have asked me how to get hold of it. Finally, having caught up with Nathan as he returns from California to Nashville, I’m able to answer that question. So if you’ve been dying to hear it, you can preview and/or buy it over at CD Baby. If you’ve not, I’d still recommend it. ...

Ugh. The second week of doing these and I’m already late. I blame travel, or the lack of internet access for a couple of days at our destination. Or something like that. The big news of last week was that I signed the lease on a new office and we’ll be moving across the road into a larger (and hopefully less chaotic) space on January 11th. We’ve got space for a couple more people so drop me a line if you’re looking for desk space in Shoreditch. ...

I’ve been meaning to jump on Matt Webb’s Week Notes bandwagon for a few months now. I’ve even written a couple when off-line but then forgotten them until so long after the fact that they’re no longer relevant. Still, it seems like a good discipline and clearly this blog needs some injection of life, so here goes. While I do all my work under the " Ket Lai" banner, I’m going to post them here as they’re a fairly personal reflection and may also occasionally contain some links of technical interest. ...

We hadn’t expected to get to do this. Arriving on site we didn’t know we’d have funding, but the call came in late on Thursday and the planning began. Matt –given his background in typography and design for print–handled negotiations with the printers. A deadline of 7pm on Sunday was set, if we met it we’d be the first thing on the press that night and should be able to have the paper on site that night. ...

I’ve been watching the recent furore over Apple’s iPhone app review process with some concern. Partly, of course, I want the process to be clear, to make sense and to provide us all with good access to the apps we want. But the slightly more selfish reason was that I was waiting for the Greenbelt app to be approved for sale, hoping fervently that it would make it through in time for people to buy it before the festival. ...

For a while now I’ve been transitioning away from using the name jystewart.net for my web development work in favour of Ket Lai. The shift is partly born of a desire to separate out my work from other parts of my life (increasingly important now we’re a family of three), but mostly a recognition that I rarely work on projects solo these days–instead pulling in a range of collaborators–and a group identity is more honest to what we’re doing. ...

I really liked this story about the NPRbackstory twitter account. The panel at SxSW about newspaper APIs (which NPR was tagged onto) was one of the highlights, filled with promise, and it’s good to hear about a tangible (albeit experimental) use of one of those APIs to begin to contextualise breaking news. All too often we lack the memory or the back-knowledge to appropriately interpret the stories that dominate the news (I was a little surprised and disappointed that the BBC stories about Khamnei’s comments on Britain didn’t note that “blame the British” is a common off-hand comment in Iran). News organisations often have vast resources that could help us develop some of that back-knowledge but they’re under-utilised. It’s rarely helpfully presented by web-based news outlets, but for a radio station it’s particularly hard to get that out. Twitter provides a nice way of passing on some tidbits and it’s great that NPR are using it for more than driving traffic to their very latest content. ...

I didn’t write much (outside of twitter) about SxSW 2009. In part that was because life rushed off in other directions immediately afterwards, and in part there wasn’t much that really inspired me to write. There were numerous good sessions at the conference, but far too many “social media consultants” talking without real experience and far too much focus on “monetising.” Many of us with a longer view of the web and/or more of a technical bent expressed considerable frustration with such sessions and the voting process that had allowed them to dominate the programme. ...