As described in my last post, I’ve been working on documenting the kuler REST API. Last night I whipped up an RSS feed for any user’s themes. You’ll have to visit the page and login to get the link, but after that the feed will work even without logging in.
I also created a page that just grabs a single theme - each theme in the feed now links to this page as a permalink. Finally, I figured out the download url and the feed description should contain the ASE download link.
Geekery ahead.
I really love Adobe’s new social app, kuler, built around creating, tagging, and sharing color themes. The interface is gorgeous, and the ability to download themes into Photoshop and Illustrator is a great feature.
However, as a social app, kuler is not very social. It exists completely as a Flash application, and there are no features that allow the sharing of information created in the kuler space with anything outside it. At the least, I wanted an RSS feed of my themes that I could aggregate on DELICIOUSLYMETA.
Based on some information gleaned from a blog comment by a kuler employee, I installed the excellent network tool WireShark (née Ethereal) and started watching the traffic between the Flash app and Adobe’s servers.
Sure enough, kuler uses a REST-style API based on http calls t the server that return XML documents representing the data. I’ve first wrote some PHP code to test it, and then started documenting the API at http://deliciouslymeta.com/kuler/. I’ve only got the basics documented yet, but over time I’ll get more of it down. At some point I hope to be able to offer RSS feeds for a user’s themes.
My goal in this project is not to “hack’ Adobe’s cool new app, but to show how the API model they use is actually a great foundation for a social app. Hopefully they will publicize and document the API in the near future and this experiment will be obsolete.
I’ve been hacking on my new linklog over lunch, and finally got it fixed up enough to put up as the main home page at http://deliciouslymeta.com. There’s a feed, so you can get my monkinetic posts, my google shared items, my del.icio.us links, my diggs, and my twitter updates all in one convenient package. Oh, the joy.
The linklog is based on Jeremy Keith’s stream.php as described in Deliciously Streaming Links. Still to come - feed caching and if-modified/ETag support.
Bonus joy- the bar chart reflects post activity over the last 10 days. Hover over a bar to see how many posts for that day.
Adelina and I went to see Happy Feet last weekend… the movie was really good (if a bit preachy towards the end), but I wish that Adelina had been able to see the real penguins in March of the Penguins first. Luckily, it came on TV this weekend and we were able to TiVo it, so she got to see it while the other was still fresh in her mind. We all enjoyed the movie, though we decided that emperor penguins, while being cute and fuzzy as chicks and fun and funny as adults, lead a life that we’re glad we don’t.
Collibri is a poor-man’s (read Windows-user’s) QuickSilver, which I use on my Windows machine at work. It’s got few prefs to speak of, can’t find half my apps, but it’s better than nothing.
So anyway, version 17a is out.
Massive, giant, enormous, huge, terrifying, flesh-eating centipede.
The giant centipede then grips the stone with it rear legs, allowing its forward segments to dangle into the cave below. Its front section sways as its legs wriggle through the air in search of the intended target: a passing bat.
Fortunately, the poison from the Scolopendra gigantea is insufficient to kill a healthy human adult. The alarmingly massive centipede can, however, cause symptoms such as local sharp pain, swelling, chills, fever, weakness, and uncontrollable running-away-and-screaming.
I picked up an iPod Shuffle last night. It’s as tiny, light, and AWESOME as everyone says. And the sound quality is fantastic - the bass response in the earbuds is better than my 4G iPod by quite a bit - and they’re the same earbuds. How’d they do that?
In response to Ethan:
Head Over Feet by Alanis Morissette: Falling in love with her, again.
Gloria, U2 - learning guitar for the first time, hammering out that riff over and over and over
Document, R.E.M. - road tripping with Don, Document and Lifes Rich Pageant alternating in the truck CD player
Lemon, Paul Oakenfold - that guy Ryan in college that introduced me to techno.
Turn You Inside-Out, R.E.M. - sweating over a media-analysis term paper in school on the music of R.E.M. What were you thinking, Michael?
Even Flow, Pearl Jam - Mowing the lawn for my girlfriend’s dad in high school. Hot, sweaty, grass stains and headphones.
Bullet With Butterfly Wings, Smashing Pumpkins - the SP concert in Hamburg, Germany where I crowd-surfed for the first and last time
MoFo, U2 - the U2 concert in Munich where I danced with a girl I’d never met (and whose language I did not speak) for an hour to Howie D’s beats before U2 came on (Howie D also DJed for some of their first songs in the set).
Orange Crush, R.E.M. - Working construction in late 1989, trying to rock out to what would soon become the important band in my life while NOT falling off the steel girder I was standing on (3 stories up).
Kid Fears, Indigo Girls - Hurting for the hurting people in my life, 1993.
Two Step, Dave Matthews Band - creating the letter, nay, work of art, re-declaring my love for her, 1997.
These are only some of the notes in the soundtrack of my life… perhaps when I’m back at my iTunes library I’ll find some more.
A while back, I registered deliciouslymeta.com and setup a simple Wordpress linklog. I posted to it for a while, but it fell out of use.
Lately, I’ve started using the other del.icio.us again, as well as sharing links from my Google Reader account, and I’ve even started Digg-ing (welcome to the 21st century, Ivy). So I have been linking things, but it wasn’t going into my linklog. Silly webgeek. I did add sections to my sidebar for my Google shared items and my del.icio.us links, but it seemed a bit of overkill.
So… last week I ran across Jeremy’s life-streaming script again, re-read what it did, and decided it might be a nice way to revive ye old linklog without having to, you know, work. So, I spent some time getting it to work without access to fopen and making it read the funky ATOM feed from Google Reader.
You can see the “beta” version of the script at http://deliciouslymeta.com/stream.php. If it works well for a while, I’ll move it to the home page, add an RSS feed, and re-integrate it into the homepage here.
Chuckle. Merlin Mann on today’s MacBreak Weekly:
“You should get Boing Boing to open up a can of Cory on this…”
Chatting with Dad about buying a new Macbook pro…
(16:35:58) Steve/AIM: well, get the bootcamp pre-setup (16:36:09) Steve/AIM: you can still download and try parallels for fun (16:36:20) Dad: it will come with XP installed (16:36:33) Steve/AIM: cool (16:36:43) Dad: will there be a conflict (16:36:54) Steve/AIM: only in your heart
It seems to me that Cory Doctorow is working a little too hard to make Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, his work of science fiction set in a world where the artists and geeks of Disney World have taken over operation of the park in a sort of anarchistic revolution - come true. At least, for some virtual version of “true”, as realized in the huge virtual world of Second Life. From Rough Type:
Meanwhile, outside agitator Cory Doctorow, of Boing Boing, raised the specter of an outright revolution in which residents would seize control of Second Life from Linden Lab. “Second Life’s management is doing an exemplary job of coping with this,” wrote Doctorow, “but benevolent dictatorships aren’t the same thing as democracies. If a game is going to declare that its players are citizens who own property, can the company go on ‘owning’ the game?”
(Ties listed alphabetically)
What’s your favorite band? What are your top 5 albums by that band, ranked by how many 5-star rated songs each album contains?
“I sat in the Situation Room in secret meetings for nearly twenty years under five Presidents, and all I can say is that some awfully crazy schemes might well have been approved had everyone present not known and expected hard questions, debate, and criticism from the Hill
“Working with the Congress was never easy for Presidents, but then, under the Constitution, it wasn’t supposed to be. I saw too many in the White House forget that.” - Bob Gates, current nominee for SecDef.
(Via Andrew Sullivan and FAS’ Secrecry News)
Scott Adams just got over the flu:
After several days of doctor-ordered bland food, I experienced “flavor†yesterday as if for the first time. “SWEET BABY JESUS, WHAT PLANET DID THIS PICKLE COME FROM?!!!!â€
And caffeine. I know that some of you think that life without caffeine is actually worth living. But it isn’t. My first Diet Coke after four days of abstinence was shiver-worthy. I didn’t see the hand that reached inside my head and removed the wads of cotton, but suddenly I remembered that I have hopes and dreams. Excellent!
I’ve added a subscribe-by-email box in the sidebar, provided by FeedBurner, so if you’re the email type instead of the RSS-in-a-newsreader type, you can now get tasty morsels of tech, trivia, and R.E.M. delivered to your inbox. Oh happy day!
Nice cover I’d not heard before.
I was reading over on Yahoo and tried clicking the little purple arrow next to the world Iraq…
…and was interested to see it loading a relatively “proper” Yahoo search in the popup window. Kindof cool.
Interesting article on color in Digital Web Magazine, but I find it deeply ironic that the article is completely in black and white.
it’s the end of the world as we know it
I find it comforting and appropriate that there is an R.E.M. quote in the Frontier source code.
UPDATE: in other R.E.M.-as-software news:
this one goes out to the one i love
shiny happy people
I was reading an old article on ars technica (IBM and OSDL to help Patent Office get organized -Jan 2006) about IBM’s work with the USPTO to help reform the patent system, and ran across this quote:
The second part of the new system would be a public, searchable (with search possibly provided by Google), and up-to-date database of Open Source code.
Sounds familiar, sort of like Google Code Search, announced sometime in the last couple months I think. I wonder if Code Search came out of work done while looking into this prior-art database?
Preview for Mike Judge’s new psychological thriller. digg story
“That’s the last straw…” (Fade to black)
I’m a little over the whole “tag cloud” (a simple weighted list, really) thing as applied to blog posts, but applying it to more socially “interesting” texts is a clever idea. Here Chirag Mehta has run a series of tag clouds on 360 speeches and documents by Presidents of the United States - US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud.
For example, move the slider back and forth to move forward and back in time, and compare W’s 2001-01-20: First Inaugural Address with his 2006-01-31: State of the Union Address. Pretty cool.
From the Creating Passionate Users blog:
Reduce my fear and I’ll love you forever.
This 360’ skateboard ramp is insane. Some people have way too much time and adrenaline on their hands.
What you get when you unpack an Apple refurbished product.
Plus, you won’t be tempted to save the box it comes in and take up room in your house, and that has to count for something.
(I just recently managed to throw away the 17” Powerbook box I got two+ years ago…)
Most of us went through these. And I love the colors on that site.
