Ben Nolan

I put this together as a quick prototype of what an agile board in HTML5 could look like. I’m not a huge agile fan myself, but since I keep having to use pivotal tracker in projects - I’m always tempted to do a little bit more work on it and get it to a usable state.

In my work on twitterplaces - I’ve been commonly importing several thousand tweets at once from the streaming API. As I re-write my import process, I have to re-run this import job, so I’ve been trying to get it as fast as possible. Currently what I do is:

Woohoo! Please go vote now! It’s a bit lame they’ve got the unsexiest screenshot first, but… yay!

Well, it’s done. I just submitted my entry to the 10k apart competition. It’s been a pretty intense 24 hours, but I’m glad I gave myself some extra time this morning to polish up my entry.

In the preparation for my leap back into the world of start-ups, I’ve been wondering why I don’t prefer to consult full-time. Consulting has a bunch of pros:

I haven’t had much time to look at the Facebook Places API, but I have been working on my 10k apart submission. This competition challenges you to build a functioning web app in only 10 kilobytes of javascript, html and css.

Like some web developers, I’m a bit ADD, so I find going to the gym a bit of a chore. Don’t get me wrong. I love the exercise, the clear headedness afterwards, the more energy you have in every day, the rest for your mind - a blissful 45 minutes where your brain doesn’t have to analyse pixels on a screen, or type strange patterns into the keyboard.

Since Facebook places isn’t available outside of the US yet - I’ve only had two options for exploring the places api.

I’m really excited about the release of Facebook Places. It’s not widely available yet but it should be rolled out to American Facebook users over the next 24 hours.

I’m excited to announce that weheartplaces will be available for Nokia Series 60 phones, as well as the iPhone and Android.

Are you in Wellington and are serious about starting a tech business? I got an email from the bright ideas challenge with information about the following presentations, from various technical and business development peoples. I’ll be attending these three…

On Safari, it’s nice to use ellipsis to limit the length of text. However, a warning to young players - text-overflow: ellipsis doesn’t work with webfonts.

I’ve used photoshop for years and consider myself an intermediate user. You end up using photoshop a lot in webdesign to slice stuff up, or create decent logos - and prior to CSS3 it was my number one gradients tool. However - there’s a bunch of stuff photoshop doesn’t do.

I’ve been working on logos and design rules for Weheartplaces, creating dozens of Artboards in illustrator. I’m not a designer by trade, so some of my design is a bit stilted, but bear with me and eventually there might be a nice logo and style for the site.

I’ve talked with Sam Minnee (CTO at Silverstripe) a bunch of times about running jquery on the server side. It was only a hunch, I never knew exactly what the benefits would be - but with the availability of pushState on Firefox, Safari and Chrome - it suddenly makes a lot of sense.

This analysis by Gigaom is interesting to me. I’m really keen to see what Facebook does with places. What they’ve done so far has been underwhelming technically, but has seen impressive takeup.

I’ve been using LESS to make writing css for a jqtouch app less painful. However - the less compiler is a bit awkward to use by default - if you run:

CoffeeScript 0.9 was released over the weekend. CoffeeScript is a compiler that turns .coffee files into .js files. CoffeeScript is a significant whitespace, rubyish language that makes large (and small) javascript projects much more manageable and fun.

I’ve been working through the extension authoring documentation for each of the browsers. I was excited when I got my little icon showing up in the Safari toolbar for the first time:

While redesigning this blog (I love being able to edit css and template as easily as blog posts, go github pages!), I found myself turning this: