Laurie McGinley

old, old bird

old, old bird

© Laurie McGinley for 95% photography, 4% digital illustration and 1% commentary, 2008. | Permalink | No comment

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tree illustration

tree illustration

© Laurie McGinley for 95% photography, 4% digital illustration and 1% commentary, 2008. | Permalink | No comment

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blue and yellow

blue and yellow

$30.00 - Blue and Yellow 8×10 inch print 20080501 $55.00 - Blue and Yellow 11×14 inch print 20080501 $95.00 - Blue and Yellow 16×20 inch print 20080501

© Laurie McGinley for 95% photography, 4% digital illustration and 1% commentary, 2008. | Permalink | No comment

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Cullect, simplify your reading life

A short time ago I saw Garrick Van Buren demonstrate Cullect. We began the conversation by talking about APML, something I've publicly raved about. My understanding was that APML was a way to program your attention data into your feed reader. Then I met Garrick.

Cullect is so smart that it doesn't need APML. Garrick programmed Cullect to understand nine (or was it ten?) gestures that measure your affinity for a particular article. In this way, as I read posts from various blogs, news feeds and searches, Cullect tallies my behavior and begins to understand which articles I will want to see.

I decided to challenge Cullect with what I thought would be a very difficult task: show me photographs I like. I thought this would be hard because photographs don't have text that can be scanned and I generally do not care what a photo blog post says, outside of the actual photograph. Well, I am amazed. I've been working on my Cullect photography reading list for about a week now and Cullect shows me the photographs I like.

Simplify your reading life

I have been using Google Reader for about six months. I like that I can collect over 300 feeds and still get through them but I have developed some awful habits by using Google Reader. I tend to tear through unread posts and only skim headlines for interesting tid bits. Google Reader collects all my unread messages and tells me how much reading I have to do to clean up my inbox for the web. That is stressful! I've marked everything as read several times and I just feel guilty about it.

Cullect, on the other hand, has allowed me to slow down and actually read. I know that the posts will be arranged in order for me based on my past reading habits. So, if I only have time to read three posts, I can be assured that reading the first three posts in my Cullect reading list will be satisfying and relevant to my interests.

Here is a comparison of my photography reading list in Google Reader and my photo reading list in Cullect.

Have many interests

Cullect allows me to have multiple interests while letting them cross over each other. I can set up just one reading list if I am only interested in reading one topic. If I set up a reading list for each theme I am interested in, Cullect will allow me to have recommendations for each category. I can also use the same feed to fuel several reading lists and Cullect keeps my reading habits separate.

Why you should pay for this service

I know, everything on the internet is free and having a dollar sign lurking around just makes me nervous. I stumbled on Cullect in January and immediately closed the window when I saw that it was a paid service. Now that I have had a chance to play with it, I see that Cullect is a service that is worth paying for. It will allow me to collect articles, read them on my own schedule and feel assured that what I am reading is relevant to my interests.

Cullect, go test drive it today.

Google embraces OAuth

Programmable Web just posted an article about Google and OAuth. They summarized OAuth very well:

Like the feature on many cars today where you give the parking attendant a special key to your car that gives him some, but not all, access to your vehicle. On the Web you now have your own keys to dozens of sites but how to best handle the mashup-style case of site A wants you to grant them access to get some data from site B? Ideally you don’t want to give site A your password to site B. OAuth aims to simplify this problem: “It allows you the User to grant access to your private resources on one site (which is called the Service Provider), to another site (called Consumer, not to be confused with you, the User).”

Google Calendar atom to XSLT to hCalendar

I've just spent the last few hours turning the atom feed from a Google Calendar into hCalendar formatted HTML output and I'm exhausted. This requires an asp feed parser, knowledge of XSLT and an understanding of atom feeds. Thank you Nathan for the parser!

Here is the XSLT

Many thanks to Brad Hosack and Dave Hartley for your help!

spring

spring

$30.00 - Spring 8×10 inch print 20080420 $55.00 - Spring 11×14 inch print 20080420 $95.00 - Spring 16×20 inch print 20080420

© Laurie McGinley for 95% photography, 4% digital illustration and 1% commentary, 2008. | Permalink | No comment

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learning hAtom

I'm beginning to play with hAtom today. HAtom is a microformat for content you might want to syndicate but you don't have in a blogging platform. You might use hAtom for:

• An events calendar
• A homegrown blog
• An announcements section of your website

Like other microformats, hAtom uses standardized classes to tell browsers what kind of content is on a page. In this case, hAtom tells your browser that there is syndicated content available.

I am testing this idea in the sandbox and hope to learn enough about it to make an essentials post soon. I've found Guy Leech's article, Minimizing hAtom to be very helpful.

There are also good code examples at microformats.org.

Is anyone else using hAtom?

Readburner, why you should care

Readburner just relaunched last night. Readburner is a service that compiles shared link blogs from Google Reader.

Why should I care?

Shared posts from a feed aggregator can be thought of as recommended reading. I am much more likely to read a book if someone who likes what I like recommends it to me. I'm reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle right now because my sister recommended it and I am enjoying the book. Sharing a link in Google Reader (or any other feed reader) is a way to recommend a blog post, news item or any other syndicated information.

I could spend much less time and get a greater reward if I only read recommended reading from people who share similar interests. That would save me time and make me happier.

Who is reading your recommendations?

Your link blog is somewhat hidden unless you publicize it. This is my link blog. If you have friends who share links, their link blogs will appear next to your unread items in Google Reader. That is a pretty slow way to share recommended reading.

Then Readburner came along. Readburner compiles shared link blogs from Google Reader. Everyone who burns their feed has their recommended reading added to the pile and Readburner's output is a list of the most popular, or upcoming posts. Brilliant. Now you can get a feed of the most popular recommended reading that is being shared.

New features?

I think only time will tell just how much Readburner has improved during its downtime. I already see a new feature I really like.

There are categories now, that each have their own RSS feed. Today I see "All, Web, Desktop, Mobile and Apple." If I wanted to, I could aggregate a feed of the most popular recommended items for Apple. I hope we will be able to get feeds of recommended items for any keyword soon.

ice leaf water

ice leaf water

$30.00 - Ice leaf water 8×10 inch print 20080418 $55.00 - Ice leaf water 11×14 inch print 20080418 $95.00 - Ice leaf water 16×20 inch print 20080418

© Laurie McGinley for 95% photography, 4% digital illustration and 1% commentary, 2008. | Permalink | No comment

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MinneWebCon

Thanks to everyone who came to the microformats talk at MinneWebCon today. I put my slides up here.

If you are using microformats please feel free to leave a comment here or email me. I'd like to start an affinity group.

Did anyone else know that Eric Meyer was one of the three people who established XFN and he is involved in microformats? If you did know and didn't tell me, thank you. I think I would have passed out!

mocolocal beta

MocoLocal is a service that lets you search for amenities in a US city. They also format all the search results in microformats so you can easily plan out your vacation destinations with a mobile device.

Brilliant.

You can also rate what you find to help other users find what they are looking for.

address tag vs. hCard

Sitepoint has a good article about the gray area between XHTML and microformats.

They touch on a point that I'd been wondering about. When I first discovered the hCard creator I was impressed that I could fill in my information and get code that helped me understand hCard rules. I was disappointed that all the code was put into div and span heavy coding. I explored adding the information to the address tag that we currently employ for contact information at work. I see now that we've been using the address tag incorrectly because we've been adding street addresses to it. From the sitepoint article:

Now, those paying attention – and those who have devoured the contents of this reference from cover to cover – may well be saying at this point: "Ah, but there is an element for addresses. It's called 'address'." But alas, you are mistaken. A quick check back to the reference for address will reveal that it is not used for the purpose of marking up a physical location, but is in fact for identifying the point of contact for a web page, and therefore may include an email address, or a telephone number or something of that ilk. If the address element is used for marking up a location (number, street, city etc), then it's actually been mis-used. So, what should you do?

Enter Microformats.

Maybe we should work on a mishmash of the address tag and an hCard, which can reside in any XHTML tag. I'd love to see examples in the wild.

APML and getting the content I like

Mads Kristensen just summarized something I have been hoping to see for months.

APML = Attention Profiling Markup Language

I think my APML file might look something like this:

<Concepts>
<Concept key=”Photography” value=”1”>
<Concept key=”Documentary” value=”0.2”>
<Concept key=”Web Design” value=”0.8”>
<Concept key=”Semantic Web” value=”0.7”>
<Concept key=”Architecture” value=”0.4”>
</Concepts>

In essence, APML allows you to tell your feed reader (or maybe browser someday?) what kinds of things you want to see.

Imagine that you have 300 feeds flowing into your feed reader at any given time. It can be hard to sort them even if you are diligent. It can be even harder to predict what kind of posts will ender your reader on any given day. Wouldn't it be great if you could tell your reader to push certain topics to the top of your reading list?

Based on Kristensen's post, I think we are close.

As Kristensen put it:

"I’ve just implemented APML support on this blog for both the RSS and ATOM feeds, but also for the search page. If you specify a URL to an APML file as a query string to the RSS feed, you’ll get an RSS feed back that is filtered to match your interests."

Kristensen explained this well, but it is still confusing. I want to be able to type in my keywords of interests, rank them and have a reader that will push posts that match the description right to the top. Is there a reader like that out there?

white

white

$30.00 - White 8×10 inch print 20080401 $55.00 - White 11×14 inch print 20080401 $95.00 - White 16×20 inch print 20080401

© Laurie McGinley for 95% photography, 4% digital illustration and 1% commentary, 2008. | Permalink | No comment

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