You never forget your first DMCA takedown notice. In my case it was the Perfect Pitch incident, in which an incompetent business was sending out automatic takedown notices to Google for any website that contained a combination of the words Burge Pitch Torrent . That situation, which affected The Session , was resolved with an apology from the offending party. Now I’ve received my second DMCA takedown notice. Or rather, my hosting company has. … Read the rest here
I use my walk to and from work every day as an opportunity to catch up on my Huffduffer podcast . Today I started listening to a talk I’ve really been looking forward to. It’s a Long Now seminar called Universal Access To All Knowledge by one of my heroes: Brewster Kahle , founder of The Internet Archive . Brewster Kahle: Universal Access to All Knowledge — The Long Now on Huffduffer As expected, it’s an excellent talk. I caught the start of it on my walk in to work this morning and I picked up where I left off on my walk home this evening… Read the rest here
Here’s a nifty piece of in-browser behaviour… Fire up Chrome and in the address field type “huffduffer.com” followed by a space and BOOM! …the address field transforms into a site-specific search field: “Search Huffduffer.” That’s thanks to this XML file that’s been on Huffduffer since day one. It’s the most straightforward example of the OpenSearch format. It’s the same format that powers Firefox’s search providers. If you visit Huffduffer with Firefox and click in the browser’s search field, you’ll see the option to “Add Huffduffer” to the list of search engines. I can’t imagine many people will actually do that but still, no harm in providing the option. Another option that’s been added to Huffduffer recently (thanks to Andy ’s hacking) is the ability to access the API through YQL … Read the rest here
If you look at my profile page on Huffduffer , this is what you’ll see: my details, what I’ve huffduffed, links to subscribe to my podcast and my tag cloud. That’s the core information for that page, preceded by a header with site navigation and followed by a footer with some additional links. Because I’ve provided a URL with my details, there’s some extra information displayed in the sidebar: my other profiles on the web, as determined by Google’s Social Graph API , MP3s recommended by Last.fm , my latest updates on Twitter . It’s a similar situation if you look at a piece of audio I’ve huffduffed . The core information is: all the details about the audio (title, description, tags), who else has huffduffed this, possibly-related items and links to share and embed the audio. In addition, because I’ve used a machine tag — book:author=cory doctorow —the sidebar contains: related articles from The Guardian, sales information from The New York Times, books on Amazon. … Read the rest here
After seeing (and hearing) what Brian was doing at History Hack Day , I decided I’d have to have a play with Tropo . Like Twilio , it’s a service that allows you to build voice-activated apps that you call up and talk to. The API is pretty straightforward and it seems like there’s quite a lot that you can do as a developer before upgrading to a paid account . They’ll also host your code for you, and you have a choice of scripting languages . At the most basic level, you can send text-to-voice messages: say(”Hello world”) But you can also give it audio files to play: say(http://example.com/helloworld.mp3) Huffduffer has the locations of thousands of audio files, so I thought a voice interface onto Huffduffer’s collection would be fun… Read the rest here
Speaking of URLs … We were having a discussion in the Clearleft office recently about that perennially-tricky navigation pivot: tags. Specifically, we were discussing how to represent the interface for combinatorial tags i.e. displaying results of items that have been tagged with tag A and tag B. I realised that this was functionality that I wasn’t even offering on Huffduffer , so I set to work on implementing it. … Read the rest here
Speaking of URLs … We were having a discussion in the Clearleft office recently about that perennially-tricky navigation pivot: tags. Specifically, we were discussing how to represent the interface for combinatorial tags i.e. displaying results of items that have been tagged with tag A and tag B. I realised that this was functionality that I wasn’t even offering on Huffduffer , so I set to work on implementing it. I decided to dodge the interface question completely by only offering this functionality through the browser address bar. … Read the rest here
Because I was so busy, the two-year anniversary of Huffduffer passed unnoticed back in October. Two years! It’s hard to believe. It seems like just yesterday that I launched it. It’s been ticking along nicely for all that time and I’ve been tweaking it whenever I get the chance. … Read the rest here
One of the mailing lists I subscribe to is the Brighton Speculative Fiction group. If I rightly recall, I signed up whilst drunk at a party I had gatecrashed in Kemptown. What? Like it’s never happened to you. I suppose you’ve never woken up the morning after the night before, clutching your aching head and moaning “Oh man, I hope I didn’t edit any wikis last night!” Anyway. The Brighton Speculative Fiction group meets regularly in the excellent Basketmaker’s Arms to talk sci-fi and swap books… Read the rest here
I done a podcast! In each episode, ClagTunes will feature five of my favourite tracks; four of which I will have bought since the previous episode of the podcast, plus one bonus track from the archive, so to speak. I don’t know how often each episode will come along. Essentially it’ll be when I’ve got four new tracks I want to tell you about, so I guess every month or so. But no promises. You can visit the clagTunes page for full subscription details, or click one of these links: RSS Via iTunes Thanks to Huffduffer for making all that very easy. … Read the rest here
Whenever I take a trip somewhere—like Copenhagen , for example—it’s a good opportunity to catch up on what I’ve been huffduffing . Trains, planes and buses are the killer apps of personal podcasting. In many ways, Huffduffer becomes more useful the further away you are from a computer and an internet connection. I didn’t get the chance to see Mark speak at this year’s Web Directions @media in London, but now that I’ve listened to his talk on Designing Grid Systems , I’m cursing the two-track format of the conference and the fact that I couldn’t be in two places at once. This talk is superb; one of the best presentations I’ve ever heard… Read the rest here
An interview with Think Vitamin : While I was in London for the Future of Web Design conference this past May, I had the pleasure of chatting with Keir Whitaker from Carsonified about Dribbble . You can also find the audio over at Huffduffer
There’s been a lot of map-related activity on the BBC recently. The series of documentaries called The Beauty of Maps was all too short. Meanwhile, Radio 4 ran a ten-part series entitled On The Map . They would have disappeared down the Beeb’s memory hole but Brian did a little bit of digital preservation and passed them on to me. I’ve put them on Huffduffer . … Read the rest here
You may have noticed a lot of HTML5 vs. Flash talk lately. Substitute HTML5 for HTML5 video . Frankly, I’m a little baffled by this supposed dichotomy because you don’t have to choose. The way that video works, according to the spec , is for fallback content to be placed between the opening and closing <video> tags. So you can go ahead and use object or embed or whatever you need to put your Flash video in your markup… Read the rest here
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I had the pleasure of joining hosts Dan and Jeffrey for the second episode of The Big Web Show . We talked about Pete Townsend and cats that look like Hitler but mostly we talked about HTML5. Specifically, we talked about what’s between the covers of HTML5 For Web Designers . The audio is available for your huffduffing pleasure so go ahead and huffduff it if you fancy an hour’s worth of three-way markup action. The Big Web Show 2: HTML5 with Jeremy Keith on Huffduffer Tagged with bigwebshow html5 book audio huffduffer … Read the rest here
I went up to London today to have a chat about HTML5 with some of the developers in the trenches of the BBC World Service . It was only when I was on the train from Brighton that I realised I had left my reading material at home. Never mind , I thought, I’ve got my my Huffduffer feed to listen to. First, I listened to a talk from Robin Dunbar at The RSA entitled How Many Friends Does One Person Need? How Many Friends Does One Person Need… Read the rest here
Thanks to this fine piece of huffduffing I’m reminded that there hasn’t been a Biscuit Friday for over four years. That’s about to be rectified. To the tune of the Hokey Cokey: Facebook Mum YouTube Dad Seabass, manbag Fifty quid to Chad Would the congregation like to rise and sing Hymn number 252 Here come the Barmy Army They’re absolutely crazy Bart, Elvis and the baby Kill kill kill stab murder and dispatch From Petty Sessions on CSI :Ambleside . Read or add comments … Read the rest here
Ever since I launched Huffduffer , one of the features that really caught people’s attention was the sign up form . I have to admit, I didn’t really think it was that revolutionary an idea. All I was trying to do was make the sign-up process a little friendlier and if web standards have taught us anything, it’s that there’s nothing inherent in the presentation of any element, much less forms. So I made the form more conversational and less blocky and rigid. Well, it turns out that people love it. I’ve received bucketloads of Twitter messages and emails from people telling me how much they enjoyed the sign-up process. … Read the rest here
The last thing I needed was more choice in apps for keeping a ‘Design Scrapbook’, but that’s what’s happened with Zootool . At first glance, it looked like just another FFFF ound , Ember or Img Spark , but it turns out it’s much more than that. The developer, Bastian, told me to think of it as more of a visual Delicious. Once I got into that mindset it made more sense. Zootool ‘lassos’ not only images, but documents (like PDF s), videos, and pages (not complete pages yet) and stores them in your ‘zoo’… Read the rest here