The blog of Abraham Williams

The last two days have been filled with awesome talks of developer communities, code philosophies, merriment, and food consumption. @ GitHub pulled off an excellent first @ CodeConf and I'm already anticipating the next one. I've laid out my thoughts on a few presentations below plus an embed of some choice tweets from attendees. Metrics, Metrics Everywhere by @ coda Unfortunately I missed this presentation but I hear it was really good and I'm looking to implement some of the ideas for my upcoming @ unicornmetrics project. Hacking Space Exploration by @ arielwaldman Space is awesome! Documentation isn’t optional by @ jacobian Excellent documentation is key and it should be readable. Networks with Node.js by @ ryah Windows has a lot of issues but it is still the dominant OS platform. OSS on GitHub: Your Community is Your Best Feature by @ ginatrapani Make it super easy for your community to contribute. Especially in none code related ways. The ...

What do all of the many Twitter mashups hanging around on the internet have in common? Broken avatars! At the rate users upload new avatars every site will at some point have outdated profile information. I have come up with a simple and elegant method of keeping profiles up to date with very little wasted computer cycles. The basic idea is to bind an event handler onto JavaScript error events with @ jQuery . This handler will perform two actions. Fist it will replace the image source with a temporary static link to the users avatar so the visitor will see a working image. Second the handler will ping the server with the screen_name of the missing avatar so the persistent storage can be updated. In your HTML load jQuery and use selectors to find all image elements with a class of twitter-avatar. The error handler bound to all the selected image elements updates the image source and pings the server. The second file is in PHP and uses TwitterOAuth but can be in any programming ...

" Storytlr  is an open source lifestreaming and micro blogging platform. You can use it for a single user or it can act as a host for many people all from the same installation." I've been looking for something like Storytlr for a few months now or at least trying to do it with Drupal . While I love Drupal and FeedAPI  I did not want to spend all that time building a lifestream website. So I've been playing around with Storytlr instead and found it very easy. Here is how I got it up and running on a Ubuntu EC2 server. You can also check out the official Storytlr install instructions . Assumptions: LAMP stack installed and running. Domain setup for a directory. MySQL database and user ready to go. Lets get started! Get the code : wget http://storytlr.googlecode.com/files/storytlr-0.9.2.tgz tar -xvzf storytlr-0.9.2.tgz You can find out the  latest stable release  on Storytlr's downloads page. Import the database : Within protected/install is database.sq...

Idea Rate Google Group post from Gmail so the rating system can be used without visiting the Group  web interface. Use a Google Chrome extensions to display 5 stars next to each email from a Group and allow the user to click on one submitting the rating to Google. Flow The general flow of the extension. User loads Gmail. Extensions finds Message ID from email. Extension fetches did and tok from Groups. Extensions presents 5 stars next to email. User rates post. Extensions GETs request to rate post. Find post on group The following url can be used to find the did and tok needed to rate posts. http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=Message-ID Message-ID example:b3ba2f35-7537-4b8d-91db-61ac20a85fd5@v30g2000yqm.googlegroups.com Message-ID example:MPG.1a749350f6d8bb7a9897f4@news.freeserve.net Rate post Using the did, rat, and tok you can rate a Group post with a GET request. The did is the short id for the post. The rat is a number of 1-5. The tok is available from the h...

Check out this example code of Twitter's OAuth beta working with PHP.

Collection of libraries being built to make interacting with multiple microblogging services as easy as possible.

Modify the userscript liked to here to have a running count of characters in the GMail compose view.

This code is old and should no longer be used. Perl script for downloading Drupal 6.4 and multiple modules. Place in an empty directory as a .pl file and execute.