The Fuel Podcast – Coming Soon

I’ve teamed up once again with the illustrious Jamie Rumbelow to make something new, fun and totally nerdy.

We’re currently working on a new podcast called The Fuel Podcast, specifically focused on the CodeIgniter community, but covering a broad array of web development topics that CodeIgniter and non-CodeIgniter developers all will be interested in.

We recorded our first episode last week, and Jamie’s currently working fervently to get our site up and running, so we can open The Fuel Podcast up to the world.

I’ll update when we’ve got something to show for our labors. It’ll certainly be an entertaining experience for all who chose to listen. Our sarcastic, slightly competitive and general nerdy humor will keep you on your toes while you hear us comment on the latest and greatest on the Web.

Hashtags, Client-Server jQuery using AJAX and a Tight Deadline

Well, doesn’t that sound quite weird?

If you follow my Tweets at all, you’ve probably read that in late November, I’ll be traveling to the U.K. to join the illustrious Jamie Rumbelow, prince of PHP, at his first Cambridge Geek Day conference.

You may also know, that I’ve built a basic prototype of an application called hashtag.it, which seeks to become a single source for meta information about hashtags used on Twitter.

One thing I’ve noticed at conferences is that session or conference hashtags are not standardized. Well, duh. That’s the beauty of the hashtag, it’s a completely community-driven piece of meta data. That’s all fine and good, but with the growing number of Twitter users, relevance is being lost. The goal of hashtag.it is to increase the relevance of Tweets to users by publicizing information about hashtags that users are using.

In a bit of a publicity stunt, I’ve offered to build an application for Cambridge Geek Day that helps attendees to use hashtags to make their Tweets during the conference more useful to other attendees and others interested in the event.

So, I’m building Cambridge Geek Day Connect. Basically, it’s an application that maintains a small cache of Tweets that contain specific hashtags that can be configured on the fly.

On the client side, jQuery is used to poll the caching server. As I’ve begun to build out the application, I’ve had to wonder what will happen with approximately 300 attendees fire up Connect, and requests begin to hit my server at a rapid clip. Will it crash? I hope not. At the same time, I wondered, what if a new hashtag comes into use after the event starts, and I want to make sure all the conference attendees have access to it?

The result, is a bit of a client-server setup. It’s nothing monumental, really. Configuration information is simply passed as part of each of the API’s response to the client. Configuration changes can be made to speed up or slow down the refresh of data from the client or update the hashtag filter options in the clients menu.

I’m sure it’s been done before. But I still must say, it’s pretty cool to see these configuration changes take place, being pushed out from the server to the clients.

International Talk Like a Pirate Day

Arrr, well, Me just wanted t’ wish you all a great International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

I hope ye all remember t’ raise your pirate flags and talk just like those seamen o’ yesteryear.

Check out http://www.talklikeapirateday.com for more information about this annual e’ent, and remember t’ post your pirate moments on Twitter with hashtag #pirateday, argh!

Translation into pirate speak provided by http://www.talklikeapirateday.com and a modified version of Dougal Campbell‘s text filter suite plugin.

Public To-Do List

I have a lot of things I want to do, but I never seem to get them done. So I’m posting them here, so you all know what I want to be doing.

1. Give Hashtag.it a serious upgrade. This includes a more refined design and new features.
2. Start building the Twitter management tool that I’ve been dreaming about. I can’t manage my 400+ followees, and I don’t want to cut anyone. I’m determined to make it work with some code-magic.
3. Read a bunch of books. I’ve got a stack a mile high of books I want to read, but I never feel like reading them.

Another Hashtag.it Update

Just another quick update about Hashtag.it.

I’ve now added the feed of What the Trend into Hashtag.it. Any hashtags that are found on the What the Trend site with a definition will be automatically imported into Hashtag.it.

Hopefully this will help jumpstart usage of the site by prepopulating it with some data.

Also, in the process of adding that functionality, we had a bit of a flub. We lost all the data that was loaded prior to last week. Luckily, it was only about 40 tags.

So, if you had previously added any hashtags to Hashtag.it, please add them again, and continue to add them going forward to help build up a collective database of hashtag definitions.

All for now.