Ted Roden

A checklist for apartment hunting

Camera stats from photos posted to tumblr

The Ninth Annual Year in Ideas

Hacker Newspaper

How had I missed this for so long? 

The best thing ever

Subtly, I'm going to show you the best thing that ever happened to the iPhone.

All Nighter Night!

Whenever they do the all nighter I'm always up late working. Cause or coincidence?

The Nook vs. The Kindle

The Nook arrived at work today. It doesn't seem as bad as they say.
Great hardware. Nice enough screen. Next year will be interesting.

Speedtracer on a Mac

I'm loving that extensions now work on Chromium for Macs. I've downloaded FlashBlock, which works just like ClickToFlash and a lot better than any ad blocker extension. I've installed a gmail extension and a host of others. But Speedtracer is certainly the most interesting.

"Speedtracer is a tool to help you identify and fix performance problems in your web applications." More than FireBug, it actually helps you identify the exact moment when you UI locks up and becomes unresponsive among a bunch of other things.

To get Speedtracer running on your mac, it just a few steps:

• Download the latest build of Chromium.
  
• Install the extension
  
• Open Chromium from Terminal.app like so:
  /Applications/Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS/Chromium --enable-extension-timeline-api
  

What are your new facebook privacy settings?

I only changed the photo permission. I'm not sure that I want photos of me tagged by other people to show up publicly... but I'll probably relent soon.

Man hit by car on streetview

View it on the map.

I call her Grablr

For whatever reason, a bunch of people have been sending me kind emails in the past few weeks on topics such as “what ever happened to grabber?” “I signed up for the gobbler beta ages ago, did it ever launch?” “I’m reminded of gaffer, is that still around?” and other such queries.

Well, no, Grablr still hasn’t launched… but it’s still up and running and collecting data. I’ve even been (slowly) updating the code over the past couple of months years. Today I’m even moving my personal site back to it after all this time. There is no need to fear my tumbilarity, I’ll still post just as much as ever to tumblr and everywhere else keeping it at an even 7 for many months to come.

As we’ve been getting reacquainted over the past couple of days, Grablr and I have been having a massive love fest. I just wanted to point out some of the things I like about the site, that were so far ahead of it’s time a couple of years ago… and some things are still not done by anybody else.

The crux of site is that it understands you post a lot of content to a bunch of different places for a bunch of different reasons. Grablr knows that not all posts are created equal and tries to behave properly with all of that content. For example, Flickr is a photography site (despite what it looks like when you visit that site), so it should always show ALL of the big beautiful photos. On the other hand, if you post 100 photos to a single post on posterous, Grablr understands that those are all related and puts them into a little slideshow (without using flash).

It also understands similarities between sites. For example, Tumblr allows you to post a bunch of different things, but they’re all types of content that exist on tons of other sites. So a link on Tumblr is exactly like a link on delicious. A quote? Just the same as a tweet.

You know those features that your favorite sites have been pumping out this year? Grablr had them last year. It had “endless scrolling” before that was a thing, and it got noticed. Endless scrolling works from both the main homepage of a site and from every single permalink page.

Grablr also does a bunch of stuff that nobody does even now. For example, it understands just because it imported a post from Wordpress, a video from Vimeo or a photo from Flickr, the import doesn’t end there. It continually imports each comment on that post forever… and it does it quickly too!

The beta will still come at some point, when it or I am ready to launch it. But I’m glad to be back on it myself, with all my content in one place, and super fine grained control of what goes up and what stays off.