Instarchive will gather up all of your Instagram photos to-date and give you a copy of every one in a nice little zip.
/via John “Loud Keyboard” Gruber.
How to get more likes on Facebook
The Oatmeal takes a crack at how to get more likes on Facebook. Incidentally, the answer to that question is also the answer to how to build a business; make great stuff.
Simple HTML parsing with PHP
PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser is a pretty great open source project for parsing the DOM using jQuery-like selectors. I recently used it on Nilai to parse recipes from the leading recipe sites. Worked great.
Viddler helps Foreigner to create an innovative online video contest
There have been some pretty interesting milestones in the history of Viddler for the last 5+ years I’ve been on the team. This is one of them. We’re working with Foreigner of Waiting for a Girl Like You fame to help them bring a video contest online in a way that no other company could have.
I just unbuttoned the top two buttons on my shirt.
Light Table, a new IDE concept
Chris Granger about Light Table:
Light Table is based on a very simple idea: we need a real work surface to code on, not just an editor and a project explorer. We need to be able to move things around, keep clutter down, and bring information to the foreground in the places we need it most.
This project is inspired by Bret Victor’s presentation Inventing on Principal that I also mentioned Nilai is inspired by. Light Table makes for a very interesting demo. The most intriguing of the modes shown was the mode wherein you could see all of the related code while you were editing, say, a specific method in a class. This type of IDE wouldn’t just save time, it’d probably result in far better code.
Meanwhile at the Siachen Glacier
There was an avalanche a few days ago in Pakistan. You may have missed it scrolling by on the CNN news ticker. More than 135 people are either trapped or dead below 70 feet of snow.
The WordPress.com API
Interesting. WordPress.com now has an API. Which is slightly different than WordPress simply having the use of the decade old Meta-Weblog API. This opens up features on WordPress.com like reblogging, following, etc.
It will be interesting to see what comes of this.
Fanfare for the Comma Man
Ben Yagoda on the use of the comma:
You see this kind of thing all over the Internet as well. People punctuate that way because, if they spoke these sentences, they’d pause after the conjunction (and because the extremely fanciful and undependable Microsoft Word grammar and style checker refrains from applying a squiggly green underline).
I’m no writer. I’m sure I get this wrong all the time. In fact, I know I do. (See what I did just then?) I do exactly as Yagoda suggests. I write commas based on how I would say or read the sentence.
He goes on about the use of the Oxford comma as well. Which I wholeheartedly agree with and strive to do myself though I’m sure if someone ripped through the catacombs of this here blog they’d find a million grievances.
Yagoda has a follow-up coming. Stay tuned.
/via John “I’m using Facebook by way of Instagram” Gruber.
Hiring for culture fit
Elad Gil 4th tip on hiring the right person for your company’s culture:
4. Take people out for a “beer” test as part of interviews.
We would take every candidate to some social outing (typically dinner or beer after work). In a startup, people work long hours and you want to make sure people fit in and the team and create an even awesomer [1] environment.Intriguingly, in a “social” environment, the candidate would often show more of their “true colors”. Especially if beer was involved. This often happened before any beer was drunken – I think it was just a shift to a more social context from a work one that triggered behavioral changes.
A great example is a candidate we rejected post beer test, who was one of the strongest engineers technically that we had ever interviewed. However, once we made it to the bar he made a lot of really bad off-color jokes that crossed the line and made the team uncomfortable about him.
For many of the people we hired at Viddler we did exactly the same thing. And sometimes with a similar result. First and foremost I want someone I can work hard with. And it is tough to work hard with someone who creeps you out regardless of how good they are.
/via Dick “I’m the CEO at Twitter but really I shouldn’t have let Feedburner die” Costolo.
The Great Collision
Umair Haque writes an interesting rag on why things are they way they are and to what eventuality it may all end up. The Great Collision. Here’s why:
It’s easy to construct a narrative of victimhood; and a narrative of victimhood is as easily palatable as a Big Mac. Sure, you can argue that the modern condition is a finely jawed trap: bound by the chains of debt peonage, our horizons have been ineluctably delimited. But I’d say we’re equal parts victims and victimizers — preying not merely on one another, but our own better selves. When it comes to real human prosperity, in the crudest terms of political economy, “demand” is about what people have the impertinence to, well, demand — and perhaps the simple fact is that we’ve become a society that’s simply not demanding enough.
It was tough to pull a quote for this one so if you’ve got a few minutes I recommend reading the whole thing. I don’t know that I agree with it wholly, however, it is good to see someone rising above one’s normal 6-odd-foot perspective and seeing the world from a different angle.
/via Alex “One who knows HTML” Hillman.
Management as administration
Joel Spolsky guest-posting on Fred Wilson’s AVC blog about The Management Team:
This is my view of management as administration—as a service corps that helps the talented individuals that build and sell products do their jobs better. Attempting to see management as the ultimate decision makers demotivates the smart people in the organization who, without the authority to do what they know is right, will grow frustrated and leave. And if this happens, you won’t notice it, but you’ll be left with a bunch of yes-men, who don’t particularly care (or know) how things should work, and the company will only have one brain – the CEO’s. See what I mean about “it doesn’t scale?”
Precisely.
500px Terms of Service
Remember Tumblr’s fairly easy to understand TOS? 500px has a similarly great TOS.
/via AOL TechCrunch.
InstaBackup – Download all of your Instagram photos to your Mac
Speaking of backing up your Instagram photos. InstaBackup is a free Mac application by David Smith that makes it simple to download all of your Instagram photos to your Mac.
/via Andy “$1B is a good deal” Baio.
Liquipel, reviewed
As a follow-up to my link to Danny’s post about Liquipel there is this review on iHeartApple2:
After viewing videos and reading reviews I think Liquipel is a great idea that is just not quite there yet. I think it would be great for protecting your phone in the rain or from spills but a toilet or pool, no way! It’s clear that results will vary in every situation and with this being said I just could not feel confident enough to recommend or use Liquipel right now.
Some protection is better than no protection, I always say. However, one shouldn’t expect to go swimming with one’s iPhone either.
/via fellow-Viddler Thomas Kover (TKO).
Liquipel
Danny Nicolas, on the newly-revived Waking Ideas blog, about Liquipel:
The number one complaint that I hear from friends, family and random strangers complaining on the train is that their personal technology devices (mp3 player, phone, watch, etc.) are not waterproof. The number one enemy to their electric devices is water. Be it the humidity in the air, the sweat from a successful exercise session, or devices that just seem to be drawn to pools of standing water, there’s a huge disconnect between the number one feature people want, and the ever increasing feature list of things that don’t matter as much.
I’ve often thought that every single device which is meant to be used daily should also be waterproof. There is a huge benefit to the user even if that device never, ever gets completely submerged in water. I may have to look into Liquipel further.
Be sure to watch the video demonstration at the tail end of Danny’s blog post.
PHP is like scrapple
Paul Ford, of NYMag, about Facebook:
The company is also technologically weird. For example, much of the code that runs the site is written in a horrible computer language called PHP, which stands for nothing you care about. Millions of websites are built with PHP, because it works and it’s cheap to run, but PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat. Imagine eating two pounds of scrapple every day for the rest of your life — that’s what Facebook does, programming-wise. Which is just to say that Facebook has its own way of doing things that looks very suspect from the outside world — but man, does it work.
I use PHP. Which makes sense because man do I love scrapple.
Viddler Customer Spotlight: Under the Belfry
One of my favorite customer spotlight videos from Viddler; Under the Belfry.
“With Viddler within three days we were able to roll advertising. That’s ridiculous.”
Export your photos from Instagram with instaport.me
Maybe you’ve heard; Facebook bought Instagram for a cool $1 Billion. Remember, I said it was a network not a camera. Well, some people are a bit miffed and are planning their escapes. Not nearly as many as I’d thought would though seeing how many people were up-in-arms about Instagram on Android.
Assuming you didn’t already share your Instagram photos to Facebook, Flickr, or Twitter and also assuming that you deleted all of the photos off of your iPhone without backing them up first – you could export your photos from Instagram using instaport.me.
I’m in no hurry to leave Instagram. But we’ll see what the next year or so means for the service.
Live Great Blue Heron Nest
Oh I’m done for. The Cornell Labs of Ornithology has set up a live cam on a Great Blue Heron nest.
