I’ve finally been able to create The Diet Stream which shows the last 25 items relating to the diet. It collects the latest blog posts from almost every dieter on the list (there are some that do not write about the diet at all, or simply do not have blogs), the photos and discussions from our flickr group, and bookmarks stored in del.icio.us with the-diet as a tag.

I’m pretty excited about this because it will allow new people to get a fairly good snapshot of what is going on, as well as those who are not familiar with using feeds to get up-to-date really quickly.

Perhaps one day I will jot down some notes on how I built it, but for now I will say it is powered by a flavor of mystreamr (a yet unreleased tool for doing things very much like The Diet Stream in a relatively short period of time). There is a little more behind it, so I will be sure to jot down my hassles that I came across and perhaps a bit of the code in the future so that you too can set something up like this for your needs.

If you have any ideas how I can improve The Diet Stream, do not hesitate to let me know. I hope everyone finds it of some use, especially those that I know have been asking for it for over thirty-eight weeks.

[tags]diet, the-diet, the diet stream, announcements, mystreamr[/tags]
[slug]diet-stream[/slug]

Let’s say you have a day job where you are a mechanic. Obviously your normal business day is filled with fixing someone else’s car, doing routine maintenance, etc. However, if you could take one day and simply think about a better way to do one of those common tasks, what would you correct? Would you take some time to build a tool to help make a common task easier? Would you do something even more simple; such as cleaning up your area to make you more efficient for the week ahead?

I can think of tons of things like this that I could fiddle on. Today, I focused on two. My blog here, and a yet-unreleased service from ChanceCube.

I thought about this blog and what it is lacking, and I started to fiddle with a few things that will allow me to fill those gaps in the near future. Obviously this was done purely for personal reasons, but I am hoping these little adjustments will improve your experience here. No, I am not going to do a complete redesign of my site – but much of the markup is being rewritten to give me some more flexibility and work in some Microformats (oh, and this site has yet to work properly in IE). More on this later, but I was able to take a few hours and focus on a few minute details that really, in the end, give you a lot of satisfaction that you were able to spend some real time thinking about only a few little things.

With the service (called mystreamr) that we have yet to release, I wanted to do some “outside of the box” thinking that I may not normally have the time to do otherwise. How would a mother use this? How would a kid who found this service through digg use it? How could I explain this service to someone that doesn’t speak English? What happens if I use the service in the complete opposite way it was intended? All of these questions I was able to address, in some form, today.

I think that this is a great exercise for anyone to try and do (especially when the temperature dips to below freezing!). Get out your watercolors (which I still might do later), and try a style you’ve never tried before. Waste paper! Go into the kitchen, whip out a recipe book that has 4-layers of dust on it, and just start cooking. Look through the garbage and find the instruction manual for your digital camera and learn to use it better. Go for a jog on a street that you’ve never been on. Knock on that neighbor’s door that you’ve never met because your work schedules conflict. Have you read your Bible lately? Have you taken 30-minutes in the last decade to appreciate the night-sky? I could go on forever! I have tons of things that I would love to find the time to do but so many other things end up getting in the way.

Perhaps the next time your day’s activities get cancelled, you shouldn’t worry about filling those slots with more things to do, just fiddle.

[tags]thoughts, weekend, saturday, schedule, chancecube, mystreamr, fiddle, cdevroe.com[/tags]
[slug]fiddlin[/slug]