Sliding Panel: WordPress Plugin

What is a sliding panel?

Quite simply, it is a panel that can be opened and closed with a click of a mouse that will allow you to house additional content on your site without it getting in the way.

via Sliding Panel: WordPress Plugin.

Select a Date: How is this not completely standardized by now?

Did a search for a room for an upcoming weekend trip. Came across myriad ways that sites still use to ask you the dates of your stay. My favorite are where I can pick one date and it assumes I am going to stay for a couple of nights. That seems simple, so why would sites Leave today’s date in the check-out field when I want to check in next Saturday. Why bother to prepopulate the field? The last image I grabbed was the worst of the lot in my travels. I needed to make _6_ selections on tiny form field elements in order to select my dates. Then I found there was no availability for those date. I could have checked Hotels.com 3 times for the same clickage.

 

Just struck me as I was making the booking and comparing rates – I am surprised that something so extremely common is not more standardized than it is. I wonder if it is the case of a lot of wheel reinventing. I’m sure at least one site has tested the heck out of different variations and nailed it. There does not need to be _one_ way to do it, because I am sure there are variations in audience and need, but perhaps we could at least stick with the most efficient ways by now.

 

Below are some grabs from my travels.

 

 

 
 

[Updated] i get it now: why i’m hooked on blip.fm

Personal Soundtrack T-Shirt from ThinkGeek.com

[Update: It is possible the end is near for the fun on blip.fm.]

My Personal Soundtrack
holy crap. i get it now! this whole social media thing. the stuff with the updates and the tweets and the blips (“They’re *blinking* and *beeping* and *flashing*! Why doesn’t somebody pull the plug” Shatner from airplane ii). It was fun to broadcast what i’m eating and what i am toasting or overhearing. But combine that tweet-ability with music and you’ve got social media gold! I think (and hope really) that blip.fm is going to be a success… i also think certain forces will surely muck it up to some degree. But mostly I am rooting for this site to figure out what no one else has yet – How to make a music sharing experience with flow that doesn’t suddenly suck or get people arrested.

What I Like

1. The nostalgia is addictive: Our lives have a soundtrack. Hearing songs from the past turns out to be a great way to dredge up touch-base with the associated memories. add 140 characters of stuff and you’ve got a cool personal soundtrack building.
2. The community rocks: you instantly get 30 or so favorites so your stream is instantly filled. The props system is a terrific way to encourage connecting with others. Sure, Twitter has a star you can click for tweets, but on blip you are saying you like a song in addition to the pithy quip or reminiscent remark.
3. The music is largely there to discover: You are encouraged to upload stuff, but most searches return a series of results. The combination of search results and favorite djs creates a really rich and real-time feeling music discovery channel.
4. Know your friends tastes better than if you took a facebook quiz: favorite your friends or follow their updates in twitter and you may see a whole new side emerge. That or confirm what you already believed.
5. It’s free (shhhh. don’t wreck it.): I will click through and buy stuff. i won’t complain a peep if/when they splash it with advertising.  Attend concerts and buy concessions. Whatever needs to be done to not wreck a fun and good thing. At least the team running the show is thinking business model early on.
6. It gave Twitter a purpose for me: You can follow everyone’s updates within the blip.fm site. But seeing what my friends post via Twitter provides an instant filter, allowing me to follow a crap load of interesting djs on blip while bubbling up the ones i am most interested in following on Twitter.
7. i’m hooked: while my initial excitement will surely wane, for the moment i am hooked.
8. It’s a semantic smorgasbord: Music has never had such rich contextual information. on a song-by-song basis people are sharing associated thoughts, comments, memories, feelings, etc. Some sites allow you to star or favorite a song and maybe even comment on it. But none have drawn the basic song-to-comment association so simply and clearly.
9. It’s created for an international audience: It feels more than an American sharing site. The little flag beneath each user’s name lends to the feeling that blip is addressing the needs of a global audience (or faking it well).

what could be better

1. The listening experience is not up to par with last.fm or pandora
   1. volume control and normalization
   2. continuous play from page to page
   3. can’t pause the river
2. It could hook up with more sites – last.fm to import favorites (they do scrobble now), other purchasing channels, nostalgic merch to go along with the 80’s tune you add, etc.
3. better on-boarding and explanation: I honestly didn’t get it at first and ignored it after i registered. then i realized you could search for songs as well as upload. that opened a whole new door.
4. It’s at a good size now, but may eventually clog up twitter and even blip itself.

Thankfully the folks at blip appear to be listening and open to suggestions too. I look forward to seeing how the site evolves and the many sites that spawn off of it based on the data and semantic potential through the APIs (which are still in private beta as of this post).

Sundance Content Discovery

Sundance Content Discovery, originally uploaded by jpriceless.

I love the elegant way in which Sundace[1] has implemented this content discovery tool. It is quick loading and acts very nicely as a secondary navigation element. It strangely makes more sense than many structured secondary navs in other sites. Making it so prominent really puts a stake in the ground about the way this site wants users to navigate.

I think i have said it in enough different ways in the previous paragraph, but in summary – neat.

[1] http://www.sundancechannel.com/films/500313260

testing Flickr blog posting API: marshalite photo

marshalite, originally uploaded by jpriceless.

more flow. I am seeing if this pic appears as i would like it to and testing the Flickr blog API. Hopefully this will allow me to reduce the steps required to take a screen grab and comment on the contents.

I realize it is an extra step than just uploading the file from my desktop, but i am trying to eliminate that steps and create an image library from which to draw upon for the future. So multiple goals (beyond just flow) are at play. If this works it will be a great step in the right direction.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Press This Test: Lessons on Blogging from Jon Stewart – O’Reilly Radar

Trying to increase the flow of my posts. I am mostly inspired by a site that i see or some design pattern or best practice-ish kind of feature. I like to collect stuff along my web travels.

I recently put together in my mind the best way to take a screen grab and post it to the web. I use SnagIt to grab the section of the page i am interested in, make any updates and then email it to Flickr. That way i no longer need to collect my snips and snails on my hard drive in folders. I can also tag and notate to my heart’s delight.

Still haven’t fingured out the best way to take a screen grab and post it directly to the blog for further comment and pithy insight.

This is a test of the Press This feature of WordPress. Hopefully it is a step in the right flow direction. Here is my text to press:

“Lessons on Blogging from Jon Stewart

this article is a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of journalism. It shows how the informality and attitude that we take as characteristic of blogging can be combined with the tough-mindedness, research, and craft that is displayed by the best investigative reporters.”

Lessons on Blogging from Jon Stewart – O’Reilly Radar.

I already see i don’t have to CTRL select the title as it is already populated in the Title text field.

Rss guy

Gonna put together some thoughts on my various rss readers. Ihave been trying out 5 different ways of organizing and consuming info. They all have different pluses and minuses. I also get a different view of the world through each, even though the deeds are the same.

The thing I’ve learned the most is to keep backup copies of my opml file.

Isn’t rss dead? To some, but I am still an avid aggregator and I feel the masses who have yet to even try building a feed will determine Its live-ness.

Trying out iphone version

One of the key reasons I began this particular blog was the fact that wordpress released the iPhone app. Here I am… Testing it out. The more I type on glass the better I get.

What do I think so far. I am wondering how to add a link of embed an image. Maybe the app is not the place for that.

Ok. Picture of a horse rear added. Pretty simple. I expect it will tag onto the end. The way this is set up it may be better for observations in the physical world. Not a lot of screen grabs in the iPhone.

I also can’t emphasize text without SHOUTING. No formatting.

Overall, not too shabby. Limited but should do the trick.

first post… here

I have created a personal blog. The third such attempt in the last 8 years. i have a couple others with tumbleweeds on blogger. This time I have more ideas swimming in my head than i have outlets to convey and capture them. Thus, I am busting out of my 140 character shackles and posting my thoughts in extended form.

As for the design i’ve chosen… it’s stock. that works for me, because i am busy. I like that it is minimalistic. I like that i did not just say minimal and i went with the full on -istic. These are the thoughts i wish to explore and expound upon more. I say ‘thus’ a lot, hence this sentence. ‘hence’ is a favorite too. followed closely by ‘circa’. You something is well established if it has a ‘circa’ on it. anything that is ‘circa’ anything has a story to tell for sure.

enough about me… oh wait this is mostly about me. let the posting begin.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!