Development

Dec
15

The Wubbahed.com Google Friend Connect Challenge

Posted by wubbahed at 12:05 pm

UPDATE: The contest is now over! The results were that only six people joined, and that included both me and my mother. Not exactly a resounding call for social interaction, so Friend Connect has been removed. On to the next project….

Every now and then, someone random starts following me on Twitter. I’m never really sure if they’re finding my Twitter page because of this blog or not, but I’m curious what kind of loyal readers are out there, and more importantly, if they’re actually interested in engaging in a community on this site, or if they’re just here to get information and leave.

I recently got an invitation to add Google Friend Connect to my site, however, I was hesitant to do so because I don’t think I do the community thing really well on this blog. But I’m not one to stamp out the voice of the people, so I’m now going to introduce the Google Friend Connect Challenge!

Below is the widget for Google Friend Connect. I’m going to leave it up here on the home page until the end of 2008. If at that time, at least 10 people have joined the site, then it will be permanently moved into the sidebar. Otherwise, I’ll let it be just another thing I tried out in 2008.

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Aug
29

Running OpenTape on my Nokia N95

Posted by wubbahed at 4:05 pm

I always liked the website Muxtape, and right around the time that the site went offline, a group launched an open source web application that allows you to run and share a mix tape on your own server. It’s called OpenTape, and while the idea is similar, they are NOT related to Muxtape.

OpenTape is amazingly easy to use. Just download the files, unzip, and upload them to your own webserver. From there you can use the web interface to set up and configure the mix tape you want to share.

But what I want to know is can I run OpenTape on my mobile phone? Specifically, my N95? If you want to try this yourself, here are the steps.

  1. Register and install the Mobile Web Server to your S60 compatible device.
  2. Download and install the PAMP package for S60 and install it on your compatible device.
  3. Download OpenTape and copy it to the htdocs folder of your Mobile Web Server installation.

Once that’s done, just go to the directory on your webserver, and voila, it works!

Notice that the URL is actually from my Mobile web site…

Once I set up the password, then it was still working just fine.

And after I added songs, i thought it was looking so good.

But then it never displayed any of my songs. Hmmm…

Not to give in so quickly, I started digging through the source code, and it turns out that the problem might be with the PHP package on my mobile. First, the /code/xspf.php XML file wasn’t returning any tracks even though they were uploaded in the folder and the permissions were set correctly. Digging further, it looks like the code is using an ID3 library to read all of the metadata about the Mp3 files, so maybe that’s not included in the PAMP package?

Anyway, I’m so close, but I’ll keep looking into this and see what kind of fix I can come up with.

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Aug
22

Sauna Talk

Posted by wubbahed at 1:34 pm

I read a lot of blogs many of which are heavily devoted to technology, mobile, and the developers who love them.

This week I came across a new video series for N-Gage targeting developers and it’s strangely brilliant in a Finnish way. It’s called Sauna Talk because all the interviews, well, take place in a sauna. Beware though, clicking this link will force you to watch a lot of video content starring this guy.

The only thing that’s really lame about it is that there’s no RSS feed and there’s no way to easily share/embed the video. If there were RSS, I’d probably go back to the site more. And this totally needs to be on YouTube.

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Aug
10

Children’s PressLine – RSS and widget for S60

Posted by wubbahed at 2:42 pm

I’ve been doing some pro bono web work recently for Children’s Pressline, a youth news service that trains kids to be reporters and editors who write articles for mainstream media partners. It’s a non-profit open to any child in NYC, and currently their news stories are being run in the NY Daily News, Metro, and the Amsterdam News.

The work I’ve done involves some basic tweaks to their website, setting up a Children’s PressLine Facebook page and creating a Children’s PressLine RSS feed that shows you their latest stories and links to the major media outlet running the story.

There’s not a mobile website, but just by having an RSS feed, that’s all you really need to get started reading the content on your mobile. If you’re reading this on your S60 device, you can just click on the RSS feed, and automatically subscribe to the latest news articles.

If you’ve got one of the newer S60 devices, though, then you can get a richer experience using this widget I made which pulls in the RSS feed and displays the latest news stories directly on your phone.

S60 widget (WRT)

You can download the Children’s PressLine widget directly, or scan in this QR code to get it straight to your mobile:

Get the widget

Total development time for this widget was less than an hour, and most of that time was just deciding which colors to use in the CSS. If you haven’t seen the Nokia Web Run Time, then I’d recommend checking it out as it’s going to be a great way to build quick applications for S60 devices. Right now, it’s only drawback is that it has almost no access to the device itself (e.g. GPS, Contacts), but Nokia has already announced these features will be included in the next major release.

If you want to see the source code of the widget, then just download the file to your PC and change the file extension from .wgz to .zip. Then open the zip file and all of the source code is there. It’s a very simple setup with one HTML page, and one XMLHttpRequest call to retrieve the RSS feed.

Let me know if you have any questions about how the widget was built, and I’m also interested to see how other people are using widgets not just for their personal use, but also to help promote causes they believe in.

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Jun
06

MobileCampSF – June 14th

Posted by wubbahed at 5:02 pm

If you happen to be in the SF area on Saturday June 14th, be sure and check out MobileCampSF at the Swedish American Hall. If you’ve never been to a BarCamp before they’re lots of fun. It’s completely free, and as of this post, it’s already around 70% full so RSVP now if you’re going to come. I’m hoping to talk some about this simple little project I’ve been working on lately. If you want a sneak peek at it, just scan the QR code below. Otherwise, wait until after BarCamp when I’ll post a full writeup of the project.

qrcode

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May
20

Chumby widgets on the Nokia N82

Posted by wubbahed at 4:03 pm

So I recently purchased a Chumby. According to UPS, it’s on its way here, and in anticipation of its arrival I’ve started reading about how to make your own Chumby widgets. Turns out, the widgets are all just 320×240 FlashLite 3.0 movies.

This is wonderful news.

Why? Because my phone also runs Flash Lite 3.0. So now if I’m going to go to the trouble to make a Chumby widget, I can design it to work on the Chumby and on my Nokia device. As a quick test, I grabbed some of the existing Chumby widgets and tried to see if they would run on an N82.

Out of the box, two widgets worked great — the MTV News widget and the Chuck Norris Facts widget. Some of the other widgets like weather and NY Times launched correctly, but I need to pass them some configuration details so they know what content to download from the web. That’s the next step.

Bottom line is that if you have an Nseries device that runs FlashLite 3.0, then check out Chumby as a source for games and things that you can load straight on your device. And in case you need proof, here’s Chuck Norris Facts running on an N82.

Yeah, yeah the video is kind of fuzzy, so here’s what it looks like on a real Chumby.

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May
12

Blueprint CSS framework — and new WordPress theme

Posted by wubbahed at 9:53 pm

My co-worker turned me on today to Blueprint, a CSS framework that’s based on typography rules so it helps you design websites in a clean way. Needless to say, I think it’s brilliant and beautiful.

A quick Google search turned up a few WordPress themes that had been developed using Blueprint, but the Blueprint theme by Fire and Knowledge stood out head and shoulders above the rest, so I’ve added it to my site. I still need to tweak a few things like the color palette of the Google ads, but if you’re like me and you typically just read RSS feeds in Bloglines or your favorite reader, then pop back to my site for a change and check out the theme.

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Jan
11

the real dangers of xkcd.com

Posted by wubbahed at 11:40 am

There’s a great edition of xkcd today that talks about the different DANGERS indexed by the number of Google results. Brilliant and funny as always.

But not entirely accurate.

Here’s a little thing I wrote which will display the current stats for these particular search results. It’s set to update once an hour, though I’m not sure Google even updates their results that frequently. Love to hear what you think.

 

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