Another project begins:

Appleicious

Can’t say too much about it – but you know you want to be involved in the beta. Go there now!

As I detail here , your-wishlist.com has gone 1.1. What’s new in this update? Well, there are some bug fixes, and some other enhancements, but the biggest news is that you can now create a wishlist before you register on the site. Try everything out, then save it if you’d like. There’s no commitment necessary, people!

Make a wishlist

I was a bit glib in my previous post on this subject, anyway, so I’m going to give you a little background. Your-Wishlist.com is a social wishlisting service. (God, I feel dirty just typing that.) You can create any number of wishlists (using Amazon products) quickly and easily, and even give them a special graphical theme a picture, then send them out to your friends. These wishlists can be practical (“Stuff I’d really like for graduation!”) but they can also be fun, and off-the-wall, like Jack Bauer’s Terrorist Fighting Wishlist (for those of you who watch 24.) Wishlists can be tagged, and wishlists and their individual items commented upon. You can even tell a story with wishlists, and keep track of your favorites via RSS feeds.

A bunch of similar sites to your-wishlist.com have launched around the same time, so the only way I’m going to become the most popular is through lots of feedback with the community, and quick feature additions. So if you’re interested at all in this idea, and how it can be improved, let me know!

After a grueling two weeks of work, your-wishlist.com has launched. Your-Wishlist.com uses the Amazon API to grab product data, and lets members organize these products, rate them, comment on them, and share their wishlists with others.

Using AJAX to minimize the hassle of adding products to wishlists, your-wishlist.com is fully “Web 2.0” aware, but does not yet incorporate the Web 2.1 blink, or a fully Web 2.0 compliant name; this is not likely to change, although other feature upgrades are already in development.

Now, those of you who know me personally know that I really dislike most things. With that in mind, most of you who know me professionally can probably extrapolate that I have little use for buzz-words like AJAX, podcasting, vidcasting, vlogging, etc… Note: This does not mean I’m critical of the concepts behind the buzzwords; I’ve done remote scripting on the web for ages, and I’m writing in a goddamn blog, so that really wouldn’t make much sense. No, it’s the buzzwordiness of it all that I can’t abide. I guess I’m just a curmudgeon.

That said – sometimes, you have to know when you’re beaten. That’s why I’m doing something right now that I really would rather not – I’m using the phrase “Web 2.0.” As near as I can tell, Web 2.0 refers to a website that features a dynamic user experience, and achieves this dynamic user experience with flare and techniques that aren’t employed by most standard websites, which are typically more of the “static page -> form post -> server response -> page reload” variety.

Well, I’ve attempted to throw my own hat in the ring, with a local community website, which launched on New Year’s Day. Check it out:

The Portland Scene

It’s for the city of Portland, OR, specifically, but if you’re a web developer, you might find it interesting anyway, even if you live in Nova Scotia. Why? Well, let’s list some features.

• I’m using the Scriptaculous Library , which I’ve found quite good, although the Prototype library, which it requires, I have found buggy in the past.
• I’m using Yahoo’s Map and Geocoding APIs , which are very, very keen.
• User and picture grids are sortable and filter-able without reloading the page. Play around with the grids in the righthand column, but don’t lose focus on the other things you’re looking at.
• The Scriptaculous autocomplete control makes searching for locations less tedious, and almost – gasp – fun!

• There are tons of bits of functionality that are handled without specific page reloads, including picture reordering and adding to favorites.

  Basically, the entire goal of the site was to create a virtual community for a physical one, and get rid of some of the interface annoyances that we put up with when we use sites like Citysearch. Is it successful? I hope so, but I’m not sure. But, like anything else in the Web 2.0 world, The Portland Scene is in beta, and the features and fixes are coming fast and furious. Hope you find it interesting.

As those who stumble onto this website can see, Electricstate.com hosts a few small projects, like the iPod bartender, and LinkFinder. Well, I’ve added another one to that mix. This one is called Patron Grid

What is Patron Grid? It’s a way, ala Million Dollar Home Page, for website owners to display those who have donated to their projects. It’s data file is a plain XML file, which is parsed – AJAX style – and displayed. A Wordpress Plugin is in the works. It will be freely available. In the meantime, if you want to hack around with something, the code is also available on the some page.