Anders Conbere

The last couple months have been interesting for me, one of the big evolutions has been Timelope. A new project for helping people share their browsing history. This sounds like an odd proposition, and maybe it really is. I certainly didn't think much of it until I really started playing with it and the ideas started pouring out.

Basically the pain point is that accessing your browser history is not particularly fun or engaging right now (Firefox 3's awesome bar goes a long way to solving this), but beyond that acting as a medium for discoverable browsing. Reddit, Digg and Delicious all do some form of this. They might sell themselves as social news or social bookmarking but their big traffic comes from people looking to discover new sites, or find information they would find interesting. The problem with all of these sites is that it requires explicit action on the part of the user to submit new material, which means they're reducing the size of their data pool significantly and self selecting a portion of the people in their community willing to submit new material.

So I've been working on the Firefox extension for Timelope which has been a lot of fun. And by fun I mean painful, but at least a new kind of pain. I have way to much to say so I'll say more later.

Well, I finally sat down and did a serious overhaul of the old blog. I've moved all my django hosting onto slicehost which has been fantastic. I've got most things back up and running, did a big visual overhaul, and I broke my resume application.

Well, I "fixed" it, but there was data loss involved in that, so it will be coming back together slowly here.

I've been up to my ears in projects lately. I've been putting together some of the pieces for a new travel guide site crafty traveler, mostly dealing with how to do the GIS data parts of that. I've been having some problems getting all my GIS tool compiled on that box which is hosted at Joyent and runs solaris, but the joyent support has actually been really good and hopefully with a little bit more tweaking that will come together.

I've also been working on a golf social networking site, primarily building widgets running off of ruby on rails, that's been a struggle, but after a bunch of initial road blocks I've figured out how to do most things in rails. It's an incredibly complex system, and I'm not to sure why it has all that overhead, but it's good for me. The javascript widgets have totally thrown me for a loop, but I'm sure I can work that out.

anyway... busy :-D