mistersnodgrass

Weblog and Portfolio Redesign

mistersnodgrass — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 18:58:29 +0000

Hurray! Last night, I launched my re-designed weblog and portfolio. The weblog design is a tweaked and twerked rendition of the Hemingway theme for Wordpress. I’m pleased with the results, although I think I would like to incorporate more feeds into the design. I am having a bit of a problem with the Google Reader feed right now. It appears that Google Reader is giving me malformed links to the blogs that use Feedburner.

Install Apache, PHP, MySQL on Mac

mistersnodgrass — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 14:30:56 +0000

Recently, as I designed more websites that incorporated the WordPress blogging platform, I started to think about how nice it would be to run WordPress locally on my Mac. Among other advantages, this would allow me to create an off-line development sandbox that is out of view from the public. In order to run WordPress locally, I needed to have Apache, PHP, and MySQL installed on my Mac. The prospects of installing all of that sounded kind of scary, but after a short trip to Google, I found a solution called MAMP. MAMP installs a local server environment on Mac OS X. Besides the fact that its absolutely free, the beauty of MAMP is its ease of installation. A couple clicks and you’re done. Once I had MAMP installed, I referenced the How to Set Up WordPress Locally on your Mac post at Ben Bleikamp’s blog. In less that ten minutes, I was running the latest version of WordPress locally on my Mac.

How Not to Promote a “Special Offer”

mistersnodgrass — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:10:44 +0000

I received an email yesterday from the Kansas City Chiefs with the subject line: “Ultimate Football Weekend.” The body of the email contained this embedded html message, promoting the two football games (KU/MU, Chiefs/Raiders) being played on consecutive days, November 24th and 25th at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City.

Whats going on here? The KU/MU football game has reportedly been sold out for nearly two weeks. Did KU and the Chiefs hold back some tickets just for me? Apparently they did! There, at the bottom of the page is a link to purchase tickets and to use my “special offer” code, JAYHAWKS.

Amazed at my good fortune, I followed the link, which took me to this page on the Ticketmaster website. There are three items for sale there - tickets to the Chiefs game, parking passes to the Chiefs game, and parking passes to the KU/MU game. No KU/MU tickets. Apparently, that game is still sold out, but you wouldn’t know that from the language of the email that I received. Thats a pretty “special” offer if you ask me. Now that I know I’m on the mailing list, I can’t wait for the next one!

APML and the “Attention Economy”

mistersnodgrass — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 21:49:59 +0000

The folks at Mashable had a great post yesterday on the developing APML standard. If you’re not familiar with APML, here’s a nice introduction.

In short, the goal of APML is to make our online consumption more efficient - allowing us the opportunity pay attention to more of what we’re interested in, and less of what we’re not. In order to do this, an “attention profile” - a record of the things you choose to pay attention to on the web - would be built over time and kept as an AMPL file. Websites that support AMPL would be able to tap into your AMPL file in order to discover what kinds of content you prefer to pay attention to. Those sites would then be able to serve up customized content based on your unique attention profile.

Along with other uses and benefits, the standardization of AMPL could take targeted web advertising to a new level. Rather than viewing ads that relate to the immediate context of a website or email you’re currently viewing (a la Google ads), you would view ads that are based on your cumulative attention profile.

There are some legitimate privacy concerns regarding AMPL, but it appears the workgroup that is helping to develop the standard is addressing those issues. Keeping AMPL as an opt-in-only service would go a long way. That freedom of choice, in addition to the ability to edit your own attention profile, should keep the privacy police at bay.

KC Pandora Meet-up

mistersnodgrass — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 07:08:12 +0000

I’m not a total Pandora fanatic, but I have been a frequent user of their internet radio service for over a year. Last night, I attended a Pandora meet-up at the Screenland Theatre in Kansas City. Pandora’s founder, Tim Westergren, was there to share the company’s story as well as to answer questions and take suggestions from fans of the service. I found the whole thing quite fascinating.
It was really interesting to hear the story of Pandora’s evolution from birth of concept to product launch. During the discussion, I realized that Pandora’s core-competency isn’t the ability to provide a phenomenal, ground-breaking internet-radio service (which it does, in fact, do). What truly makes Pandora special is its ability to break-down the musical elements of individual songs into raw data that can then be parsed in any number of ways. Right now, Pandora is using that knowledge to create not only “smart,” but responsive music streams that are based on individual tastes. That application may only be the tip of the iceberg for Pandora. As their listenership grows, and they are able to observe and record listener’s behavior and musical preferences, Pandora will own a truly powerful and revealing knowledge-base.