Dancing About Architecture

In case you didn't notice, we've been growing our core catalog of FeedFlare at FeedBurner. We now have three very cool dynamic FeedFlare units that leverage other web services to help bring interactivity to your feeds and sites.

• Technorati Cosmos Links. Example: Technorati: 8 links to this item
• Scape This. Example: Vote at Netscape. 231 votes, 548 comments
• Digg This! Example: Digg This! (87 Diggs, 55 comments)

You can add one or all of these FeedFlare to your feed or site -- and remember that the information displayed is always current, without marking old items in your feed as modified. Just go to the "Optimize" tab of your feed and select "FeedFlare". Or, you can choose other FeedFlare from the growing, chaotic Flare Catalog ... or build your own!

Posted by Eric at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you're like me and you have about 20 different plates of code spinning at the same time, you might find Mylar to be a valuable addition to your Eclipse environment. Basically, it allows you to arrange your work by task and it tracks what you do while you're working on that task. So what? Well, then it's able to use that information to filter a lot of the views, so things like the Package Explorer only show the you classes that are relevant to your current task. It also stores the state of the editors, so when you switch back into a task you can easily remember where you left off.

I've been using Mylar for a couple of weeks and it's changed the way I work. I really like it. Give it a try if you're a crazed multi-tasking coder.

Posted by Eric at 02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm generally not one to point to another post and say "yeah, what he said" -- it's just another echo in the chamber. But I can't help myself with the latest YouTube debate. I am in complete agreement with Fred in his post Stop The YouTube Hating!.

Yes, YouTube is a company that's founded on a very clever viral Flash widget. Yes, I'm sure someone could now replicate YouTube's web site and technology. But that's not the point. As Fred says:

It's the experience. The tools. The player. The comments. The community. That is the essence of YouTube. These guys invented the embeddable flash player. The single best move in the online video game to date. I love them and the service they've built and the community that exists there.

And that's it right there. Do you know how hard it is to get all of that right? Each piece might be trivial or straighforward, but getting the gestalt of the whole experience to work is something else entirely. And that's what YouTube has done. And that's why it's the first place I look for any video content, and why Dane Cook referenced YouTube in his SNL monologue the other night, and why YouTube is awash with "A:F6" tributes this morning.

Remember when, before imdb, you'd remember something about an old movie or some actor and you'd be left with an unanswered question? That's what YouTube is to me -- the place to go to "answer questions", and then some.. My hat's off to what YouTube has created, and I hope they get ludicrously rewarded for creating one of the few services that changes how life with the net is lived.

Posted by Eric at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)