Twitter dropped RSS feeds in early 2013 (Mashable) and never had direct support for RSS feeds from favorites. I still use Twitter favorites as a bookmark or “read it later” service for myself and have been running the Tweetfave service for over 2 years now. Tying these ideas together, I’ve just rolled out Twitter favorites RSS feed support in Tweetfave. How it Works Tweetfave periodically scans your account (using the official API) and summarizes all favorited tweets in an email. Now the system will also update a feed which can be used with other systems that accept standard RSS feeds.…
My friend Jeff Cable was one of the early adopters of the Nest thermostat. At the time we talked a lot about the obvious next step of supporting home sprinkler/irrigation controls. Especially here in California (where we are in a pretty serious drought), having better control over irrigation (not to mention the remote access) seems like the logical next step. Rather than waiting around for Nest, I just bought and installed an OpenSprinkler. OpenSprinkler started out as a hobby kit for makers and they still sell it a variety of ways, from kits to completed units. The software is open…
I was sad to see this week that Yahoo! Pipes will be closing soon. Pipes launched in early 2007, so it had a pretty good 8+ year run. People created some pretty crazy mashups with Pipes. For me the simple ability to combine RSS feeds with some simple logic was very useful (for example: 2014 Tech Advent Calendars). I also recently created some Stack Overflow feed tools for work which will have to be recreated in Python or something similar. The news was part of a broader product update from Yahoo: Q2 2015 Progress Report On Our Product Prioritization. Also…
Every so often I like to publish my current podcast subscriptions (last update from late 2013: Top 7 Technical Podcasts). Since joining DataStax a year ago my commute time is significantly shorter, so I’ve slimmed down my playlist as well. Here is my current subscription list: Hanselminutes [rss] One of my favorites. Scott Hanselman is a great interviewer and runs through a broad variety of guests. Giant Robots Smashing into other Giant Robots Podcast [rss] One of my other favories. Ben Orenstein from Thoughtbot hosts. Plus, the title is cool. .NET Rocks! [rss] I’ve been listening to these guys for…
Early in March this site was hit with a WordPress hack that was present for about 10 days until I discovered and fixed it. After the fix I was frequently checking Google Webmaster Tools to make sure search results returned. After about one week, my traffic (from Google at least) had pretty much recovered to the pre-hack levels: And here is the corresponding timeline from Google Analytics, showing traffic slowly returning to normal: