Twitter has been all the rage amongst web geeks for a few months now. But as the service starts to catch on with the general public, keeping up on all the Tweet messages can get a little crazy. It only gets crazier as you start following tweets from your coworkers, ColdFusion gurus, the Mac community, and, oh yeah, Jack Bauer. With a little help from Yahoo Pipes, you can organize and separate tweets into different RSS feeds.

Twitter exposes most of its service functionality through an extensive API system. The API is powerful and insanely simple. On top of that, most of the tweet lists are available in both RSS and JSON form. Using just a few lines of scripting code, you can bring all the elements of Twitter to your own web site or desktop gadget/widget.

Take this a step farther, and you can pull the RSS feeds for individual tweet streams into a single Yahoo Pipe. Pull the pipe through a sort operator on the publication date and the various Twitter streams intermingle into one timeline. The pipe has its own RSS feed that you can follow in your feed reader of choice or pull into your own applications.

I just threw together two quick examples, a ColdFusion Tweet pipe and a Flex Tweet pipe. Neither is exhaustive but there’s enough there to get the basic idea.

This is some very cool stuff, a perfect example of opening up your applications so your users can decide how to consume them.

We Feel Fine is an interesting web app tracking what bloggers are saying about how they feel over time.

According to the site’s methodology section, it has been scanning blogs for phrases like “I feel” and “I am feeling” and grabbing the full sentence when it gets a hit, along with whatever author data can be scraped from the site. The results are organized and presented in six completely different, filterable interfaces.

The different results interfaces are impressive for an applet. The Madness view is a cloud of dots on speed. The Murmur view is reminiscent of the PostSecret project. If nothing else, the site is a cool proof-of-concept on organizing large amounts of statistical data harvested from web content.

I’ve been keeping this under wraps, but since I turned in the signed contracts there’s really no turning back. I’m working on a book about Windows Vista Sidebar gadgets. Gadgets are mini-apps that run on on the new Windows Vista desktop and do things like show a local weather report or list news headlines.

The book’s part of a series called Visual Blueprint targeted to technically inclined people looking to learn a new skill. It’s really for people who have put together a few web sites and want to learn how to make interactive gadgets for the Vista desktop. It covers all the basics you need to make a gadget with lots of helpful screen-shots.

It’s going to take up most of my time for the next few months, but I’m really happy to be working on it. I think it’s a great subject — gadgets of all types are really going to change the way people interact with their computer desktop and the web. It’s exciting to help people create their own gadgets.

Twitter is sort of like instant messaging. Scratch that — it’s really more like instant message away messages.

So why is a feed of other people’s away messages interesting? And why do I need to keep a running tally of my own? Somewhere in the mix of web application and desktop gadgets, the folks behind Twitter have struck gold.

While I visit the Twitter site from time to time, my main interaction with the service is through desktop mini-apps. I’ve got Twadget (yeah, that name… not the best) loaded on my Vista Sidebar at work, and Twitterific installed on my personal MacBook. With a mouse click or two and a few quick keystrokes, I can post a short message without ever opening a web browser.

The process is simple, it doesn’t interrupt whatever else I’m doing. It’s become part of my routine just like having an IM window open to chat with friends.

This is really the power of web enabled gadgets. They break web apps outside of the browser, taking away another barrier to entry for your application. Just like RSS has done for following information on the web, gadgets can be used to extend interaction out of a web site and make it part of your users’ routine.

Somebody is selling every NES game ever made on Ebay. All 670 of them are represented, along with most of the original accessories: ROB the robot, the Power Pad, Game Genie, and even the Fred Savage approved Power Glove is included.

Thinking back, I spent *a lot* of time playing these games. Kid Icarus, Dragon Warrior I - IV, all the Mega Man games, all the Castlevania games, Punchout, Skate or Die, Spy Hunter, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and obviously all the Zelda and Mario games. There were a few truly bizarre games: Golgo 13, Nobunaga’s Ambition, Rygar, A Boy and His Blob.

Did I do anything else in grade school?

The line isnt too crazy.

Update No Wii for me:( Tar-jay only had 9 Wii’s, and I was number 14. The Wii Bastards at Target, Best Buy, Circuit City etc. printed up circulars touting the thing, and they only have 9 on hand? LAME!

Update 2 The Wii is mine! GameStop had 18, and only 4 people in line.

I’m more than a little late to game on this book. It’s a compendium of blog posts by self-styled software development expert, Joel Spolsky.

Each chapter is a post. Some have been slightly adapted, others seem ripped straight from the web. There’s no narrative thread, but there’s a general ideology that holds the book together.

Overall, it was a good, quick read. And the whole blog-posts-as-book thing that tainted my expectations ended up not really bothering me.

Take aways:

• Good code requires reasonable planning. Don’t let the code be the spec.
• Fight the urge to rewrite. One of my biggest weaknesses is feeling like I need to write and rewrite every piece of code I encounter. Why reinvent the wheel — and throw away someone else’s months or years of debugging?
• Change from within. I have a tendency to get bogged down when I’m frustrated. Push on, make things better rather than wait for them to improve.
• Luckily I work in an environment that already scores pretty high on the Joel test.

Thanks to Terry for lending this one to me.

The other night I walked by a bank, and noticed a computer terminal facing the walkway proudly displaying a Windows 98 splash screen.

Could a bank really be running an operating system that was put to pasture at the end of 2003?

I guess it’s better than Windows 95, or 3.11. But seeing that definitely wouldn’t inspire much confidence in the safety of my identity or banking information if I were a customer.

I had two main goals with the latest redesign of this site. I wanted to strictly adhere to web standards with a semantic-focused HTML layout, and I wanted to start writing more technology related posts.

I am a little embarrassed to admit this is the first version of my personal site not using tables for layout. I’ve created a few table-less layouts at work and on other projects. But this is the first iteration of my own site done with web standards in mind. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good step in the right direction.

Why are web standards important? They help ensure content is easily accessible regardless of device or browser. And they make maintaining a site much easier by cutting down on unnecessary HTML clutter.