Seattle.BloggersPub

Crush3r - the evite killer. If you’ve ever sent an evite check this out!

Continuing the tour of Italian restaurants in downtown Kirkland, Liz and I recently ventured out to Ristorante Paradiso. Let’s get this straight - we have a really, really hard time with most Italian restaurants in the United States. There are far too many restaurants like the Olive Garden serving American-Italian food and giving diners […]

NOTCOT recently featured some new work by the amazing Audrey Kawasaki and it reminded me how much I love her work. She manages to blend the innocent and beautiful with the dark and, well, kinky. The resulting mix is sexy as hell.

Clark’s written a bit recently about the irrationality that afflicts nearly everyone’s decisions about energy (see here and here). As a partial antidote, I give you this: Seattle’s super-groovy online energy and resource audit.

Basically, you fill out a short survey about your energy habits and your home’s characteristics. Then, based on your answers, plus your billing history for electricity, water consumption, and garbage you get a customized report detailing how much your household uses – and how much it costs you. Better yet, the report also gives detailed suggestions to improve your efficiency.

It even goes so far as to calculate an estimate cost savings for you. For example, installing newer toilets in my house, circa 1943, would save me $13 to $18 per year. But low flow showerheads would net me savings of $31 to $42. So the “payback period” for a showerhead is around one year. Actually, it’s no time at all, since Seattle is giving them away for free right now.

What’s great about this stuff is that it gets us energy consumers to confront how much we actually pay for our wasteful ways. And when we understand the costs of our consumption, it seems that the costs of our investments in efficiency are pretty darn cheap. Or free. Or they actually put money back in our pockets. 

It turns out that the best thing for my greedy self-interest is to do good things for the planet.

The Home Resource Profile, as it’s officially called, is open only to folks who are Seattle City Light customers and who have 10 consecutive months of billing history. I’m willing to bet that other cities have similar programs, but I don’t know of them. But you know of others, send them to me and I’ll post them here.

Sure, looks like great animation. But…the screenplay is by Neil Gaiman!!!

This article is part of a series.

My house gets a 77 out of 100; my office, a 92. Want to know how walkable your neighborhood is? Or the neighborhood you’re thinking of living in? Go to walkscore.com.

Three Seattle uber-hackers, Jesse Kocher, Matt Lerner, and Mike Mathieu, built this addicting new website. It maps the closest grocery store, restaurant, and several other businesses you might walk to from any address in the United States or Canada. It also gives each location a “Walk Score.” (You can even watch the site tally up the score. It’s awesome!)

What’s especially exciting to me is, Walk Score marks the successful completion of a quest I launched more than a year ago. (It started all the way back in Car-less #2 “One Mile from Home” and continued in Car-less #20 “Googling Google.”)

Yes, walkshed maps are here – and cooler by far than even I imagined. J, M, and M took my idea, improved it, and built the website. Obviously, they’ve got some chops: they claim to have done the project in a couple of weeks.

Walk Score does not count every single business within a one-mile walkshed, as I originally proposed. Instead, it calculates the distance to the closest business in each of a list of commonly used categories such as grocery stores, restaurants, and coffee shops. It assigns points based on the distance to these amenities, then averages the score. This simpler strategy works well and generates great maps.

The most far-reaching impact of this tool would be if realtors began publishing the Walk Scores of their property listings, the way they promote local schools. That step could send ripples through the real estate market, subtly tilting the scales toward compact communities over sprawling ones. Ultimately, this shift would improve health, reduce fuel bills and oil imports, and slow climate disruption. (So, please send all your friends who are in the real estate business to walkscore.com.)

And the most fun aspect of the tool is the Walk Scores of Celebrity Locations box. Who’d have guessed that Jennifer Aniston’s character in the sit-com “Friends” had a Walk Score of 100 at her fictional apartment in New York City, but Jennifer Aniston herself (pre-breakup) had a Walk Score of 3 at her California home?

Go look at www.walkscore.com. Next, come back here to record your score and to comment. Then, tell your friends.

What’s your Walk Score?

After my little rant on Sunday, it was funny to see the headline Using AI To Filter RSS Feeds on Slashdot tonight.

The article points to AideRSS, a service that takes your feed subscriptions and applies its “special sauce” to find the subset of posts from those feeds that they believe are of most interest to you. The following comes directly from their FAQ:

In a nutshell you enter the URL of the feed that you would like to have filtered and we do some math and checking around the web to learn about this feed, its statistics, and people’s reaction to it. We then assign PostRank scores to all articles in the feed and provide you with a variety of tools to sort and parse these items of interest into manageable lots for you to scan and digest at your leisure.

At another link available from the Slashdot article:

After using AideRSS for a few days, there’s definitely something there. While it probably needs to become more user-friendly, AideRSS shows good progress in tackling a major problem/challenge for many people who rely on RSS feeds to consume information.

This sounds interesting, and its definitely the closest thing I’ve heard of to what I’ve been suggesting. However, from what I can tell, it sounds like it uses a lot of external information to make decisions about what might be pertinant to an individual feed subscriber. I much prefer the idea that I’m in charge of what interests me, and that my newsreader would simply pay attention to my interests and learn over time to present the most relevant and interesting topics and bury the ones I’m not likely to care about.

Over on the Pownce blog, Shawn announced that they are going to be forming a group to take a look at what APIs should be exposed for Pownce. That was one thing developers really wanted from the service, so I’m excited that they’re going in that direction. Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch had this to […]

I talked to John Musser at the Naked Truth event yesterday and he mentioned to me that he had redone his Mashup Matrix on Programmable Web in Flash. The Mashup Matrix is a way to visualize all of the APIs that exist and then the number of mashups that have been created with that cross […]

Contrary to popular belief, it’s been a while since I’ve done anything with WordPress. On top of that, I’ve never actually done anything with WordPress. Confused? Visit those two links and hopefully you’ll get back on track

Anyway, the last time I used WordPress was when I set up a personal blog for my fiancée about two years ago. It was relatively simple to set up and customize, but my experience with it didn’t really go anywhere since she decided to jump ship to LiveJournal or some other hosted site shortly thereafter.

Last Friday I decided to give WordPress a try because I wanted to roll out a blog very quickly. Shortly after registering, I decided that I wanted my own domain name, so I purchased one and then began investigating what it would take to point it at my new WordPress blog. The instructions were simple enough (point at the right nameservers, etc.), but that’s when the first catch showed up. In order to map a domain name to my new WordPress blog, I’d need 10 “credits.” WordPress credits cost a dollar each, so I needed to lay down $10 on top of the $10 I had just shelled out for a new domain name in order to use it with my new WordPress blog.

Unfortunately, the lameness didn’t end there. I soon noticed that the amount of space alloted to me as a WordPress user was limited to 50MB. To get more space, I’d need to (you guessed it) shell out more money for additional “credits.” Lame++. Then, I noticed a feature in the control panel (the front-end to their CMS) that allowed me to tweak the CSS associated with my blog. I had already added a theme I liked, but the idea of being able to tweak the CSS to my liking seemed pretty cool. But guess what? To actually enable the changes on my new WordPress blog, I’d need to purchase even more credits! Lame++ yet again.

Needless to say, it was at that point that I decided to cut my $10 in losses and head directly to WordPress without passing Go. After all, there’s a reason I’m paying my web host a fee each month, right? I downloaded the latest release, installed it on my web server, updated the nameservers associated with my new domain name, and within a couple of hours (once the nameserver change propagated) I was up-and-running on my own server, where I could do whatever I want with my domain, my storage space and my CSS.

That being said, there are still aspects of even WordPress that I’m not a huge fan of. For example, whenever I try to edit a post (in the “Code” tab, of course) that includes valid YouTube code, it splits the code up on different lines and adds in closing

tags unnecessarily and without reason. So with each edit, I have to manually fix the code so that it remains valid after I save my changes.

I also get this dirty feeling whenever I’m writing a post in that “Code” tab, simply because I feel like I’m relinquishing some control over what the actual code will be over to WordPress. On top of that, it looks like it’s pretty easy to break the validity of the source without ever tweaking anything that is directly code-related (i.e. anything that WordPress isn’t meant to manage itself under the covers).

All-in-all I think WordPress has made some decent progress since the last time I used it. The theme and plugin architecture is definitely very intuitive and useful. The amount of control that is given to the user makes the CMS very powerful. The time it takes to set up such a powerful tool is grossly disproportionate, which is a good thing.

I don’t see myself using WordPress for anything really serious, simply because I like to keep my hands dirty with even the lowest-level XHTML aspects of my websites. I definitely won’t ever even consider using WordPress again (hopefully this isn’t confusing anymore) simply because I’m already shelling out money each month to get access to the things they are charging for (plus a whole lot more that they aren’t). I do see how the latter is a great solution for a casual blogger that wants a flexible, full-featured blogging platform without all the fuss, though.