First Crack 120. Wonderlick’s Tim Quirk on Truth Through Music

I’ve been a fan of Tim Quirk’s music for 20 years – easy. The playful melancholy in throughout his songwriting continually resonates with me. When he announced the new Wonderlick album was in the works and available for ‘name-your-price’ pre-order – I jumped on the opportunity. When I started hearing about how successful the campaign …

DickensURL.com – Extra Short Stories

There’s lots of silly URL shorteners. Some of my favorites – not just because of their silliness, but because they offer some interesting potential; GiantURL – takes a regular URL and transforms it into a multi-line, unreadable, hash. Potentially, the information you’re sharing could be encoded into the hash, rather than redirected. Hmmm. what’s the …

More Usable URLs: Twitter.com

URLs are consistently the least usable aspect of our interaction with web-based information services – which is terribly unfortunate considering their prominence in how we access, share, and interact with these services. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how Twitter’s URLs could be more usable – by either being more logical, more …

A Proposal for Shorter Google Maps URLs

I was adding a link to a Google map into my iCal and noticed Google is encouraging me to share the the map URLs in email and IM. But there’s a problem with the Google Maps URLs. They’re +/- 155 characters. Here’s the full URL: http://maps.google.com/maps?oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&ie=UTF8&q=the+red+pepper,+plymouth,+mn&fb=1&split=1&gl=us&cid=1854680882426337660&li=lmd&z=14&iwloc=A This URL is neither short, nor easily memorable, nor …

How To Cache Highly Dynamic Data in Rails with Memcache – Part 3

In part 1 and part 2, I laid out my initial approaches on caching and performance in Cullect. While both of them pointed in the right direction, I realized I was caching the wrong stuff in the wrong way. Since then, I tried replicating the database – one db for writes, one for reads. Unfortunately, …