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Nice tutorial about CF's built-in SMS support
Fuelly
Last week I was in San Francisco for the Start Conference. Not only was it a refreshingly hype-free conference filled with great ideas and advice, but Matt had a chance to get on stage and talk about something we just started: Fuelly. It's a site that helps you track your gas mileage and then share and compare how you're doing with others.
Sometime in June Matt mentioned the basic idea for the site, and I was surprised it didn't already exist. Over the next couple weeks we brainstormed about the potential site once in a while, and at some point we realized we could put it together. We took July to focus on building the site and we had a working demo for a couple dozen friends in about two weeks. Since the launch last week, we've been busy adding the top feature requests and trying to make the site available to a wider audience. (Fuelly is a little too US-centric at the moment, but improving.) It's fun seeing how people are using the site, and how the empty space we created for fueling activity is slowly filling in.
As Matt mentioned on Flickr, the first 24 hours exceeded our expectations. Lots of folks have been very enthusiastic about using the site, and I'm looking forward to the site evolving as Fuelly drivers make it their own. And I think the time is right to team up and take a collective look at our fuel consumption as a group. I know I've been trying to get the most out of my car now that I know others are watching. (By the way, I'm pb at Fuelly.)
Here's a quick roundup of posts that mentioned Fuelly in its first week:
Sometime in June Matt mentioned the basic idea for the site, and I was surprised it didn't already exist. Over the next couple weeks we brainstormed about the potential site once in a while, and at some point we realized we could put it together. We took July to focus on building the site and we had a working demo for a couple dozen friends in about two weeks. Since the launch last week, we've been busy adding the top feature requests and trying to make the site available to a wider audience. (Fuelly is a little too US-centric at the moment, but improving.) It's fun seeing how people are using the site, and how the empty space we created for fueling activity is slowly filling in.
As Matt mentioned on Flickr, the first 24 hours exceeded our expectations. Lots of folks have been very enthusiastic about using the site, and I'm looking forward to the site evolving as Fuelly drivers make it their own. And I think the time is right to team up and take a collective look at our fuel consumption as a group. I know I've been trying to get the most out of my car now that I know others are watching. (By the way, I'm pb at Fuelly.)
Here's a quick roundup of posts that mentioned Fuelly in its first week:
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"With Fuelly, you can compare and compete with other users for mileage bragging rights. Does that matter? It could help you research real-world mileage on a car model you're thinking of buying. And it might be something you want if you're a competitive hypermiler."
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"Overall the point of Fuelly is to make saving fuel more fun by connecting your stats with your friends, and at this early point in its life, it does a pretty great job."
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Nice summary of Fuelly from a local angle: "I'm looking forward to seeing how Fuelly helps me and my family reduce our fuel consumption."
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J.D. on Fuelly: "Fuelly taps the power of the masses to compile real fuel efficiency data so that users can find ways to save money."
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Chris Pirillo's video summary of Fuelly.
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Great summary and screencast of Fuelly in action.
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Great advice in this article like, "If you can fail with your integrity intact, you'll build a network of people ready to help you when you're ready to try again."
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Looks nice!
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Amazon bookmarklet that lets you add items from any site to your Amazon wishlist. [via glass]
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Yahoo Music is shutting down and their customers are losing their music. Ed Felton reminds, "Yahoo deserves blame here, but let's not forget who else contributed to this mess."
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"Here are ten things newspapers could do, right now, to improve the quality of the comments on their sites."
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"Drawn from the Gallery's rare book collection, the 19 works include pages from Ernst's collage novels..." [via peacay]
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Jason's Twitter-killer: plain text file on a server. Someone write an aggregator and we've got the distributed holy Twitter grail.
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Eclipse plugin for ColdFusion development.
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Fun web app for creating tiled backgrounds. [via MeFi]
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The trouble with attention-focused modal overlays such as lightbox, and why asynchronous trays and sliders are better. [via migurski]
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Nice travel photography. The Tiger's Nest Monastery picture is amazing. [via long now]
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looks like a good way to jump start a CF facebook app.
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"...this moving skyscape features Jupiter above the southeastern horizon and the marbled streets of the ancient port city of Ephesus, located in modern day Turkey."
Mockingbird Sounds
Today I recorded a strange bird that lives at this four-way stop in McMinnville. It's a fairly busy intersection and the bird hears cars stop and take off all day, every day. Its standard chirp is already loud and screechy, but it has another chirp that sounds exactly like a car with a loose fan belt taking off from a stop. Check it out:
That whine is the bird. The funny part is, there's a house at the corner where the people obviously have an antagonistic relationship with this bird. Their trees are full of silver streamers that blow in the breeze—meant to scare the bird away. I couldn't see the bird at all, but it must be some sort of mockingbird.
That whine is the bird. The funny part is, there's a house at the corner where the people obviously have an antagonistic relationship with this bird. Their trees are full of silver streamers that blow in the breeze—meant to scare the bird away. I couldn't see the bird at all, but it must be some sort of mockingbird.