Usage (version 0.2)

Download the zip file and extract the contents to your wp-content/plugins directory. In your blog’s admin tool, activate the plugin.

Next, login to Foursquare and goto the feeds page. Find your RSS feed.

Copy it to the clipboard, and paste it into the Foursquare settings panel.

Finally, paste the following code in your sidebar.php file in Wordpress:

<?php echo foursquare_get_checkins(); ?>

Here is the working version of the plugin in action:

Pretty basic now, but there will be further revisions, I promise

Downloads and version history

• Version 0.1 – Simple widget showing the latest 5 checkins with links back to venue pages – [download]
• 0.2 – Added the ability to control the number of checkins you post. Also cleaned up the code a little bit. Still want to figure out how to eliminate duplicate checkins via strcmp() or array_unitque() functions in PHP. I want to add a Google map with the kml file and show checkins on a map – [download]

In further versions, I want to explore the Wordpress widget API. Instead of this being a plugin where you have to actually paste PHP code into your sidebar, I want to bring all the interaction into the admin panel.

I welcome further requests please! Email me or leave some comments below.

Here is the git repository for my Wordpress plugins.

Note: this blog post is still a work in progress, check back periodically for updates

So when I saw Alison Rosen using Blogger, I wanted to help her move to Wordpress, and start using her own domain name. I’m no designer, but here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

I got Facebook Connect up and running with the help of Disqus. Each post has the ShareThis plugin, in addition to the Tweetmeme plugin.

Also, moving from Blogger was a breeze. You login to Blogger within Wordpress and it just imports everything.

Another cool thing that I did is cached her Twitter feed. I modified this code to accept the JSON instead of an RSS feed. We are only hitting the Twitter API every ten minutes, instead of everytime someone hits the site.

Hope you like the site. I plan on building more things into it, and eventually trying to get a real designer to take a look at it.

Check out her demo reel, she is pretty funny:

I wanted to help her because she blogs A LOT. And she deserves to have a nice place for her to express herself, and for her audience to contribute. What do you think of the site?

The story starts out:

Once upon a time in a little place they used to call the City of Lights, there was a Boy who had a Heart Made of Gold…

I wasn’t allowed to take pictures inside, so I will have to explain it here. Imagine an urban circus. People flying back and forth on living room drapers, little people chasing tires, a love story, lots of dancing, acrobatics, painfully flexible but graceful stretching, a drum and xylophone two-piece, and a lots of laughs, oos, and aahs.

I could say more, but I want you to see the show. It’s playing at San Francisco’s Brava Theatre in the Mission.

Click here to buy tickets for Kamikaze Heart.

It was totally different than the pot-pie tasting I did at Chow last year.

Their startup is a marketplace for high-end artisan food vendors, so they get a lot of free food samples to try. This tasting was to decide if they would ultimately decide to offer some of these ingredients in their store. I was lucky to taste along.

A tradition at Foodzie tasting is to sign your name on a cork. Last week, Kevin Rose was at a tasting, and I got a picture of his cork:

Laura Werlin, aka “The Cheeze Lady“, was fresh off a judging at a grilled cheese contest at San Francisco’s AT&T Park. She brought some of her cookbooks for us, and then told us that it’s okay to put a plate over the grilled cheese to expedite the melting process.

We got right down to building sandwiches after Laura gave us some tips on grilling.

There were so many types of cheese and toppings to choose from.

The table was setup very nicely too.

This was by far my favorite cheese:

My sandwich included pesto truffle oil, two kinds of cheese, a thick slice of bacon, and some experimental salami. It was to die for.

I really enjoyed the tasting and I hope Emily and Rob invite me over for another soon.

Check out the rest of my pics at Flickr »

(Bentley cleaned up the mess when everyone was finished!)

I was proud to be a groomsman at Vinay’s wedding this weekend. I had a lot of fun, and really enjoyed the ceremony. The venue was the Golden Gate Club in the Presidio, and it was beautiful.

Full photoset on Flickr

Scott Beale says that a variety of different sites are using the service and so far the response is good. Veronica Belmont and Art of the Prank are two good examples of high-traffic Wordpress installations using the Laughing Squid Cloud.

The good guys at Rackspace will be powering the service. For $12 bucks a month, you will have reliable storage and serving of pages with speed. I’ve moved the blog over this evening, and it’s like zipping around in a new hybrid vehicle; fast, quiet, and little exhaust.

The Ultra Squid Plan gets you: 2GBs of disk space, 100 GBs of bandwidth, 1000 compute cycles, 5 MySQL databases, 30 POP/IMAP email accounts and 1 GB of email storage per mailbox.

I deleted andrewmager.com from Dreamhost, but I still host 50+ domains there. I wanted to put my blog on a more stable architecture because I plan on blogging more.

Give Laughing Squid a try if you have a site that you don’t want to lose. I want to have multiple copies of my blog’s files in case a server drops. Cloud lets you do that.

Now it can be integrated into the rest of the web, and even your phone.

Commenting on a blog is easy, but sometimes you don’t feel like filling out your name, email, and URL every time. Facebook Connect solves that, plus a lot more. It unites a community on your blog, and brings traffic back to Facebook.

You finally have a unique identity across the web.

If your company hasn’t implemented Facebook Connect, or a comment system like Disqus, you are losing community every day.

From this day forward, I will give you, the user and main person I care about on this blog, the power to comment with Facebook. Next step is to get my company to implement it.

Read more. This includes learning more. When school ends, you finally have a chance to learn what you want to, not what is taught to you. I will make sure I read at least one new book per month and learn about a new topic.

Blog more. This blog barely gets updated. My ZDNet blog isn’t much better.

Cook more. I’ve been a line cook at about 4 restaurants, but I have yet to use the kitchen in my SF apartment.

Spend less money, and save more. This one is huge. My finances do need a lot of work. I have a little bit of debt that I need to figure out and pay down. Some of it is college, and some is old credit card.

Be way more patient. This one is very hard for me. Using the Internet every day makes me want instant gratification for everything in life. When I am cruising around in a browser, at any time I can hit CMD + T and tab to Google and find any bit of information that my heart desires. I take it for granted sometimes. In ‘09, I will be more patient with life.

Be more social. I would like to meet every single person who has ever been born.

Make my company better. As I sit here and write this, my dad is watching the NBC Nightly News. He regularly watches Marketwatch.com, a direct competitor to BNET (a site I work on every day). In the new year, I want to make my company stronger.

Monkey playing a trumpet backwards

Tom Merritt hit me with this photo meme, from Veronica Belmont. Lemme tag six more people: Josh Campoverde, Kevin Cupp, Brian Sewell, Stephanie Chu, Neha Tiwari, and Miguel 23.

I went to see Milk last night and I was blown away.

It was a very touching story about the life and times of San Francisco’s first openly gay politician Harvey Milk. If this movie is playing near you, I recommend you see it at once.

In the heart of San Francisco’s gay district, the Castro, there is a public transportation plaza dedicated to this man, and I found it yesterday for the first time.

I was really enlightened when I saw the memorial:

Check out more of my photos here.

I will offer photos, stories, and videos.

Stay tuned for more.

Visit the website for more information. It was awesome though.

In a 20 minute nap, you don’t fully go into deep sleep, but your mind goes into a resting mode and you become refreshed.

45 minute naps are bad because you fall into deep sleep and then awake right in the middle of it.

You sleep in 90 minute cycles, so that amount of time for a nap is perfect.

Everybody has different sleep needs. If you wake up in 6 hours and feel okay, then don’t force yourself to lay in bed for another two hours.

If you sleep with a snoring bed partner, you can lose up to two hours of a sleep a night. The size of your bed has a huge factor in the comfort of your sleep. They even have mattresses with a “spoon slot”, a hole in the mattress where you can put your arm if it’s uncomfortable.

Lucid dreaming is a skill. You dream about whatever it was you were thinking about right before you goto sleep. If you think good thoughts, you should be okay.

Dreaming appears as though it’s a storybook. If you wake somebody up early, they are in chapter one. If you wake them in the middle of the night, they might be in chapter 6 of that same “story”

The ending of the dream does occur, but most times you don’t remember it because you are amnestic for the first minute or two when you wake up. It takes your brain a little while to function. Keep a notepad by your bed.

Fatal familiail insomina is only present in a small section of Italy. As time goes on, you eventually just stop sleeping. And it kills you.

If you try to stay awake for a long period of time, your body will just throw you into a state of sleep.

Tips for good sleeping:

• 20 to 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise
• Slowing down your caffiene consumption (it can have a half-life of up to 12 hours)
• Have a bowl of cereal before bed

There is no data to suggest that Benadryl puts you to sleep faster than a sugar pill. It makes you feel fuzzy-drug-head, and you fall asleep, but there are other methods.

You would have to eat a 46 lb. turkey to have enough tryptophan to make you fall asleep.

Sometimes people hallucinate a little bit when they wake up. It’s usually okay, but it can be an early sign of narcolepsy.

You can’t smell during sleep. That’s why you don’t wake up from sleep farting.

You can follow my live blog here: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3.

Day 3 update: I got a chance to interview Ashton Kutcher with Meghan Asha:

Here is a link to the site »

He is the main guy behind the scenes at TechCrunch50 this year:

Plus, older stories were getting broken because the content was too wide.

I needed a more extensible design. I asked Marc for something simpler, and this is what he came up with.

I am always studying the codes that make up the Internet; from dynamic scripting languages to liveblogging. I told Marc I wanted something with a “blueprint” feel, because I am not really a designer yet, but I am in the course of learning.

I am really excited about it

It’s not 100% ready right now (i.e. I haven’t looked at how comments are formatted yet), but it’s basically there.

I have been constantly testing myself with building out new designs fast. It’s kinda like a test for my job, where I slice Photoshop documents all the time.

How do you like it?