That is where one of my ideas will come into place. I like to think of it as the Mahalo of related content. Mahalo is a service that allows editors to provide accurate results for top search queries. Having said that, I would like to build a service that lets editors gather content, congregate all of the information together, and present it in a reasonable manner. Categorize them into individual pages (Speeches) under a parent category (Hillary Clinton) and provide the ability to link parent pages into group (Politicians). This type of categorization will give the user the ability to roam around the site and learn about the things that are of interest.

Just a thought.

There are a few minor problems, however, that I’ve run across thus far.

1. The green gradient for comments that have been rated up/down by my friends is utterly ugly. Please add an option inside your Settings page to allow us to disable the green background. It’s extremely distracting. By all means, you guys can leave the friend usernames but the green background is such a harsh change from the other user comments.
2. When you toggle the rating score for the comments (from ‘+5 digs’ to ‘+7/-2′) and digg down a comment, that comment’s rating score goes back to the ‘+5 diggs’ format, leaving all other comments with the controversial score rating. Click the rating score again and all comments are toggled back to the ‘+5 diggs’ and your dugg down comment is toggled to the ‘+7/-2′ format. Refresh the page and it’s back to normal.

I’m sure there are a few other oddities with the new system that are overshadowed by the new design. If you see anything else, please leave it in the comments below.

Whether or not they’re real is unknown, but damn these are awesome.

Enjoy.

Basically Google will host a certain amount of storage, computation limit, and bandwidth for each developer and will eventually provide opportunities to PHP, RoR, and possibly other languages. The current beta cycle is limited to Python, which is definitely a plus in my favor since I’ve been looking to dive into Python for quite some time. What’s odd is that I literally purchased Learning Python yesterday and brought it to read between classes today. Little did I know that I would have a chance to really start using it on a quite limited (10,000) userbase platform.

What am I going to write using Google Apps Engine? I’m not too sure right now. Depending on it’s ability to communicate with the outside world, I might develop something with my new friend, Twitter. In the past couple of days I’ve been thinking about what services are already out there and a few that haven’t been invented yet (at least that I know of). Perhaps some type of centralizing system for geographic location, so that you could add “DallasTwit”, ping @DallasTwit, and in turn, DallasTwit relays the same message to all of it’s followers. Message relays will be limited to one relay per XX minutes, allowing for the service to work but not spam.

Hopefully no one steals that idea, but if they do, I’ve got a few hanging under my wing that I could venture into as well. If you’re interested in working with their API, check here.

Now to figure out what to waste it on…

Before:

After:

Effect:

(happy)

The project that has peaked most of my interest lately is TagItFunny, a digg-like site that allows users to post links, videos, images, jokes/stories, et al. There is a lot of rewriting that I must go through if I want to optimize it enough for it to be useful to me again. I started work on it before I started learning Smarty templating and how useful Smarty’s cache features can be. It was before I saw Snap, the primary source for the automated screenshots, pulled the plug on a service. It was before I realised that I should work on things that I really believe in and can grow into something useful to it’s users instead of forcing content-based sites down users like I’ve done in the past.

Waiting on a project and luckily coming up on the previously mentioned news piece regarding Snap and gaining more knowledge has allowed an actual future for the project. I could’ve walked in blindly, continued what I’ve been doing in the past, and run into too many problems that might have caused my exit.

Whether or not I actually pursue TagItFunny (the name is going to get a definite change) is for the future to decide.

The other post will focus on how I use Stylish to my leverage to hide annoying ads on websites that I frequent. I’ll include codes for Facebook and MSNBC.com as well as demonstrate how I go about making them.