State Of The Blog
After 5.5 years, 140 posts, 550 comments, and 270 tags…
this blog attracts about 7000 monthly visits,
and has a Google PageRank of 5.
Not too bad for a little blog, eh?
Jenkins BuildMonitor – 20000 Downloads Later
Yesterday, Jenkins BuildMonitor Firefox Add-on surpassed 20,000 downloads. I uploaded the first version on June 8th, 2008, so that’s almost 3 years ago, and there have been 26 releases since.
On average, there are about 2500-2700 active daily users on weekdays. That became the basis of my release mantra: “Let’s not piss 2500 people off.”
The top locales are en-US, de, en-GB, fr, ja, pl. We’ve got en, fr, and ja locales covered https://github.com/jenkinsci/firefox-extension-buildmonitor/tree/master/src/main/resources/firefox/chrome/locale. Any German or Polish translator around? please feel free to submit a pull request.
While the top operating systems are Windows, Linux, Darwin, Solaris, FreeBSD.
And as you know, this add-on is now named Jenkins BuildMonitor, though in practice it should still work with both Jenkins and Hudson just fine. As for the project management, I’m staying with the original Hudson – now Jenkins – community, source code on GitHub, mailing list on Google Groups, etc.
Do You Find Websites Hard To Read On The iPhone? Try FeedTouch
After the first few weeks of using an iPhone, I learned that reading the content of most websites on a mobile phone was such an unpleasant experience. The texts were tiny and hard to read, the ads were distracting, I kept having to zoom in and out, scroll vertically and horizontally. In short, I spent most of the time trying to navigate the content instead of reading the content.
I know there are already some solutions out there that somewhat tackle this problem, but none of them is simple enough to my liking. So that’s why I wrote FeedTouch. (Note: even if there’s a simpler solution that I didn’t know of, I’d still write it anyway :p)
To use FeedTouch, all you have to do is add ft.t00.me in front of a website URL.
The screen shot below shows a normal website on the left http://ma.tt, and the FeedTouch-ed version on the right http://ft.t00.me/ma.tt .
FeedTouch automatically discovers an atom or RSS feed on a website (most news sites and blogs have such feeds). But instead of showing the content included in the feed (many feeds only provide excerpts), FeedTouch shows you the full content in a readable format.
I understand that this is not a solution for everyone. FeedTouch is particularly useful for me because I mostly read news sites with fresh daily content and I mostly do the reading during my daily train commute, which means I only care about reading stuffs, I never run out of reading material, and I’m not worried about keeping track which articles I have or have not read. And after some time, I ended up with a folder containing a collection of the FeedTouch-ed websites that I read most often, I added those sites to my iPhone home screen.
I know some of you might ask “What’s wrong with Google Reader?” Two things. First is that Google Reader only displays the content included in the feed. I like to read NBA.com and I only get few sentences worth of excerpt on their feed, which means I ended up having to visit the actual web page with the hard to read texts anyway. And second, adding new feeds to Google Reader on iPhone’s Safari is not simple enough because it involves finding out the feed URL (good luck with that) and copy-pasting it to Google Reader, plus, using a web form on a mobile phone is such a pain.
I would rather simply add ft.t00.me in front of a website URL and let FeedTouch discover the feed URL automatically for me. If I like the website content, then I simply add it to the iPhone home screen. Easy!
FeedTouch uses jQueryMobile, and mashes up Google Feed with ViewText.
Update (26/07/2011): replaced ft.prn.la with ft.t00.me .
Childhood Drawings – T’Challa And Scorpion
I found some of my old hand drawings when I visited my parents’ house in Jakarta earlier this year. I used to draw a lot when I was still in elementary and junior high school, nothing awesome, but I guess it wasn’t too bad for someone at that age.
Back then I was really into soccer and basketball, and for a reason I can no longer remember, I often incorporated elements of a soccer ball or a basketball in my drawings.
Here’s two of them:
T’Challa from Marvel Comics, obviously holding a basketball with adjusted ribs forming the shape of claws.
Scorpion from Mortal Kombat. Notice the basketball ribs at the background of the Mortal Kombat dragon logo?
There’s one mystery, I’m not sure what the significance of the numbers, 91 and 4, on those characters was. I’m guessing 91 was Dennis Rodman‘s jersey number when he was playing for the Chicago Bulls and 4 was Takenori Akagi‘s at Shohoku High School, but yea, your guess is as good as mine.
Studio Sign
This sign was bolted on the front wall up to the third letter before some body corporate police appeared out of nowhere and pointed out that it’s against their rules.
So we had to improvise and placed the sign above the door frame for now.
Time to start planning to overthrow the current body corporate.