Josh Highland’s Blog

I love working for TechZulu.com, I get to meet and interview awesome people like Tony Safoian of SADA Systems

See the full write up at techZulu.com

please twitter, improve your stability!

In a previous post, I mentioned that I had the opportunity to be a guest corespondent for TechZulu.com, at the Inland Empire .Net User Group MVM program.

At the event, I got a chance to interview Volkan Uzun. He was a really cool guy who does a lot of work for the .NET community in Southern California.

Check out the video on TechZulu.com or by watching the video below.

I love wordpress as a blogging platform an I love the iPhone as a mobile computing solution. Yesterday I saw that there was a wordpress app avaliable for the iPhone, so I had to try it out.

This is a post from the wordpress app, and so far it’s easy to use. I don’t know how much milage I will get out of this app, I tend to blog from home and use Twitter on the run. Who knows, this app might change that!

Let’s see how the image attachment feature works. This is me, right now in my office.

Oh man! I’m really excited about this. Last time I was behind a mic was a long time ago (unless you count my podcast).

My friend James Johnson runs the .NET User Group for the Inland Empire. He was having a special program to showcase some of the most valuable members of the .NET community in the Inland Empire. It was a pretty big deal, where were over $40,000 in prizes being given away to the winners.

TechZulu.com, a great site that covers tech events in Southern California, were going to be at the awards filming interviews with the participants and sponsors. One snag, all of their corespondents for TechZulu were on assignment. James hit me up and asked me if I could fill in and be a guest correspondent for TechZulu. He didn’t have to ask me twice (James blogged about it here).

The people that we interviewed at the event were very cooperative and had a lot of good things to say,  Efren from TechZulu is a great guy, and way fun to hang out with. I’m excited about the type of things he is doing to bring attention to tech in so. cal. Im glad I got to help contribute to their efforts. I’m going to try to make it to some of the event they have on their calendar

I was also very impressed by the .NET user group itself. It was great to see that many developers in the Inland Empire coming together to build a strong community. I was born in the Inland Empire, and have lived here all my life, and worked as a developer here. I think that the IE has a wealth of tech resources, so it makes me happy to see people like James Johnson and Efren of TechZulu taking the time to bring attention to developers in the IE.

Watch the interviews from the Inland Empire MVM Awards on TechZulu.com

Its not secret, I love social networking, I cant get enough of it. I also love programming and anything internet related.

I’m not sure how I came across it, but a PHP based, Object Oriented RSS caching tool named SimplePie caught my attention.

Previously I had been using a tool called Last RSS, but I found that Last RSS could not handle ATOM feeds.

Digging into how SimplePie works, I found that I could merge several feeds together, sorted by post time, my first thought was to use this to aggregate and cache all the different music related news feeds that and going to add content to notpopular.com v2.5 (when ever I finish it). I started thinking about it a bit more and thought it would be cool to use SimplePie to mash together all of the different RSS feeds from the different social networks I am on.

It wasn’t that hard to use SimplePie and the various social networks to make something really cool.


//establish the feeds
$pownce = new SimplePie("$pownceRSS_url");
$flickr = new SimplePie("$flickrRSS_url");
$twitter = new SimplePie("$twitterRSS_url");
$digg = new SimplePie("$diggRSS_url");
$youtube = new SimplePie("$youtubeRSS_url");


//merge them all together!
$merged = SimplePie::merge_items(array($pownce, $flickr, $twitter, $digg, $youtube));


Then all you have to do is look over each item in $merged, and output the appropriate info you want.

You can see what I built over at www.JoshHighland.com

One thing I really found great was the API that was on the SimplePie site.

After I put this all together, I found out that there is a term for what I had just built. People are calling them “LifeStreams“, which is a very appropriate term. I thought I had invented something, but guess LifeStreaming is like fire or a spear, given enough time people all over the place will discover it on their own.

I encourage you do set up a LifeStream for yourself and post the URL in the comments below. It’s fun!

My LifeStream: www.JoshHighland.com

I use GMail as my main email client. Often I’m at work and I see something online that I think is useful, and I want to remind myself of it. I have tried righting down URLS on scraps of paper in the past, but sending an email to myself works as a good reminder for me. As a bonus, I can pick up my GMail form anywhere, including my iPhone.

I’m a programmer, so I am lazy by nature. It’s kind of a pain to open a new browser, and navigate to GMail.com and then copy and paste the URL of the site, and text into GMail and then send it.

Enter the GmailThis! bookmarklet by Doug Ward. Bookmarklets are bits of javascript that you save as bookmarks in your browser. When you click that bookmark the javascript runs. Basically bookmarklets are little javascript plugins that work in almost any browser.

The GmailThis! bookmarklet will open up a new Gmail window in a little popup. The body will have the URL of the page you are currently on, and any text you happen to have highlighted at the moment. All you have to do is enter the recipients name.

You can get the GmailThis! bookmarklet from Doug Wards site, http://contrapants.org/blog/2005/07/gmailthis.html

Doug also made a cool video showing how simple the bookmarklet is to use.

If you are a heavy GMail user like I am, this is a must have.

Recently I have been looking for a solution to allow users of notpopular.com to have photo albums of unlimited size. Its a popular trend in social networks, and its way cooler then the 5 tiny images that are allowed on notPopular.com (1.0)

There are many technical problems that associated with having this kind of open system. One of the biggest problems is storage (disk space), and load on the web server. Each image takes up space on the hard drives, and requires attention from the web server when an image is requested, taking attention and CPU from other more important processes.

After looking at several options, I came across Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). Amazon S3 is an online storage web service offered by Amazon Web Services. It provides unlimited storage through a simple web services interface. Data can be easily stored and retrieved at any time, from anywhere on the web. Amazon charges in proportion to the amount of data stored and applies charges for sending and receiving data. A perfect solution for what I’m looking to do!

S3 would store the data, and would handle the load of the requests coming from users, allowing my web server to focus on more important tasks like PHP processing and MySQL queries.

Here is the price break down for amazon S3 usage:

• Storage
• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used
• Data Transfer
• $0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
• $0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
• $0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
• $0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB
• $0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
• $0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests

Using the calculator tool they have, and looking at the notpop data and projected traffic, my monthly costs would be around $20 a month, and even if things doubled in time, it would still only be $40 a month. Very reasonable for the speed and reliability that a company like Amazon offers.

I found some great php classes to work with S3, particilarly one from Geoffrey P. Gaudreault over at neurofuzzy.net

I am also planing on using some CNAME records on the notPop server to mask the amazon URL. Should be easy to do.

Last night I started to sew Amazon S3 into the pending notPop 2.0 code base. I will make some follow up posts about how it goes once I really start using it.