There you have it, SXSW 2008 by the bullet points. You can check out all my photos from this year over on Flickr.

I’ve long since warmed up to the concept and have posted nearly 3,000 largely nonsensical “tweets” in my time. It’s only been recently though that I’ve started to see the real power of the mass of information cycling through the service on a given day.

What if one could harness Twitter messages from the general populous based around a single topic or event? Enter Politweets, slapped together over a weekend or so by Doug, Gabe, Min, Dan, and myself. What Politweets is doing is observing Twitter for messages mentioning any of the Democrats or Republicans currently vying for their respective party’s nomination in the Presidential primaries.

We launched Politweets yesterday, focusing the launch date around the New Hampshire primaries. Clever, right? Anyway, the site gives you an absolute, up-to-the-second view of the political musings of the Twitterverse. I’ve frankly been astounded at some of the observations one can cram into 140 characters available. In addition to displaying lists of messages, we also keep track of the frequency candidates are mentioned (displayed in the center column of the main page).

Speaking for the rest of the crew, we’re all exceptionally proud of how this turned out. We’re far from done, though. We’re cooking up additional features that’ll help visitors drill down through the data and make some real sense out of the mash. It’s going to be good, rest assured.

Thus far we’ve gotten great reviews. A sampling of sites talking about Politweets:

• Politweets: Twittering Politics on ReadWriteWeb
• Politweets Tracks the Primaries. Why Didn’t Twitter Build This? on Mashable
• Politweets, a political buzz tracker based on Twitter on ZDNet

Heck, we even got a mention on Wired. Cool stuff.

The primaries are just heating up, so keep your eye on Politweets!

Mixx buttons!

A whole bunch of the DC crew is heading up to New York City for the Future of Web Design conference next week. Mixx is representing in a big way with myself and Alex in attendance. We’ll also be handing out the shiny new Mixx buttons seen above!

This will be my first time in the Big Apple (as preposterous as that sounds). Other than the conference (of course), I intend to hit up some record stores, see a show or two, and maybe go to Letterman. We’ll see what happens. Either way, it’s going to be a blast.

Mixx logo

I’m happy to announce (a few days late) that Mixx has gone beta and we’re slowly letting people in to hammer away on the system.

What is Mixx, you ask? Well, Mixx is what I’ve been working on for the last three months with my incredibly talented friends and co-workers. Mixx is our take on social news. We’ve drawn inspiration from sites such as Digg and My Yahoo! to create something new and (we think) unique. For those not familiar with those sites/services, the basics are:

• Anyone with an account can submit a link to the site, adding categories, tags, and locations to the story to help make the link more findable.
• Everyone else can vote the story, photo, or video up or down depending on how they feel about the link’s content.
• Anyone with an account can create private groups for sharing links between your friends or other real-world or online social groups (I created a Refresh DC group, for instance, for sharing links with local web designers and developers).
• Users can also customize their “YourMixx” page (essentially your homepage on the site) by browsing around the site and clicking “Add to YourMixx” buttons.

These are just the basics, there’s a whole host of other features and design niceties that I’ll talk about more in other posts. In this post, I wanted to give a brief overview of what I’ve been working on (and why a lot of you haven’t heard form me!).

Some of you more web-savvy users out there will likely decry Mixx as a “clone” or “copycat” of the services I’ve mentioned above. To you, I say this: fine. If your news needs are being filled by another service, that’s great. The web is a large enough community that there’s room for everyone. Some will be more successful than others, yes. It is my firm belief, however, that building a pleasant, self-governing community is more important than having the most users, page views, or whatever other metric you wish to apply.

Stepping down from that small soapbox, I’d encourage everyone to go visit Mixx, throw your email address our way, and we’ll let you in on the ground floor. We’re looking to beta test for about a month or so with a full-scale launch sometime in October. We’re also really looking for useful critiques and feedback during this beta testing period, so if you’re in the beta, please (pretty please?) let us know what you think. The site’s for you, after all.

circaVie logo

CircaVie was one of the projects I worked on at AOL after Ficlets launched. CircaVie allows you to create visual timelines of events: your life, a vacation, etc. etc.

It’s a really cool concept and the design is fantastic. The core team included Dave McVicar, Corey Lucier, Jayna Wallace, Jenna Marino, Ari Kushimoto, and Kelly Gifford with support from Dan Bradley and others. Congrats to everyone involved, it’s starting to get some pretty good press.

For the more technically inclined, there are some microformats sprinkled about (hCard mostly) and also support for OpenID. Sweet!

After some initial hassle getting the configuration sorted out, the app runs pretty well and is much more intuitive and easier to use than SquirrelMail. It’s not as full-fledged an application as say, Outlook Web Access, but it’s going to make checking my mail from other machines a lot less painful.

Anyway, RoundCube has a simple enough address book, really only storing name and email. The essentials. What boggled my mind, though, was its lack of microformats. hCard was designed for just this sort of application. A quick Google search of their site yields no mention of microformats.

Being the µF geek that I am, I took it upon myself to inject some hCard goodness into the app. It took a good deal of hunting, but here’s how I did it:

In ~/program/steps/addressbook/show.inc (line 51):

'<a href="#compose" onclick="%s.command(\'compose\', \'%s\')"
     title="%s" class="email">%s</a>',

In ~/skins/default/templates/showcontact.html (lines 8 & 10):

<body class="iframe vcard">

<div id="contact-title" class="boxtitle fn">
     <roundcube :object name="contactdetails" part="name" />
</div>

That should do it! The only issue I’m seeing is that Tails and Operator have some trouble finding the hCards. RoundCube is using a mix of JavaScript and an iframe (shudder) to display contacts, so my best guess is this is what’s causing the confusion. I have noticed, though, that if you switch to another tab in Firefox and then switch back to RoundCube, Operator can find the hCard.

There you have it, you’ve added hCards to your RoundCube install. Next step is to get in touch with the RoundCube folks and get them to add this out-of-the-box.

I love my new design, more than any I’ve done in the past (and I hope you enjoy it, too!). I swear up and down all day I’m not a designer (I’m not), so it’s rare that I’m pleased with something I’ve designed. I’m more interested in the markup being amazing.

Anyway, I just added a feature I’m rather fond of. At the top of this column, you’ll see a little box with two radio buttons, one labeled “Browsing mode,” the other “Reading mode.” Go ahead, click one. Or both.

Choosing “Reading mode” will fade out all the extraneous data to the top, right, bottom, and left of the content area, allowing you to focus on the important part – the content. I came upon this idea (I’m sure it’s not unique) after staring at the layout of this site and having a hard time focusing on the content (a likely side-effect of my non-designer-ness).

The effect isn’t persistent across pages (yet, anyway) and is built using the jQuery library. I’ll probably get berated by Mr. Chipman or Mr. Keith for relying on a library for something this simple, buuuuuuuuuut it was the quickest way for me to achieve what I was trying to achieve. I’ll break it out one of these days.

So enjoy the new reading mode, I hope you find it useful.

Ficlets was developed internally at AOL over the course of four months and is largely the brain-child of Kevin Lawver. Other guilty parties include Cindy Li, Jenna Marino, Ari Kushimoto, and of course, myself. We had help along the way from other designers, Ops team members, etc., but the core of the project was the five of us.

We ran Ficlets like a startup. There were no requirements documents, no technical documents, no long-winded meetings about this or that. I can count on one hand the number of meetings we had. The rest was getting down to business, building working demos, and hammering out things we didn’t like or didn’t work. We Got Real, iterated through UI and design, dropped features, built less. The goal was to get a product out to the public, see how they use it, and adapt as necessary.

Our process really flies in the face of a lot of the “established practices” at a large corporation. Our launch-day press release was a message on Twitter to about 100 of our friends. We had a couple hundred dollars for printing up some shirts, stickers, and buttons. Our promotional blitz was hanging out with folks at SXSW and chatting up what we’d done. Small. Simple. Easy.

I’ll talk more about SXSW in another post (once my brain gets back to functional state), but for now, a few more “technical” facts about Ficlets:

• It’s built using Ruby on Rails. Ficlets is AOL’s first Ruby on Rails app to be launched publicly. At the onset, neither Kevin nor I knew RoR – we built the entire site while learning the language and framework. I’d say that speaks to the exceptional job the creators of the framework did. We had a little help along the way from Chad Fowler and some other RoR folks, so my hat goes off to you guys and girls.
• We’re using Flickr photos for the Inspiration section. Everyone on Team Ficlets is a huge Flickr geek and we even got people from Yahoo! excited about the project.
• All Ficlets are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. This is the mechanism by which people can extend and mash-up stories into other works. I was unaware of this until recently, but this is also the first AOL project to use Creative Commons.
• We’re using microformats all over the site. I love microformats and it’s been a ton of fun (geeky fun) using them on this project. Authors bios are marked up as hCard, stories (and lists of stories) are mostly marked up as hAtom, and comments are marked up as hReviews. I think there’s still some cleaning up I can do in some cases, but on the whole, we’ve got microformats out the wazoo.

This post is starting to become a bit long, so I’ll end it there for now. There’s a lot more to tell about Ficlets, but I’ll save it for another post. In the time being, why not check out the Ficlets blog or keep up with what I’m doing on the site at: http://ficlets.com/authors/jgarber.

Refresh DC was featured this week on two CSS gallery sites: Most Inspired and CSS Mania. As far as I know, none of my work has ever been featured on a gallery site, so this is particularly cool. Big thanks again to Martin for the fantastic design.

Speaking of Martin, he’s joined forces with Alex Giron and John Riviello to form nclud. I’m really looking forward to seeing what those three put out as they’re all extremely talented (and all-around good guys, too!). Best of luck, gents!

In recent months, 200ok has gone from being a quirky name that Jeremy and I used for silly projects to a full-fledged company. We filled out all the paperwork and hooked up with the amazingly talented Justin Babuscio, Cindy Li, and Nguyet Vuong. Never fear, none of us are quitting our day jobs yet, we’re just trying our hand at small business ownership. Working two (and sometimes three or four) jobs at a time has been taxing, but we’re all excited about where this might take us.

South by Southwest is coming up right soon. I fly out tomorrow morning bright and early with Mr. Lawver and a whole litany of other AOL folk. This will be my third trip to Austin for the conference and, once again, it’s going to be amazing. The crowd this year is going to be larger than ever (by all accounts), so I’m interested to see how that goes. There are more events and panels that I’m interested in than I have time to list here, so go check it out for yourself.

Odds are I’ll have another big announcement (hopefully) later today regarding a project I’ve been working on. Some of you may know it as Ape Shirt, but right soon you’ll know it by it’s real name. Stay tuned…

Refresh DC site relaunch

I’m happy to announce we’ve just relaunched the Refresh DC site. Designed by Martin Ringlein of Maryland Media and built by myself, the new site is a reflection of the changing needs of the group as it has grown.

I’ve been absolutely overwhelmed by the consistently high turnout we’ve had at our monthly meetings and felt it was time to spruce up the site. Martin did an excellent job integrating photos from our Flickr group and incorporating more aspects of the forum.

Check us out at http://refresh-dc.org/.