Edward R. Murrow, “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy,” March 9, 1954:
Still holds true 50 years later.
gre.gario.us has ended its short run as a publicly-accessible Web service. It simply became too popular for its own good; the creator/operator of del.icio.us shut off access from gre.gario.us because it was taking up too much bandwidth.
I had a few things in mind as I created the site. Above all I didn’t think it would really catch on (at least as quickly as it did). I thought I’d get a few early adopters looking at it, and presumed I might get a little jump a couple weeks down the road with a blog mention or something. I also knew that the service basically worked around some limitations of del.icio.us’s RSS structure; it essentially meant that I used a straight system of fetching HTML pages. I don’t deny that it took a lot of bandwidth; the size of the URL page cache directory that I had was somewhere around 200 MB each day for the couple of days I had it up. I tried to make the service as courteous as possible (building in delays, caching, and the like), but unfortunately del.icio.us’s structure wasn’t helping. I knew I might have to stop the service if it did, by some stretch of the imagination, become popular.
Quite simply, it did. Here are a few quick stats:
Per the suggestion of Jon Ippolito, one of my new media professors, I’ve kept a cached page of my own results to demonstrate as an example of the service in my portfolio. gre.gario.us is by far my most successful site yet, so I definitely want to mention it with my other past works.
gre.gario.us provided a wonderful start to my Semsym collection of sites. My next top priority is to develop the site for Semsym; from there I really have way too many ideas to count. I have a few that would be pretty simple to do; I’d like to branch off from del.icio.us again, but in a nicer way.
I’ve always believed that anything is possible with the Web if you put enough time, effort, and creativity into it. The downside is that sometimes you use a system in a way that it wasn’t designed to be used, and it might not always work out. That’s fine; I’m really happy with gre.gario.us’s (72 hours of) success, and I think I was able to show a lot of people another application of del.icio.us’s simple yet powerful service. Hopefully in time my functionality will become incorporated into the service itself.
(And I promise that’s it with the .us jokes… for now. Other strange domains may follow.)
The power of the Web – and of community-driven sites – really manifests itself when someone talks about one of your sites – in Spanish.
A few minutes ago I launched gre.gario.us, the first in a series of upcoming projects from my new development umbrella of sites called Semsym. This is the first new service I’ve launched in a while, and it works due to the fact that the simplest tools are often the most useful.
Basically, gre.gario.us takes any del.icio.us username and finds people who have bookmarked 2 or more of the 25 latest links the user has found. It then displays a list of “friends” in descending order of common link count. (lots more about the service on the about page.
The site uses PHP with some HTML regular expression parsing; I took great care to put most of the burden on MY servers, not del.icio.us. In fact, nearly everything (user pages and URL pages, to be exact) is cached daily; the first time a user or a URL is accessed through gre.gario.us in a day, the page will hit del.icio.us and call for the page. If it’s already been accessed – even if the URL has been used by another gre.gario.us user – it runs from the cache. That means that the friend list updates daily, so there’s some incentive to go back to the site.
Found on del.icio.us…
The biggest, hugest congrats of the day go to VW and DDB London for an AMAZING ad that probably has Gene Kelly looking down and either laughing or cursing.
From the wow, look at what technology can do department, check out Singin’ in the Rain… updated (direct QuickTime link, 5.6 MB), and if you’ve never seen the movie or just want to see the original again, look near the bottom of the page at Reel Classics.
Good: getting an annoying problem solved at work
Bad: knowing you should’ve been able to solve the problem faster
Good: knowing you weren’t the only one who couldn’t solve it
Good: Pat’s Pizza
Good: budget Blizzards (Frosty at Wendy’s + M&Ms)
Bad: the feeling you have after Pat’s Pizza & a budget Blizzard
Bad: 5 hours of sleep + lots of upcoming stressful stuff
Bad: 170 pages to read in a not-so-easy-on-the-eyes book
Good: 8 hours of sleep
Good: not worrying too much
Good: having a presentation go well
Bad: not having a completely clear idea of what you were presenting about
Good: ad-lib!
Good: having a friend who really cares
Good: having a really good idea for a site
Bad: having someone tell you it’s already been done
Good: doing it anyway 🙂
My new favorite online service is yourmusic.com.
Run by BMG, this site takes the deals available from its parent and simplifies the whole process. On the site you set up a Netflix-like “Music Queue” and are sent one CD a month for $5.99 (with free shipping, which is the REALLY nice part). During the course of the month, you can order as many other CDs as you want for the $5.99 price. The only catch: if you don’t have a CD lined up in your Music Queue on your monthly delivery date, you still get charged the $5.99. That isn’t really a problem, though; I have CDs lined up until June in my queue. I ordered Gavin DeGraw’s Chariot about a week ago and received it today (great CD, and no problems with it).
Great deal. Check it out. (Unfortunately, no referral program yet… they say the site may have one in a few weeks.)
I don’t usually recommend songs that you have to pay for, and, on top of that, I don’t usually recommend songs from country artists. But hey, friends can make you do weird things sometimes.
“The Lighthouse’s Tale” by Nickel Creek – get it on 
or Amazon.
Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, “Daguerreotype,” 1830s (quoted in Classic Essays on Photography, 1980):
While America drowns in debt, I seem to be going the other way… but I don’t exactly have a ton of money.
It seems as though I’ve started a little collection of gift cards, certificates, and the like. I finally used up the money to the cards I had at Wal-Mart (thanks, Bingo) and Burlington Coat Factory (thanks, Mom), but I still have a lot of little things to use up. I’ve got some money to spend at the iTunes Music Store (thanks, Secret Santa), FYE/Strawberries (thanks, Wally and Nancy), and a bunch to use at Amazon and random places online. So as long as I can creatively buy products at certain places, I’ll be all set.
My favorite thing to do with Amazon gift money is to buy lots of free-after-rebate stuff. For a nominal charge of $0.37 and some time (that is, if you choose Super Saver Shipping), you can essentially turn Amazon money into real money. I guess I’m off to find some free stuff at Amazon (ya hear that, Bezos? gimme stuff!).