Jason Cartwright

feed

1. Jay Leno's Garage - Magnetic Wind Turbine
   07 January 2009, 08:38 www.jaylenosgarage.com/video/video_player.shtml?vid=913522
2. http://www.macrumorslive.com live feed hacked. Very bad.
3. The Biggest Ponzi Scheme of Them All - O'Reilly Radar
   06 January 2009, 13:55 radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/the-biggest-ponzi-scheme-of-all.html
4. Ariane Sherine: We did it! The atheist bus campaign is bigger and better then ever |
   06 January 2009, 13:45 www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/06/religion-atheism
5. need to go outside for food, but don't want to
6. How the city hurts your brain
   06 January 2009, 11:29 www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/01/04/how_the_city_hurts_your_brain/
7. A quote from Blaine Cook

   Whoa. Madness.

   06 January 2009, 10:18 simonwillison.net/2009/Jan/6/blaine/
8. Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

   Hilarious

   06 January 2009, 10:13 www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary
9. Journalists and the Recession

   Paul Mason (Economics Editor, Newsnight), with an interesting mix of forward thinking and protectionist rubbish.

   06 January 2009, 09:55 uk.youtube.com/watch?v=e6Sv81czDoo
10. Objectified trailer

    From the maker of Helvetica

    06 January 2009, 09:38 uk.youtube.com/watch?v=S9E2D2PaIcI
11. The best selling MP3 album of the year was free
    06 January 2009, 09:05 feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheLongTail/~3/503885401/the-best-sellin.html
12. They Write the Right Stuff
    06 January 2009, 09:00 www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html?page=0%2C0
13. Authors@Google: Richard Florida
    06 January 2009, 08:56 uk.youtube.com/watch?v=khQ9BaXZAjM
14. xkcd - A Webcomic - Converting to Metric
    05 January 2009, 22:44 xkcd.com/526/
15. enjoying the hilarious celebrity twitter hackings
16. WordPress Developer's Toolbox
    05 January 2009, 22:34 www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/09/15/wordpress-developers-toolbox/
17. panorama is hilarious! like the daily mail of telly.
18. first workout since the excess. nasty
19. YouTube - FOOT 2008 (REMI GAILLARD)
    05 January 2009, 17:25 uk.youtube.com/watch?v=DdAOZg12tOE&fmt=18
20. (The rims that is)
21. @jonobrain Chicken of the VNC, bizarrely
22. The history of Apple fans: A MacHeads review
    05 January 2009, 14:34 crave.cnet.co.uk/desktops/0,39029426,49300443,00.htm
23. An ineffective concrete drill
    05 January 2009, 14:28 uk.youtube.com/watch?v=5q-BH-tvxEg&fmt=18
24. Travel time to major cities
    05 January 2009, 14:28 gem.jrc.ec.europa.eu/gam/images/large/access-map.png
25. Serv O'Beer pours when iPhone accelerometer tells it to
    05 January 2009, 11:12 www.engadget.com/2009/01/05/serv-obeer-pours-when-iphone-accelerometer-tells-it-to/
26. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt
    05 January 2009, 10:31 www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt
27. In Business, Changing Places
    05 January 2009, 10:03 www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00g47qy
28. Snow!
29. Deepest darkest north London
30. Tube Mood Swings
    03 January 2009, 18:17 www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=15510996

webmytop - MySQL monitoring tool

05 October 2008, 12:30

A few years ago I made an ASP.net version of Jeremy Zawodny's mytop tool, to use monitoring the MySQL servers that power play.tm.

The tool consists of two simple parts - some general uptime, number of query, etc stats and the process list MySQL generates with the query "show processlist".

The idea was to make it web-based and have the stats updating in near-realtime using AJAX. It worked a treat and many a poorly coded query has been reoptimised after this tool shows it up churning a machine.

Simple PHP execution time monitoring

05 October 2008, 12:00

We've all heard about optimising the user's experience on the client-side, but what about on the server?

When building out play.tm we decided we needed a tool that broke down how the PHP script generated the page and displayed how long each element took to generate. We could then optimise the worst performing code. We called it 'speedtrap'. So, here is the code:

In the top of your page:

Blog Redesign

07 June 2008, 11:45

After several years with a questionable design aesthetic and some dodgy markup my blog has remerged with a fresh look, more content and some technical optimisations.

The most striking change is the activity feed on the left of the homepage. I've been playing with lifestreaming services for a while and none of the aggregators I've used have cut it. Then came FriendFeed. The combination of quick updates, a high number of supported services, large user community (including many of my friends) and arguably most importantly a quick and simple API makes using this service a no brainer. This simple feed is processed by an XSLT script and then displayed (with some help from CSS, and jQuery - more on that later). The XSLT is pretty straightforward and is available for download. You'll probably want to customise it for your needs, but drop me a line if you do use it and make the source available, if possible.

There are a couple of tools I've used to augment the lifestream. First is the favicon. This is pulled in using a Google service that I probably shouldn't be hotlinking. The XSLT puts an image in the HTML pointing to http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=[domainname], for example. This returns the favicon for the domain in question (yes, I know the "Content-Type" header is wrong - maybe we'll see that fixed at some point). Should the system know that a favicon doesn't exist it will display a generic earth icon. Very useful. Perhaps I can get that header bug fixed at some point - along with maybe getting it sent as a GIF or PNG rather than a JPG... a poor choice I'd say, but I'm sure there is a reason.

MADDness

10 May 2008, 17:30

Article first appeared here, and was edited by Luke.

The high profile release of Grand Theft Auto IV this week has seen a number of groups use the inevitable publicity for their own means. Newspapers, online sites (yes, including this one) and blogs eager for pageview-generating stories about the hit title lap up stories from pressure groups, hoping to ride in on the search results or the Digg/Slashdot/Reddit homepages the masses consume. This potent and symbiotic relationship is well documented, and at no time is it more visible than during a big event - and GTA IV will probably be the biggest we'll see this year.

Not the least publicity hungry of these parties is, of course, our old friend Mr Jack Thompson. He waded in with a typically unmeasured rant calling the 18/Mature (depending on jurisdiction) rated game "the gravest assault upon children in this country [the USA] since polio". So far, so predictable.

What Apple should have done, by ASUS

10 May 2008, 17:30

Article first appeared here, and was edited by Luke.

With all the hype surrounding the Macworld Expo and coverage Stevie's keynote has produced, you could be forgiven for believing that the Macbook Air is the be-all and end-all of the petite laptop market.

Sure, its going to be a solid product with all the traits of expert engineering that makes Apple systems highly buyable even when sold at their higher-than-norm premium price point. The MagSafe power cable, the magnetic screen hinge, the solid hardware-software integration are all going to be there. However, the key selling point appears to just be a kudos factor that probably won't affect the average consumer - the thinness. Whilst it might be an excellent bragging right when it comes to your mates in the office, I fail to see how this translates to making the Macbook Air a fundamentally better product. It will take up marginally less room in your bag (and you won't need those Firewire devices or ethernet cable due to lack of ports) and weigh less, but will it make it more usable? Probably not - it still won't fit properly on an aircraft tray table.

Content Findability: keyword, not URL

27 February 2008, 21:00

In making a purchasing decision a buyer will go through a process often expressed as "AIUAPR". This acronym stands for the phases a buyer almost always moves through before laying out the cash...

1. Awareness
2. Interest
3. Understanding
4. Attitudes
5. Purchase
6. Repeat Purchase

Despite the rise of the internet and all the hype surrounding Google etc there is still no advertising medium quite as good at raising awareness for the average consumer as TV. Other advertising mediums such as radio, outdoor and ambient media still have their niches in ad buyer's media mixes, however along with TV all these often fail at the "Interest" stage and have almost definitely finished being consumed before the potential buyer has hit "Understanding". This is why infomercials and home shopping channels whose revenue depends on people handing over the cash there and then spend so long describing each apparently simple (and usually crap) product.

Therefore the best way to ensure your "Awareness" and "Interest" spend is more likely to be converted into a sale, by moving the buyer down this decision chain, is to provide more information than you can fit in the average TV/radio/outdoor advert. A website of course can fulfill this task well by conveying a lot more information about a product than these traditional adverts ever can - often presenting such information in a more persuasive form with interactivity.

New BBC Homepage

27 February 2008, 18:00

The BBC have launched their new homepage that has been in beta for the last few months - it looks and feels great. To get this out the door through the restrictive BBC standards and ancient infrastructure is one hell of an achievement. Good work.

However, the customisability of the page is completely knobbled by the lack of content and some basic persistence problems. The page lacks fundamental functionality that even the most basic Pageflakes-a-like customisable homepage has baked in.

For starters, the layout isn't saved in anything other than your cookie so I have to customise the page on every machine I use. This persistence problem gets even worse when you try and use other BBC systems. When I enter my postcode to customise the homepage, this information doesn't appear to be used to modify the content on any other site, and I still get asked for my postcode or place name elsewhere - /weather, /whereilive, and the customisable news homepage (a competing homepage... on the same site - only at the BBC!) for example.

8 Facts About Me Meme

19 January 2008, 18:00

I don't usually go in for these chain letter, MySpace style questions about yourself things, but as I've been tagged in one by non-other than the big man himself Mr Forrester, I'll do this one. He called me "a funny geezer" too.

Here are the rules...

1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

I was born on Friday 13th. This is the standard 'fact about myself' I roll out in those team building things - I'm sure more a few people have heard me say this one several times. It's usually accompanied by a chorus of "well, that figures" afterwards.

eBay Items

30 December 2007, 15:00

I've gone and done a bit of early spring cleaning, and the result is a load of stuff on eBay.

Alternatively, checkout the rather cool widget...

iPlayer Disappointment

29 December 2007, 10:00

Surfing around some blogs I came across Adam Bowie's post about Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe. I'm a big Brooker fan, from back in the day when people bought these paper objects called magazines and Charlie wrote in PC Zone through to TV Go Home, Nathan Barley and now this BBC Four series.

Anyhow, Adam referenced the iPlayer URL of Brooker's end of year special of Screenwipe which I'd really like to see but missed due to being on holiday. I'd heard that the Flash version of iPlayer was released so I readied myself for a dose of Charlie's rantings to be streamed to my Mac and clicked the link. It wasn't to be. "Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe is no longer available - sorry!" the error message says. All very well - the rights aren't cleared for the BBC to stream this after 7 days, I understand that, but ultimately I'm very disappointed.

I'm in Malaysia

17 December 2007, 12:00

The tour of Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Pangkor Laut, and Georgetown has begun. Have some photos below, or there are more over at Flickr.

XHTML Mobile sites are easy

17 December 2007, 11:00

Over at play.tm we've made a mobile site, at m.play.tm. This was made possible by a few different technologies and conventions all coming together. Google Adsense for Mobile for monentisation, XHTML Mobile for the markup, and the apparent de-facto standard of putting mobile sites on the subdomain m.[yourdomainname].

With all our content in the a database its no problem to output it to the simplified version of XHTML for use on mobile browsers, the design process was simple too - you can't display much on a tiny phone screen. Google Adsense adverts on non-mobile sites are embedded in the page using Javascript. The JS is executes and passes the page's URL to the script and Google's server-side code spits out the relevant ads (using Google's crazily complex algorithms to get to best ads, undoubtedly).

Mobiles can't usually execute Javascript, and the extra HTTP call creates added latency, which mobile pages are sensitive to. To get around this Google mobile ads are added to the page server-side, using whatever scripting language you choose. I guess Google figure that if you're savvy enough to create a mobile site then you are savvy enough to understand server-side scripting. Unfortunately Google only provide Perl, PHP, JSP and ASP v3 samples. As the main page generating parts of play.tm are written in ASP.net I created this function (based on the ASP v3 function Google provides), which of course you are welcome to copy and probably improve for your implementation (a mention and link would be nice though!):

Content delivery: insource or outsource

17 December 2007, 10:00

Its all gone a bit negative around here (abusing ITV, dismissing bbc.co.uk 2.0, and listing crap URLs), so I think I should write a bit about what I'm up to.

In the constant scaling battle that is running a large and growing content site a key decision is to choose where you put components of your systems. Do you insource, outsource or a mixture of the both?

So, on play.tm we've recently been moving around quite a few pieces of this jigsaw. To give a bit of background - we've got several million pages of content ranging from text to images to video, and we deliver this to around a million users a month. We're a small company where budgets are tight, but we operate in a competitive marketplace where expectation of the user experience are high. Most visitors have broadband, are experienced digital natives and we're competing with everyone from the world's largest media conglomerates to individual bloggers for their eyeballs and ultimately advertising revenue. To minimise budgets and maximise quality of user experience we are constantly striving to improve our technical infrastructure to punch above our weight.

When URLs go bad

30 November 2007, 22:16

We all know what makes a good URL. Its got to be hackable, meaningful, short, and most importantly its got to never, ever, change. But what happens when people get it wrong? <voice type="tvhost">Join me in a journey around the world of bad URLs...

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4dc9d2ba-9f2e-11dc-8031-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

CMS? Why do I care that a page is generated from a CMS? Does that identifier really need to be 36 characters long? Are the FT expecting to generate 36^36 (or more?) articles/pages in its lifetime? Just six characters (6^36 = 2.1bn) would probably cover it. You could push the boat out, go wild, and do seven (7^36 = 78.3bn).

bbc.co.uk 2.0: Why it isn't happening and shouldn't happen

21 September 2007, 16:30

Bit of background: I've recently quit the BBC after 3 years in the New Media dept (now called Future Media & Technology), and now work for Google. This is all my personal point of view.

Due to the unique way the BBC is funded it is rapidly becoming obsolete in the brave new world of the friction-free innovation that Web 2.0 affords. They are hanging in there, and respect for doing so, but for how long will the corporations online efforts be able to continue to do so?

The BBC's royal charter allows the BBC to exist, and was granted in 1927. It's been revised and re-granted every 10 years and says that the BBC "public purposes" are as follows:

itv.com - what are they doing?

01 September 2007, 14:41

I went to itv.com the other day, not quite sure why, but I did. The first promo image was about Wayne Rooney's injury, which I was interested in so decided to give it a click...

That took me to the sport site (itv.com/Sport - capital letters in the URL, and linking to default.html for whatever reason) with same promo, so I click it again...

Flash Video Embedding

03 June 2007, 17:01

Yay! It works...

Cachefly Review

13 March 2007, 17:55

I first heard of Cachefly when they sponsored the diggnation podcast. I was impressed at the download speed of the popular podcast, and did a few tests on their network from various locations around the globe.

For those who don't understand what a CDN is here is a brief overview. Delivery of data on the internet is hindered by distance. The further your data travels to get to the person who requested it the more likely it is to be slowed down (called lag) or lost (called packet loss) by points in various networks that are overloaded or experiencing technical difficulties. There is also an inherent lag in the network caused by the sheer distance its travelling. For instance, its difficult to get the lag between the east coast of America to London below about 70-80 milliseconds. Doesn't sound like much, but it all adds up if your requestor is making hundreds of requests. CDNs get around this my placing the data people may request in many different locations around the globe, and then pointing requestors to the nearest copy. The biggest CDNs claim to run networks on the "edge of the internet", where through partnerships with consumer ISPs they serve content directly from the ISP's own network.

So, I had a few hours spare the other weekend and decided to take them up on their free trial month offer to ease the load on play.tm. Sign up was easy, and the account was setup instantly - FTP, admin tools and the hostname (which is ferrago.cachefly.net). Very impressive. So I got straight on to FTPing up the files.

So, I bought a MacBook

07 February 2007, 22:57

The other month my dodgy old Dell laptop (purchased for £250 many years ago) was feeling the pain, with numerous physical and performance problems. It served me very well especially considering it was only had a 1.2Ghz chip and 256mb RAM, plus the harsh environments it was subjected to - ranging from rubbish Thai power supplies, an Asahi-fuelled tour of Japan, BarCamps, trains, planes and several datacentre floors. In it's favour was that it was very small and I didn't care much about it getting scratched or broken, on the downside was the shockingly poor battery life and the annoying sticky-outty wifi card that had to be installed.

It was time for it to go as it simply didn't cut it anymore.

My mate Luke and I trundled off to the Apple store to have a look at what was on offer and walked out with a couple of the £749 white Macbooks (minus 6% BBC discount).

SVG thoughts

12 January 2007, 12:33

Is it me or is the development of SVG features in browsers painfully slow? Whilst Flash continues to seemingly take over the world delivering insane amounts of content for YouTube, MySpace etc, SVG is little more than a tech demo with people going nuts over a <filter> tag being put into Gecko 1.9 alpha releases.

Separation of Content, Design and Behaviour - when it goes bad

12 January 2007, 12:19

So, you know the deal - anything a client side developer (HTML monkey, Javascript hacker, CSS stylista... whatever you call yourself) produces should be divvied up into separate technology specific files - with the only references between those files being the includes, and the DOM references.

The benefits of this approach arn't immediately obvious but the learning curve is small (we all use these technologies most days if your in the biz - its just structuring your work differently) so the only change you need to make is a cultural one. Once your done though - you can start separating your workforce into more focused disciplines, allowing specialisation to improve the quality of your overall product. Not to mention that when a marketing bod/boss/designer asks for a change you should only have to fiddle with one bit of code - coding nirvana.

This technique (or techniques, depending on how you look at it) is covered very well in these A List Apart articles:

BarCamp London 2006

03 September 2006, 12:37

Went to this the other day. Lots of fun. Checkout the coverage.

MetaWeather Beta Launch

26 February 2006, 18:12

My blog has cooled down a bit recently (as if it was 'hot' beforehand), as I've spent most of my spare time moving house and getting MetaWeather going.

The concept is pretty simple. It's a weather data aggregator, that goes out and acquires weather information from sources (primarily XML, or all XML, depending on how you look at it - more later) and then calculates the average weather.

Seemed nice and simple on the face of it, and it was to a degree (weather pun intended), however were are some complexities I encountered...

Common RSS Mistakes

10 December 2005, 17:36

The ubiquitous syndication format RSS is based on the XML file format, and as such has some strict rules that need to be followed to maximise its usability, to stick to guidelines, and even just make it work. Here are some common mistakes...

MIME type
MIME types are rarely an issue that a web developer comes up against, as it's often handled without user intervention by the web server software. Your standard Apache or IIS config will include mapping for common file formats to their MIME types. In Apache this will usually be done through the mime.types file and in IIS it's covered in the IIS Manager properties, or the properties of an individual website.

However, RSS is often served...

The Tim Westwood Drinking Game

26 November 2005, 10:31

Tim Westwood presents the rap show on Radio 1 on Friday and Saturday nights. Alledgedly the inspiration behind Ali G, he is a white guy immersed in the predominately black culture of hip-hop and rap music.

Tim's catchphrases, and his show's timeslot make it perfect for a drinking game.

Rules of the game are simple. Take a drink (shot or swig) whenever...

DIVless rethinking

18 November 2005, 23:22

This is a follow up to the post made previously: Why a divless page

When I first developed the HTML for this blog, I used no DIVs. Several things have happened to make me reassess this approach since I wrote the HTML and blog entry.

The first was in the development of the HTML, when I realised that I couldn’t put H tags in the DT. This was a big problem as most pages (particularly the homepage) contain a lot of text, and breaking this up into navigable areas for screenreaders should have been my aim. In the end I ignored the problem, and left it as it was. I did have a fairly decent H structure anyhow, although not for the bulk of the interesting bits of the page.

Absolute positioning ain't that bad

18 November 2005, 20:23

Absolute positioning has a bad rep from its misuse in the early days of CSS, and misunderstanding of how it works

The most common CSS misinterpretation I’ve seen is the fallacy that everything absolutely positioned must be positioned relative to the body of the page - 0,0. The fact of the matter is that an element is absolutely positioned relative to the nearest position:relative parent. I guess people came to this misunderstanding through not having any relatively positioned elements on the page, and then attempting to use absolute positioning. For the record, I’ve made this mistake. If you look hard enough you’ll find it still on the net - although the page does work well, just with huge pixel values!

So therefore cleverly laid out elements positioned relatively (I'm thinking the general page layout), and provide a structure for the absolutely positioned elements below it to hang off.

Gaming: Persistent scoring, and fair team play

08 November 2005, 21:15

Article first appeared here, and was edited by Luke

Very rarely do I get addicted to a game, but Battlefield 2 has me well and truly hooked. Team Fortress Classic, Counter-Strike (and CS: Source), Simcity, Half-Life 2 have all had me in their clutches, but this addiction is worse, much worse - its based around an MMORPG levelling and rewards system. Now I know what the guys who call Everquest 'Evercrack' are trying to weans themselves off.

Battlefield 2 requires you to register with EA, and in return they track your progress in ranked online games awarding you ranks for general achievement, and medals for training on specific tasks. All this behind the scenes technology is run by Gamespy, who interestingly offer up all of your stats in an XML format. A variety of tools (such as BF2S.com) are available online to consume these stats outside the game. Very cool indeed... the techie in me loves this. Here is my woeful combat effort. This competitive, rolling, MMORPG-like centralised ranking and scoring system has its drawbacks though, especially in a game that requires teamplay to master individual maps.

What Flickr Needs

22 October 2005, 13:46

Flickr is without doubt the best 'web application' I've used. The point on which a web site becomes a web application is a little unclear to me at the moment, but we'll stick with application for the time being. It seems the gratuitous use of AJAX tech is the main driver for HTML based tools to be called web applications these days - Web 2.0 people tell me :-)

So what is so great about it huh? Well the main (and somewhat fluffy) overall reason its so good is the style is purveys. You know these guys are a class act - every part of the design and interface is almost (more on that later!) perfectly crafted. Its also rather fast, particularly on a broadband connection. I dread to think of the infrastructure these guys have in place to handle the crazy numbers of images and transactions they are dealing with. All this is for a the measly fee of $25 (£14 odd) a YEAR for the crazy 2Gb upload a month.

However all is not perfect in the land of Flickr. Regular 'Flickr Massages' occur, where the site is taken offline, presumably for database maintenance. Since being bought by the behemoth Yahoo Inc things have got better but they still happen too often. Even with some of the finest practical MySQL minds around they can't keep the app going 24/7. There are also features missing that users have been clamouring for....

Code ordering & CSS - the hidden benefits

17 October 2005, 19:31

Marking up your page in the most accessible way (with the navigation last) is great for screenreaders. If you didn’t it would have it read through the navigation of a site every time a page loads – very annoying. The workaround is to place a ‘Skip Navigation’ link (usually hidden by a CSS) to an anchor just above the content, allowing screenreader users to ‘click’ that and get to the meat of the page. But that’s another story.

Strategic code ordering has benefits other than providing a better experience for screenreaders. Sites with advertising on can place the call to the banner higher up the page to ensure it loads quicker and is therefore displayed on the screen longer. This undoubtedly increases CTR. One problem I’ve seen, that looks pretty common, is that in Firefox a CSS positioned (and even sometimes traditionally table positioned) piece of flash (like a banner) will flicker when the rest of the content is loaded. Gamespot.com (with a lot of flashy flash adverts on it) does this all the time.

Related to this advertising point is other external code that a page may call. Cleverly positioned calls to content produced by javascript can ensure that a page loads first, then if there is a problem or delay in the JS loading the user can still see the meat of the page. A good example of this is this page! The javascript call to Flickr.com comes after the content of the page. When Flickr has issues generating the content in the JS file (it happens all too often despite having the mighty Yahoo behind them) the user can still see the blog (this text!) on the left.

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about

Jason is a web developer living in London. My clients include numerous startups, Google, YouTube, FHM, & the BBC.

links

me

• Flickr (photos)
• Facebook (social network)
• del.icio.us (bookmarks)
• last.fm (music)
• Linked In (business social network)
• Twitter (microblogging)
• Google Reader (bookmarks)

work

• Ferrago Ltd (company)
• play.tm (company's product)
• MetaWeather (company's product)

colophon

• Built in ASP.net using a Mac and TextMate
• Hosted on Windows, with IIS & MySQL
• Activity feed by FriendFeed
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