in Projects, Programming, Technology

Other Toy Projects

3. QuickPetition (1999) – I was fascinated by the viral spread of “sign this petition” emails and wanted to collect all those signatures on a Web site (rather than in the email). This never made it to production because I was concerned about a couple competitors.

4. NanuMail (2000) – I experimented with email receipts (and more interestingly forwards) using embedded invisible images. Around that time, Zaplet got a lot of hype.

5. BuzzPort (2000) – To learn XML, I scraped a giant list of cyber cafes (something I was constantly in search of when we first moved to London).

6. Messenger Companion (2000) – I hacked the Windows API to pass instant messages to a VB app. The VB app implemented a Jive translator, stock lookups, and allowed friends to control my Mindstorms robot remotely.

7. Flight Computer (2001) – I wrote a flight meta search engine to scrape EasyJet and Ryan Air web sites to help us plan when to go to Europe (based on the cheapest flights).

8. FileMetrics (2001) – Monitor Gneutella searches to generate a “Top 10” search terms site. Very scary results.

9. ButtonBuilder 2002 – Experimented with the .NET graphics APIs to dynamically build graphics for Web apps.

10. PodBlog (2002) – Investigated collaborative blogging.

9. KBlog + FolderFlex (2002) – an off-line blog publishing system that stored posts in a local database and generated HTML to be published via FTP.

10. AudBlog Aggregator (2003) -This was an experment to generate a play list from the most recently posted audblogs. Why? Because otherwise, you have to find a blog and listen to it. There is no way to take a cross section of recent postings and listen to them continuously. The result was kind of like listening to an answering machine, where each recording was from a different person in a different corner of the internet.

11. Swingster – scraping mashup against Friendster to find friends in swing states for the 2004 elections.

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