Persistant Location Updates From iPhone to Fire Eagle

Location Based Services are hot. They add an extra layer of usefulness on top of the web sites and products we’re already using. The trick is keeping your location updated in the cloud as frequently, comfortably, and securely as possible. Fire Eagle fulfills the security requirement — brokering your whereabouts only to parties you’ve authorized. … Read more

Google Voice Dialer

Last year I posted a PHP script that lets you dial phone numbers using Grand Central. I updated it this morning to support Google Voice as well. The syntax is the same You can grab the code from my google-voice-dialer project on GitHub.

YUI App Theme

Tonight I pushed a new project to GitHub called yui-app-theme. It’s a generic, skinnable layout designed for web applications — particularly admin areas — built using YUI Grids. In other words, it’s a starting point. Usually when doing freelance work for clients, unless you’re building on top of an existing CMS like WordPress or MiaCMS, … Read more

PHP Wrapper for Yahoo! GeoPlanet

Earlier this month I wrote a quick PHP wrapper for Yahoo!’s GeoPlanet API. It’s a super useful service for querying geographical information about nearly any place on earth — addresses, landmarks, colloquial locations, etc. Or, as the official description says GeoPlanet helps bridge the gap between the real and virtual worlds by providing an open, … Read more

Serving Static Content on Amazon S3 with s3up

I’ve written twice about using Amazon S3 to host your website’s static content. It’s a great solution for small websites without access to a real content delivery network. And now that Amazon has launched CloudFront on top of S3, it’s even better. But there are still ways we can improve the performance. The trick is … Read more

Download All of Your Flickr Photos and Sets

iLife ’09 was released today. And with it came a much improved version of iPhoto with facial recognition, geotagging, and Flickr and Facebook support. With so many new ways to slice and dice my photos, I wanted to start over with a clean slate and get everything organized in iPhoto before re-exporting my library back … Read more

Sync Your Adium Chat Logs With Dropbox

Here’s a handy trick that will let you sync your Adium chat logs across multiple Macs using Dropbox. From a command line, cd into your Dropbox folder and then That will create a symlink from your Dropbox folder to your Adium log directory. When syncing, Dropbox will follow this link and process your chat logs … Read more

Use Rapache to Manage Virtual Hosts on Ubuntu

For people who like the idea of VirtualHostX but want to setup virtual hosts on Ubuntu rather than Mac OS X, Stefano Forenza has created the Rapache project. Like VHX, Rapache is a GUI to manage Apache virtual hosts. With just a few clicks you can create a new host and the appropriate DNS settings … Read more

Forward Your Growl Notifications to Twitter

I’ve got three Macs that I regularly use. One at work, a laptop for personal use, and a Mac Mini connected to our living room TV. I use Growl on all three — it’s so ingrained in my workflow (IM notifications, new emails, background tasks) that I often forget it’s not a part of OS … Read more

Amazon S3 Improvements in PHP-AWS

Two and a half years ago I began working with Amazon Web Services — first with S3 and then SQS and EC2. The code was eventually cleaned up and released as an open source project called PHP-AWS. Since then, it has remained relatively unchanged. Just bug fixes and the occasional support for new AWS features … Read more