All posts by Dona

What if my House Used Twitter’s API?

Musings, , ,

Do you know what an API is? Me neither, but it has something to do with the inner workings of web applications like Twitter, LibraryThing, GoodReads, Facebook etc. When web application developers let their API’s into the wild strange things can happen.

For instance. I’m on Twitter. I’m also on GoodReads. I clicked a button on GoodReads that allowed my activity there to be let loose on Twitter. So when I add a book to my “shelf” on GoodReads it goes out as a twitter. That’s fine. Except that when I just change my status of what page I’m on in a particular book on GoodReads it also sends that to Twitter. So yesterday, for much of the day my twitter status said:

So, that was a little embarrassing. I checked GoodReads and there is no obvious way to turn this off. I don’t know whose API is at fault here, so I’m avoiding GoodReads until I figure this out.

This got me to thinking.

What if other things were to tap into Twitter. Like my house for instance. What if everything I did were to be broadcast to Twitter. It might look like this. (And yes, the House made a few typos).

Storypeople

Entertainment, , ,

I don’t know if you have stores that sell Storypeople books and artwork in your area, but we have As Kindred Spirits (aka “Dona’s Favorite Store”).

Storypeople is a company / studio that creates books, cards, furniture, prints etc. based on the work of Brian Andreas. I got to meet Andreas, just after his second book, Still Mostly True, was published. He is a down-to-earth person with a lot of stories to tell. His books are made up of truisms and illustrated with whimsical and usually primitive (think 5-year olds’ drawings) artwork. Check them out — I think you’ll like them. You can download a free e-book to see what the other books are like — but honestly — I don’t like the e-book as much as I did the first three (the only ones I own). Their site is a hoot — if somewhat difficult to navigate.