I looked through the domains I have bought the last year and I have too many. The thing is that domain names go quickly so if you find one and don’t buy it there and then it’ll be gone soon after. Can’t say that it’s always like that but I’ve experienced it myself.

So what I’ve done is I’ve had an idea of a project and before even started writing any code I’ve scouted for a nice domain I could use for the application. And then when I’ve found a domain even half good I’ve bought it.

So now I have a long list of domains I don’t use and don’t want. So this year most of them will go back on the market, I will probably just let them expire.

The most recent one expired is pepperish.net that expired 2008-02-18. If you want it, take it.

I still think pepperish is a nice domain name though, that’s why I’m keeping pepperish.com

Yesterday I came back after a few days in my old hometown Milan. Even though I had brought a laptop I didn’t actually use it, much. It’s good to unplug every now and then.

As you probably know CES took place recently. As it is the the world’s largest annual trade show for consumer electronics, all media that reports about technology sends someone over to cover it. That must be really hard work playing with the latest gadgets and toys for several days in a row!

I bought What Mobile today which had a round-up from CES. What? What mobile. Having read a lot about the event online there wasn’t many things in there I hadn’t seen or read about already. But this was new though, the article starts like this:

“It’s that time of the year again when manufacturers show off the hottest new products they’ve been secretly working on for months.”

Months? Like proper months? Noooo, really?!!

I just thought that was hilarious. And if I think it is, it probably isn’t. But there you go. If it had said “years” that would actually have been equally funny too. Crazy.

It’s Saturday morning, the sun i shining and I have time to work on my projects. This is the plan:

• Fix the timezones on Whenda. Now the service is rather useless unless you live in UTC+0
• Investigate why it said “Newer posts” instead of “Older posts” for the link to older posts at the bottom of this page. I must have done something really silly in the early hours. Nicely spotted Perly, thanks! I might also spend some time on the template, I’m not completely happy with it.
• Write something more interesting in this site’s about page.
• Implement some new features, clean up and release a pre-alpha-live-single-user-prototype of FavoRead which is my bookmark engine. The domain is currently parked so I’d like to put something there because it takes time for search engines to pick it up.

Tonight I’m going out for dinner with friends so I think it’ll be a bit tight timewise and tomorrow I have other plans. So for this to work I’ll have to stay focused, which may turn out difficult. I’ve gathered some interesting links this week that I’d like to check out, didn’t have time to read when I found them. Let’s see what happens, I posted this as a little motivator and to let you know what’s going on. Laters.

Since I wrote this yesterday I’ve learned that the means for doing exists and is spelled XMPP. I first heard of Jabber years ago but didn’t start using it because none of my friends did so there wasn’t much point. Now it feels like I’ve missed out on something really cool and interesting

Operation Catch-Up-On-XMPP starts now!

So far I’ve read skimmed the specs for the extensions Publish-Subscribe and Personal Eventing via Pubsub and they seem very promising to what I want to do.

It’s funny, yesterday I was thinking of why push techniques aren’t used to communicate between blogs. Then today I read this.
My idea was that blogs could have a list “friends” who are allowed to ping them when they have updated content. Just like blogs now ping weblogs.com for example, using XMP-RPC or REST. It would create small mini-Technoratis all over the blogosphere. So instead of a blog having only its own content it could also have a “buzzing in my network” page. What’s nice with the RWW article is that it reminded me of the Jabber protocol. That could be even more interesting to use in a one-to-many push call. So thinking a step further, why not use(extend?) the protocol to enable features similar to those in site-bound social networks like MySpace, Bebo, Facebook and Twitter. Like display online status, what I’m doing right now and so on.
Every blogger is master of his/her own blog, so there wouldn’t be any privacy issues, just only publish what you are comfortable with. There are millions of blogs, why not network them blog-to-blog?

Update: Through a comment on RWW I found out that this already exists someone is working on something similar.

Update2: The ISS thing seems more focused on messaging. That is not what I’m talking about here even though communication of course would happen through some kind of messages. Tell me if my idea isn’t clear or what you think of it if it is for that matter.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just have a list of upcoming events, and a display of how long time is left until they happen? That’s what I thought so I created a little thing that does just that. I call it Whenda.

In the spirit of release early, release often I put Whenda online as soon as I had the first feature ready so you won’t get overwhelmed by the current list of features. But don’t worry, there’s more to come!

I hope you find it useful!

I just made a new website called Topicly. The idea is to build a community around a forum where people can discuss anything. I’ve created different example categories but expect those to evolve to whatever people like to discuss. At the moment it looks kind-of spooky since there’s almost no members and no posts. Getting members for a new forum is a real challenge, so please help me out and sign up! I promise to reply to whatever posts you post.

Do you have experience in recruiting members to websites, any tips?

One of the projects I’m working on at the moment is a text editor written in Java. I’ve thought about making my own editor for a long time and since a while it’s one of the things I dabble with in my spare time. There are a few good text editors written in Java out there already like Jext and JEdit, so does the world need yet another one? Well, probably not, but I like the challenge and figured it could be a fun exercise so I’m having a go at it. That’s not saying I don’t take it seriously.

So, what’s the current status? I started with the actual text editing component(the part that response to user input and outputs text in an area displayed on screen), which is the most important part of the editor. If that’s no good the whole editor will stink and no one will ever want to use it, including me. I could have chosen to use an existing component for this part but again, curiosity led me to start from scratch, hopefully it will be at least as good as existing solutions. Time will tell how (un)wise that decision was. At the moment the component works but lacks quite a few features. Currently I’ve paused almost all work on that and focus now is on the bigger picture, more on that and other details soon.