Addictomatic is a search aggregator, a way to see results from lots of sources all at once. Want to see the latest on a presidential candidate? Or the newest iPhone rumors? Or perhaps an ego search? Addictomatic has you covered.

This isn’t a traditional search engine. It’s not designed to help you find answers about some error message or the cheapest flight to Aruba. Addictomatic helps you see what’s going on now on a given topic.

We’ve implemented a number of pretty nice features on the site. One of these is the ability to drag and drop the results boxes around to re-order them.

You can also click the little X to remove a source from a page, or you can drop down the Available Sources panel to remove and add sources.

When you make changes to the results page, either re-ordering the sources and/or removing the ones you don’t want to include, you get a nice bookmarkable URL as a result. That URL will bring you right back to your search, with the layout you specified.

In addition to being able to create new searches, Addictomatic also offers a collection of NewsFix pages that gather the top sources on a variety of topics. I’m mainly visiting the Election 2008 and Baseball pages of late, though I also enjoy hitting Thought 2.0 and Web 2.0 with some regularity.

Building this service has been an interesting experience on a number of fronts, but one of the most exciting has been discovering that it’s something I want to use myself. I liked the idea when Dave first explained it to me, but I wasn’t sure how much I’d use it. As it turns out, I now use it quite a bit - it’s sticky. Much like Twitter, it’s value is hard to explain but readily apparent once you use it for a while.

The design of the site was done by well known designer Bryan Bell, who did a terrific job. We received the Photoshop files from him and created the front-end XHTML+CSS+JavaScript and all of the back-end systems.

Many thanks to Dave for letting us help him bring Addictomatic to the web.

UPDATE: Dave’s blog post is here and Bryan’s is here.

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Folks, this is a real game changer.

Scalability has been the final frontier for web applications for far too long. For web developers like myself, the “building the app” part of offering a web service is the easy part. The challenge comes when you try to scale it.

FeedLounge is a great example. By all accounts, we built a fantastic web feed reading experience. Unfortunately, we didn’t succeed in scaling it. Sure, we learned a lot and I can think of a couple dozen things we would do differently if we could go back and do it again, but scaling would still be our number one issue.

Google App Engine changes that.

Sure, Big Table isn’t a drop-in replacement for a relational database like MySQL or PostgreSQL, but writing GQL isn’t any harder than writing SQL. Basically, you need to re-think how you do the data layer of your application, and the reward is scalability that would have cost you months to develop and significant hardware costs.

GAE not only offers a scalability solution, it also revolutionizes deployment. When you roll your own scalable infrastructure, you get rewarded with a variety of deployment challenges. You need to update code on a variety of machines, upgrade database schemas, etc.

At Crowd Favorite we are web developers, not system admins. We understand how to build something so it can scale, but actually doing the server config and managing them on a day to day basis is not our core competency. This service is designed for us.

The Campfire was a very well produced event. The speakers, as you can see in the video, did a very good job. Questions I had during the presentation were often answered within the next couple of minutes - always the sign of a well designed talk.

As an attendee of the Campfire, I got a chance to ask the GAE team some questions after the presentation. Most of the questions that I was asking had very good answers, and all had very reasonable answers.

A couple of things I asked about:

How do you bring the data from your live application back into your local development environment?

There isn’t a data export/import built-in yet, though it seems like something they’d be open to building. There is a feature to create an XML representation of any data object, so I expect a library that handles the production data export/local development data import situation to be one of the first tools that is built and well supported by the development community.

Is there a CRON equivalent?

No. The solution that seems best to me is to use another machine with CRON to send HTTP requests to your GAE application. If you want a pure “cloud” solution, you could use Amazon EC2 for this.

How long can a request live?

There is a 10 second execution limit for all requests. This includes requesting and submitting data to external services. If it takes 8.5 seconds to download a tweet stream from Twitter, you’ve only got 1.5 seconds to do something with it. This is very reasonable. In thinking through the things I normally do in a long executing script, they could pretty much all b broken out into more atomic events that could each be done in individual requests.

How much will it cost if you go over your quotas?

There wasn’t an answer for this yet, and it’s definitely something you’d want to know when you’re trying to evaluate GAE vs. alternative solutions. I’ll say this though, whatever they decide to charge, it will likely be a fraction of the hardware, bandwidth and human costs of scaling to that degree on your own. I believe they will take this on a case by case basis - they are building a platform they want people to use, and I think it’s in their best interest to do what they can to support successful apps built on GAE.

What the GAE team has already done in just ~2 years is very impressive, but they’ll also be the first ones to tell you they have a long list of things they’d like to improve and enhance. I’ve got no doubt they are going to do just that.

I’d obviously like to see PHP as a supported language as soon as possible, but I don’t know when it’s realistic to expect to see support for new languages. Balancing the building of platform features against support for other languages is a tough choice.

While I’m not going to run out and rewrite all of my PHP products in Python, I’ve already mentally re-architected a component of MyFreeBusy that we probably will rewrite in Python so that it can leverage GAE to scale.

Another idea that I’ve had for a service that has been backburnered for a while is probably going to be written in Python instead of PHP so that we can roll it out on GAE.

Once we complete these internal projects, I’m sure we’ll start building GAE apps for clients as well. I’m excited about the possibilities that this opens for us.

Besides my own intended usage, the general innovation that this is going to allow is going to be fascinating. ISVs have long been able to create great software that can be downloaded and installed on a per-user or small team basis, but Google App Engine promises to let us bring that craftsmanship to internet scale.

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We are doing all sorts of cool stuff with WordPress, and we’re going to be building a lot of interesting web applications and services internally this year as well. We have fun, have a great new office in a great location, and are lots of fun to work with. Join us.

Get in touch if you’re interested.

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VodPod is a pretty fun service. You can collect embeddable videos from a variety of sources, group them together into a pod , then put that pod on your blog or web site. It’s a pretty nice way to share videos. I created one from all of my golf swing videos.

Note: the VodPod gallery and sidebar widgets require Prototype and might not work as expected if you are using other JavaScript libraries.

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We had a number of things scheduled:

• DSL installation
• Bottled water service installation
• Desk chair delivery (the guys are on conference room chairs at the moment)

Naturally we ran into a couple of hiccups. The DSL installation happened, but the technician did not bring the modems with him. As it turns out UPS came by to deliver the modems at 8:30am, but we didn’t arrive at the office until 9am. The note in the UPS comments was: “Office closed for the day”. We’ve put up a temporary sign with the office hours on the door now, hopefully UPS will deliver tomorrow while we’re there and we can get proper internet access up and running.¹

The bottled water service, thankfully, went without a hitch. We are using the same service as the Hive because we liked the water there.

The desk chairs did not show and a call to Staples got to the bottom of the issue. I’d ordered the chairs a while ago, and asked for delivery on the 21st. Apparently they got re-routed to a local store, but will now be couriered over tomorrow. Pretty top notch service from the phone rep there. She let me get off the phone, tracked down the chairs, and called me back with the resolution.

The next issue was the heat, or rather the lack thereof. The heater hadn’t worked since we started banging around last Friday, and our investigation of the furnace and the error light didn’t net a solution. For the first part of the day we were in hats and down jackets. With single digit temperatures outside and single pane windows, it was pretty brutal.

To celebrate the opening of the new office I gave the guys some Crowd Favorite fleece vests and gift certificates to a local coffee shop. Given the heating issues, they ended up being rather appropriate.

When we left to walk to lunch, the combination of us freezing in the office all morning and the frigid temperatures outside prompted us to hit the Wazee Supper Club instead of continuing one block to Dixon’s. We waiting for a minute and a half at the light to cross the street, then couldn’t take it anymore and decided to get inside.

Luckily an HVAC guy was able to come out around 2:15pm and fixed the problem - a filter that was way overdue for a change. *sigh* In our defense, the furnace is about 15 feet above the floor and we hadn’t looked at the proper side of it (as the filter panel blends in nicely with the duct work).

We received out first solicitor in the afternoon, I guess we need a “no solicitors” sign on the door as well.

We’ve got janitorial companies coming out tomorrow and Wednesday to give formal bids, and both of them support recycling. I’ve set up each desk with a paper recycling bin and the kitchen area has both a can/bottle recycling bin and the normal trash can for the office.

I think we’ll still be moving in for a little while. Among other things, we need shelves for the closet area to organize the supplies, chairs for the small meeting table I picked up tonight on Craig’s List, and whiteboards for the conference room.

It’s been fun so far, and it’s definitely an interesting learning experience.

1. We’re all sharing my EVDO modem over WiFi right now. [back]

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This is how it looks empty, I imagine it’ll look quite different after we start moving in this weekend. Lots of gear and furniture to set up. We’ve got some work to do before it will feel like home, but it’s great to have somewhere to really set up shop.

I’m simultaneously thrilled that the office search¹ is over, and really pleased with the space we got. The location is excellent, in the LoDo area of downtown Denver with easy access to public transportation, food, a jogging/biking trail that runs along Cherry Creek, the Rockies and the Nuggets/Avalanche, and a block from the 16th street mall (where there is a free shuttle that runs up and down the length of downtown).

The space is bigger than we are at the moment, so we’re excited and privileged to be sharing it with some great friends.

My personal thanks to Ryan Howell of Hedberg | Howell, Krystal Hoeft at Wells Fargo and Chris Rebich of the O’Conner Group (and my volleyball team) for your invaluable help to me during this process.

1. A process which started several long months ago. [back]

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Now if you visit kingdesign.net the Crowd Favorite site design is shown; with a small banner noting the rename being shown at the top of the page on the first page load:

Future visits to kingdesign.net are redirected to crowdfavorite.com, and the banner is not displayed again.¹ In another 6 months, I’ll probably get rid of this step and just give 301 redirects to everyone - just as I’ve been doing for the search engines already.

Previously, when someone came to kingdesign.net I would show them the old King Design web site design with a big banner at the top letting them know that we were now Crowd Favorite:

I left this in place for 7 months in the hopes that when people arrived at the King Design web site, it would not be a jarring experience like a straight redirect would be. However, we do need to complete the transition eventually, and so I made the next set of changes today (as planned).

1. This requires cookies be enabled. [back]

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Dougal has made numerous contributions to the WordPress community, from core code contributions and plugins to Ping-O-Matic. Like me, he’s got years of experience working with WordPress. Since much of what we do at Crowd Favorite is custom WordPress build and functionality work, this experience is a perfect fit for us.

However Dougal also has a broad depth of experience in general web technologies and web application development. He’ll be helping out on Crowd Favorite products as well as the custom WordPress work we do.

I’m very excited that Dougal has agreed to come on board, and look forward to working with him again.

Here is a brief bio on Dougal (also on the Crowd Favorite About page now):

Over the past 25 years, Dougal has molded his fascination with computers from a hobby into a career. Dougal joined the WordPress effort early on and developed much of the initial XML-RPC code and the Ping-O-Matic service, and now enjoys “Developer Emeritus” status. From the early ’80s to present day, he has worked on customized inventory database systems, and developed web applications for trucking companies, the hospitality industry, and a startup with a web-based video platform, among other things.

Along the way, he has contributed his efforts to several open source projects, the most well-known of which are WordPress and POV-Ray. Dougal comes to Crowd Favorite with a strong background in developing web applications in Perl and PHP, and with with an eye towards web standards and the emerging semantic web.

Dougal’s offline time is spent with his wife, three children, a dog, and a cat. He hasn’t taught the dog and cat how to set up their own blogs yet, but he’s working on it.

UPDATE: read Dougal’s post as well.

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The designers at ACS did the majority of the new design work¹, then we helped integrate and implement various features and functions in WordPress and made sure all the Ts were crossed and the Is dotted.

On Friday, we brought the new design and features live on CrunchGear.com. Congratulations to the TechCrunch and CrunchGear teams on the successful launch of the new design, and thank you for giving us the opportunity to help make this a success.

Have a web development or WordPress project you need development, design or consulting help with? Get in touch with Crowd Favorite.

1. Redesigns on high traffic sites are never universally well-received, and this is no different. The comments on new CrunchGear design are somewhat mixed, but I like the new design and enjoyed working on the implementation. [back]

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Basically it will suggest all sorts of Yahoo! content to augment what you’re writing about. It can give you little finance widgets for companies:

Maps and travel information for locations:

And even Flickr photos¹:

You get to choose to enable or disable each of the detected shortcuts, and you get to choose how to display them. Some can be embedded badges while others have little pop-up effects when you mouse over them.

This is a beta release, which means there are a few little quirks that may pop up from time to time. I’m sure there will be a lot of great user feedback (and bug reports) coming in as folks start using this to make 1.0 even better.

More info and coverage:

• Shortcuts for your WordPress blog - Yodel Anacdotal
• Boost Your Blog with Yahoo! Shortcuts for WordPress (Beta)
• Yahoo! Shortcuts home page
• Yahoo! Shortcuts plugin page on WordPress.org

It’s also worth noting that the plugin code is all Open Source under a modified BSD license. It’s almost a no-brainer for a company like Yahoo! to make this decision nowdays, which is pretty fantastic.

We had a number of interesting challenges during the creation of the plugin. It was great to see the Yahoo! team not want to make compromises from the user experience they wanted; it was up to us to make sure they didn’t have to.

• Interacting with the WordPress rich text editor is always interesting. We needed to allow people to move the Yahoo! content (maps, photos, charts) around and align them left and right. To accomplish this we had to use placeholder images for the content in some cases. Then we translate the placeholder image back to the proper content to display it.
• As anyone who builds an API knows, no matter how much you plan ahead your first customer will always ask for a feature you overlooked or thought you could postpone until later. As the first customers of the Yahoo! Shortcuts API we found that while almost everything we needed was provided to us, there were a few things that we needed to tweak in order to accomplish what we needed on the WordPress side. Luckily we had access to the API engineers at Yahoo! to give us the additional functionality we needed.
• Working with a large company without having our project manager in place (yet). I verified that project management is not my strongest suit - thankfully we’ve remedied that situation. Back to focusing on development for me (yay!).

This project also afforded me a chance to meet Jeremy Zawodny. Jeremy is one of the first bloggers I started following in (I think) late 2002 and it was great timing to be able to meet up with him at Defrag a little over a month ago. We shot a little screencast video walk-though of the Yahoo! Shortcuts plugin².

Full Disclosure: Yahoo! was our customer to create this plugin. That said, they did not provide any restrictions about what I could say here, ask me to follow any guidelines or even ask me to highlight any specific features.

1. Those with proper Creative Commons licenses. [back]
2. Because who doesn’t love to watch two guys in green sweaters staring at a laptop? You can tell that Jeremy knew there would be footage of us as well as the screencast in the final video - I’ll know next time. [back]

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Being responsive to customers is important, but if you’re a smaller shop it’s more important to try to give them the tools to help themselves. No developer or company will ever be able to answer all of their customers support requests in real time on a one to one basis, but if you work hard to document things and are willing to offer support forums, you’ll find that your customers can help themselves and each other during the times you aren’t available.

I was reminded of this fact the other night. The last couple weeks have been pretty crazy. We’re hiring new people, looking for new office space, and busting tail to make sure we are meeting our client obligations.

So about 9pm, I decided I needed to unplug and went to watch some TV. Sure enough, that’s just when I got the e-mail notification that there was a new post in our forums. Because I was dead tired and didn’t see an easy answer for the question, I decided I’d wait until morning before following up with the customer and trying to help them troubleshoot.

Sure enough, 12 minutes later the customer posted in the forums again - they had found the answer to their question in another thread. The customer has everything working and no response from us was necessary. We:

1. gave them the opportunity to find the answer to their current question
2. might have allowed them to discover something else useful along the way
3. enabled them to continue building the public knowledge base for future customers

It’s amazing what you can learn along the way when you’re looking for something specific. Accidental discoveries are often very valuable.

I’m not saying that you should ignore your customers, or intentionally make them wait for answers. However, you need to allow people to help themselves and each other if you want that to happen.

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As we’ve been growing, communication and project management has become more and more important. In order to continue to grow our development team and be able to take on the great projects we want to work on, we needed someone to help out with the project management (to allow the developers to focus on development). We’re very excited to have Peter join us to do this.

Like all small and growing companies, we all wear multiple hats. I’m very pleased to be taking off the project management hat and handing it over to Peter. Hopefully this will give me some semblance of free time again; time for things I’ve been neglecting over the last few months (like blogging and finishing updating my WordPress plugins for 2.3.x compatibility).

Here is a brief bio on Peter (also on the Crowd Favorite About page now):

Peter has been working with the Web for nearly ten years in a variety of client-facing and team management roles. Peter’s diverse experience includes a wide variety of clients ranging from Fortune 100 companies to professional sports leagues and teams. As a project manager, he greatly values facilitating both client and team communication, managing client expectations, and meeting deliverables within budget and time requirements.

Raised on skis in New Hampshire, Peter is thrilled to return to regular (and frequent!) trips to the mountains.

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This new version has a ton of great features, including:

A new WordPress plugin.

WordPress users can download the new plugin here.

Support for non-WordPress platforms.

This was by far the #1 requested feature, and you can use the ShareThis widget for other blogging platforms or for regular HTML web sites. Go the the Get the Button page and follow the simple steps.

Choose your social web services and easy color configuration.

ShareThis has a simple online configuration tool that allows you to choose which social web services you want to offer links to and allow you to set colors to match you site’s theme.

Sending using AIM, SMS, Facebook and MySpace.

Yes, people use more communication channels than just e-mail.

Stats for publishers.

With tracking features to keep track of the sharing activity on your site, ShareThis will be offering stats for publishers.

Import address books.

You can import your buddy lists to make sharing to AIM, Facebook and MySpace easy.

You can see that lots of these features wouldn’t be available without the great sharing platform being built at ShareThis.com. You can see why it made sense to work with the great folks at ShareThis.

It’s a pretty impressive upgrade, and this is really just the tip of the iceberg for ShareThis. There are a lot of exciting things on the roadmap for publishers (including some advanced customization options) and users, and Crowd Favorite is proud to be a part of it - stay tuned!

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After going through several design revisions, we created an interface primarily using client side JavaScript to allow you to choose the links you want to add to your post. There are two ways to do this, you can step through the terms one by one using “Link” and “Don’t Link” buttons (similar to the way a spell checker works), or you can simply use the list of links on the side and check the boxes for the terms you want to link.

This was started as a WordPress.com project (and has been rolled out on WordPress.com), but is also available as a downloadable plugin¹ for self-hosted/WordPress.org users.

I’m very pleased that Crowd Favorite was able to be involved with this project. It’s wonderful to see Answers.com providing an API into their data to enable this sort of feature, and it’s great that the WordPress community can benefit from it. My thanks to the teams at Answers.com and Automattic, both were great to work with.

UPDATE: There was a typo in the original packaging for this. If you are using version 1.0a, upgrade to 1.0b or rename the “answerlinks” folder to “answerlink”. This only affects version 1.0a.

1. It is available on my WordPress Plugins page and also from wordpress.org. [back]

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