This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one of the transitions for the new year. I've started it This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004
When I was a kid one of my favorite playthings was my Erector set, a boxful of metal parts and fasteners for constructing machines, bridges, towers, and other goodies. (Do they still make Erector sets? Yeah, sorta.) With an Erector set a kid could be a civil or mechanical engineer. Now Yahoo has made it possible for an aging kid like me to be a software engineer.
Yahoo Pipes (here it is) starts with a "module" for fetching one or more RSS or Atom feeds (a technology for milking the good stuff out of a website and re-using it for something else: geeks call that "syndication".) You can also fetch Flickr photos, Yahoo local business info, and stuff out of Google's vast database. You connect your module with a "pipe" to more modules for filtering, sorting, and even entering data like zip codes. You can check every step of the process to see if it works. Finally, you can name it, save it, and publish it so that others can use it. Yahoo Pipes is still in beta stage, meaning that bugs and glitches need to be worked out.
So, all this piping (a day and a half!) and what does your Coffeeblogger have to show for it? Aha! Some very cool stuff, he thinks. For example, this coffee-themed pipe called "Cafes on Flickr by Zip Code." Enter your zip code (maybe latitude and longitude will work: I haven't tried that yet. For you folks in Rio de Janeiro, a zip code is a US postal code.) You will be rewarded with up to 80 Flickr photos taken at nearby cafes. If you have no zip code, try mine: 94707. By the way, I tried the zip code for the town where I grew up. The results: zip, zilch, nada: eppes gornisht. They had no cafes back then, and none now. At least, none worth photographing for Flickr and geotagging. (What's that?
This
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But wait! There's more! Podcasts. A whole bunch of podcasts. From five different syndication feeds, but not, I repeat not, from iTunes. New ones coming in all the time. At least, they're supposed to. And the podcasts are all about coffee. At least they're supposed to be. Fill up your iPod with these podcasts, stick your earbuds in your ears, hoist a cup of Mocha Sanani, and you'll learn everything you ever wanted to know about coffee, and much, much, much, much more.
Every page now has Seesmic/Disqus video commenting. Scroll to the bottom to see or post video comments. There are also Haloscan comments at the end of each separate blogpost article. To read a text-only version of Jonathan's Coffeeblog on your iPhone or other mobile phone, click here. Or to see the graphics with less text, click here.
