February 04, 2010

Random Collection of Useful Tools

The effort on PersistentFan has led me to seek out various development/build/performance tools lately.

Some of the ones I found particularly helpful are:

  • Minify/YUI Compressor – minimizing the number of HTTP GET requests for CSS and Javascript resources and the size (in bytes) of these resources can increase client-side (browser) perf. Matt Snider has a great post on how both to concatenate and compress resources via Ant.
  • JSLint: Great service that analyzes your Javascript for code quality. Even better, RockstarApps has encapsulated JSLint to run as an Eclipse plug-in. Haven’t attempted to get this to run as part of the build (with Ant) yet.
  • Page Speed – I tried YSlow (add-on to Firebug) but found Google’s tool to be better overall. Really helpful in determining the best way to increase performance.

Posted by davehod at 03:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 28, 2010

What You Need to Know About Foursquare

Great preso from Robin Grant over at we are social.

I am an admitted Foursquare addict, sure, but walk through the deck below and see why Foursquare and GPS-enabled/location-based apps are going to be a big deal. 

How Foursquare Helps Consumers and Business Owners

View more presentations from 22squared.

Posted by davehod at 09:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 21, 2010

PersistentFan Graduates to Beta

PersistentFan

Bacon has a post up about PersistentFan leaving invite-only mode.

We’re not quite ready for primetime, calling it an early Beta instead. Like many things, we have a zillion ideas to try out and will continue to rev the service. Check it out if you have a chance.

Here’s a few sample channels to test drive with:

You can also see what other people are watching

If you are a big fan of Jersey Shore or want to keep up with the latest from the disaster in Haiti, PersistentFan enables you to:

  • Create channels of interest that persistently search for new content
  • Receive email notifications when new content is available (you receive these as they are discovered or on a daily or weekly basis)
  • Share your favorites to Facebook and/or Twitter
  • Keep up with video feeds of Twitter’s trending topics

PersistentFan was built with open source, Java, Linux, Apache, Tomcat, mod_jk, mysql, junit, Struts, AWS (EC2 and S3), Javascript and plenty of Last.fm.

Posted by davehod at 09:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)