So I've always liked the idea of being able to post photos taken with the camera on my mobile phone to my site. I've hacked together some ways to do this in the past using email. Recently, Apple launched a new gallery service on .mac that pretty much works the same way, but very cleanly. They also integrated upload access to the galleries into the iPhone, making it extremely easy to send photos to your .mac galleries from the phone. Email is the transport mechanism, but the process of uploading is very simple.

Another nice feature of the new galleries is "Photocasting" this basically means that each gallery exports an XML feed describing the photos in the gallery. The feed includes URLs to thumbnails, medium sized versions, and full size versions of each photo. This makes it very easy to integrate your .mac galleries into your own site.

I set up a gallery dedicated to iPhone images to be posted in the sidebar on my site (look right under recently seen). You can click a thumbnail, and a full version of the photo will pop up in a lightbox. You can shuttle back and forth within the lightbox, and the caption is displayed with each photo. I wrote up a quick tutorial for the 1% of iPhone owners that also have .mac accounts and PHP driven websites that use Smarty.

This week I've been working on the new version of the website for Adam Cohen's awesome webcomic MOSE. I launched it yesterday to coincide with the opening of the Low Pop gallery show at designbox, which features several of Adam's pieces.

About a year ago, I built the original site around a custom CMS and email subscription engine. The new version uses the same system, and includes some upgrades for selling prints via PayPal, a random comic display, and some other tidbits.

The site design was produced by Adam's company Distill.

Check out tanyacash21's Music Roamer. You can explore last.fm related artists through a groovy Flash interface. Discover new music, find out how many degrees of separation there are between your favorite artists. I could click around in there for hours.

Jeff & I have been working on a service built around the last.fm & audioscrobbler album correlation science I've been talking about. It's now ready for semi-public use.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present Zen Radar.

The project is still in active development, but is fairly stable. We'll be adding new feeds and features over time.

After setting up a recent tracks widget for my homepage with Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler, I came to the disappointing realization many people have lamented. There is no album information in the recent tracks feed, and no easy way to get it through other means. I don't really understand why the album info is not provided in the feed - the album listening stats are available, so it's being stored in the scrobbler database somewhere. I'm sure there's a good reason for this omission, since there have been a number of requests for this feature on the last.fm forums.

Since album detail feeds are available (with track listings!), it's possible to correlate the artist and track names in the recent tracks feed to the albums. It's not an easy task, and it's not 100% accurate, but with a little effort, you can put together a system that can match album info to your recent tracks list, complete with cover art, URLs to the album pages on last.fm, the whole enchilada.

Here's the lowdown

Have you ever wanted to display your last.fm recent tracks (or any other info last.fm info for that matter) on your own site? If you're using the Zend Framework, it's amazingly easy. The Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler class in the incubator provides an easy way of using the Audioscrobbler web services.

I put together a brief tutorial on how to make it happen.

After years of neglect, I've rebuilt roblogic.net from the ground up. Stronger. Faster. Better. I'm sure my 12 monthly visitors will appreciate it.

Happy new year!

Jeff and I spent some time this week web-enabling his fish lamp. You can see whether or not the lamp is running, and turn it on or off. We've got some other devices around the office running on the same system. Jeff & I are thinking about putting together a tutorial on the how to roll your own. There are a ton of practical uses for this kind of automation. I'm working on adding scheduling, building an admin interface, restricting access, and integrating webcam feeds. The system uses the X10 CM17a Firecracker controlled by flipit. Jeff's flash interfaces talk to PHP scripts that control flipit, and get and set device status from a small MySQL database.

Here's a site that predicts the electoral vote count based upon current polls. Pretty nifty.

Keep it real.

I've been completely consumed by a web project for the past 4 weeks, and it finally launched today!

www.ydncwomen.org

It's a new group with some amazingly dedicated and competent women at the helm. They've been great to work with! I'm honored to have been able to help them get started.

If only my paying clients where this organized!

There's an anti-spyware bill in congress right now, and it's getting huge support on both sides of the aisle. Make sure your representatives and seantors are behind it.

Firefox version 0.9 is out. Get it. Use it. Love it.