March 2009
1 post
January 2009
2 posts
A “games” category has finally been added! Ignore any mis-categorised things for the time being - I’ll fix them tomorrow.
@oo5 overhaul is live and kicking
I tentatively pushed a complete update to the @oo5 machinery a few weeks ago. I’ve been quietly keeping an eye on things to check that everything’s working and, much to my surprise, all seems good. This update was mostly for my benefit. @oo5 was my first go at programming in about 7 years and I made a lot of mistakes. Some of the machinery was impossible to maintain or improve and...
December 2008
1 post
I tentatively pushed a bunch of updates to @oo5 the other day. Most things seem to be working but please bear with me!
September 2008
3 posts
Updates to the home page are live: http://tinyurl.com/6om8ra … They’ve been a long time coming!
The new home page
It’s been an awful long time coming but the home page redesign is finally up! I wanted to get images into the design from the very beginning but I was a bit intimidated by the prospect of having to wrestle an assortment of APIs. The whole process actually turned out to be remarkably easy. At the moment I’m using Last.fm for album covers, MoviePosterDB for film posters and Flickr for...
August 2008
1 post
Geek post: Retiring BackgrounDRb
My relationship with BackgrounDRb has been stormy. I loved how quickly it got me started with grabbing data for @oo5 - I installed the plugin, wrote a couple of workers and added the start script to my deply task. Easy. Except it never quite worked. Every couple of days one or more of my workers would fail. No errors in the logs but nothing firing. Maybe it was something I did but I couldn’t...
July 2008
3 posts
Just added a couple of little enhancements: http://tinyurl.com/6jl4j5
Putting things in boxes
I’ve had a grand plan for a direct message correction system in the works for months now but I dug myself into a rather deep hole. Taking a step back I realised I was massively overcomplicating things and decided to start again. The most common problem people have is with the categorisation going awry so that’s where I decided to start… So, I give you: direct message corrections!...
June 2008
3 posts
Twitter isn’t letting @oo5 grab reviews at the moment… New ones will turn up as soon as they get the service fixed.
Timelines added to people pages: http://blog.whatiminto.com/post/38957243/timeline.
May 2008
5 posts
@oo5 and location
Search has exposed a little Easter egg that I’ve been sitting on for some time. A while back I moved contributors’ locations (according to Twitter) onto the reviews. I figured that before long people would be using services connected to Fireeagle or apps like Brightkite and Twinkle to keep their Twitter location up to date… So if you use any of those services it means that @oo5...
New this week: Speed Racer. Jealous of: anyone who was at the ATP festival over the weekend.
Film of the week: Iron Man with a 4.1 average. Album of the week: White Goddess By James Blackshaw with a 5.0 average.
April 2008
8 posts
The @oo5 black hole
At the moment @oo5 is a black hole. You review stuff, it gets sucked into oo5.whatiminto.com and then… nothing. I’ve been pondering this problem since I started the project. For me, reviews are more permanent snippets of communication than standard tweets. They’re also more structured. I wanted to be able to store them somewhere - and in a way - that would make them easy to get...
Support for those new conventions went live over the weekend. Everything’s been correctly identified so far… Excellent!
Proposing a set of conventions to help identify all the new categories: http://blog.whatiminto.com/post/31774399.
Just added Plays as an oo5 category.
Conventions
A couple of the more cultured @oo5ers have started adding theatre play reviews over the last week so I’ve added Play as a new top level category. That’s all well and good but all these new categories have started to put a strain on my poor pidgeon-holing algorithm. It was only intended to distinguish gigs from movies and it needs a fair bit more work to deal with the more subtle...
Added albums and exhibitions to the official set of categories over the weekend.
Albums and exhibitions added
I added albums and exhibitions as categories over the weekend. The automatic categorisation will need a bit of tweaking but it seems to be working okay at the moment. Review away!
BackgroundRB FAIL
I love BackgroundRB for how easy it made getting started with oo5 but she’s a cruel mistress. I’m using version 0.2.0 because I couldn’t get 0.2.1 to run at all and the docs didn’t match the code so I decided it wasn’t ready enough for me yet. But. 0.2.0 has a few problems, particularly when using it as a daemon controller. I just noticed that it stopped grabbing...
March 2008
5 posts
Social Graph API Documentation - Social Graph API... →
Thanks to Google I can now get anyone’s Twitter contacts with a single call. Expect recommendations soon… Many thanks to Dave Singleton for the heads up on this one.
Charts
I’m a bit conflicted about the charts. I disagree with charts generally - they’re of no value to me unless they’re personalised and having them there encourages gaming… But they help to explain the concept. So, should they be in or out? The more I think about it the more I think they should go. Hmmm.
Complete overhaul
I just pushed a big overhaul of Out of Five live. This update is all about reorganising. Almost everyone I’ve told about oo5 has had a different idea of how they might use it so I decided to reorganise the site for transparency. I’m hoping that making fewer decisions in the interface will make it more flexibile for the people who use it. With any luck, I’ve not made it all too...
2 tags
1 tag
So what's Out of Five?
Basically, I got annoyed with my inability to remember exactly what I thought of things the morning after and wanted a way to text film, gig and whatever reviews from the bus home. I’ve been using it myself for a while now and I’m fairly sure the idea is sound. So. Out of Five: http://oo5.whatiminto.com Since I started telling people about it though, the scope’s changed…...