Out of Five

Sorting by score has been added to all the Thing lists. This...

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:14:01 +0000

Sorting by score has been added to all the Thing lists. This should have been there from the beginning really! Thanks to jun6lee for the suggestion. Check out the top movies, for example, to see it in action.

A “games” category has finally been added! Ignore any mis-categorised things for the...

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:52:02 +0000

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

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:02:00 +0000

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 I’d coded myself into a corner.

So I went back and started again.

For the technically minded: the back end is now based on Merb instead of Rails. I absolutely loved the experience of coding on Merb - the documentation is sparse but the API is guessable enough to make up for that.

This release does have a few notable feature improvements too though.

Direct messages are now supported across the board. If you don’t want to annoy your followers with a barrage of reviews you can swap the @oo5 part of your tweet for d oo5. Here’s an example:

d oo5 Che: Part One 3.5 For an ignorant person like myself, educational, engaging, realistic & insipiring to see the revolution beginning.

The design has been tidied up a tiny bit, pushing the movie posters, album covers and gig photos that first showed up on the home page down into the rest of the site.

Lastly, I put a bit of time into standardising the API for getting data out. You can now get RSS, XML and JSON for anything that deals with reviews. Take a look at the examples on the syndication page if you’re interested.

I tentatively pushed a bunch of updates to @oo5 the other day. Most things seem to be working but...

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 23:32:36 +0000

I tentatively pushed a bunch of updates to @oo5 the other day. Most things seem to be working but please bear with me!

Updates to the home page are live: http://tinyurl.com/6om8ra … They’ve been a long time...

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 01:52:10 +0100

Updates to the home page are live: http://tinyurl.com/6om8ra … They’ve been a long time coming!

The new home page

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:48:00 +0100

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 everything else.

I’ve also finally taken the time to attempt an explanation of what Out of Five is actually for. I’m still not happy with it but it’s a damned sight better than it was before:

Out of Five is a little service that lets you review the things you’d like to remember or recommend - gigs, movies, restaurants and so on - from the bus home, your sofa or wherever you happen to find yourself at the time.

Most obviously, I’ve rethought the layout for individual reviewed things. I wanted to try and present a summary of the sentiment around each thing and give a little extra help for people wanting to join in. I seem to remember reading somewhere that when Alexander Graham Bell was trying to push the telephone into the mainstream he chose to install his new devices in public places - cafes, restaurants, bars etc. His strategy was to show (likeminded) people how to use phones instead of telling them. @oo5 is hardly rocket science but it’s an odd way to carry out the act of reviewing and I don’t think I’d really put enough thought into helping people along back when I first started the project. Anyway, that’s what the stuff over on the right hand side is: an example review and a ready made tweet for people to copy and paste.

I still need to push some of the changes deeper into the site but for the time being, let me know what you think…

I’ve finally pushed the new version of the home page live...

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:32:41 +0100

I’ve finally pushed the new version of the home page live so it’s up for all to see.

Geek post: Retiring BackgrounDRb

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:38:28 +0100

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 figure out how to debug the problem.

Without BackgrounDRb I would never have got @oo5 up and running but I finally decided it was time to give up and try something else. After loads of reading and a little asking around I decided to go go lo-fi: cron + script/runner.

Step 1 was the rolling of my BackgrounDRB workers into models - dead simple, nothing to write home about.

Step 2 was all about Cron… I’ve never liked Cron very much. I have never been able to remember how the triggers work and I was pretty keen not to have to wrangle yet another set of tricks. Luckily for me a compromise turned up in the shape of Cronedit, a gem to allow the editing of cron jobs from Ruby. My (Vlad) deply.rb now has a nice set of tasks for adding and removing jobs. In case you’re interested, here’s what mine looks like:

remote_task :add_tasks, :roles => :app do CronEdit::Crontab.Add 'grab_from_twitter', {:minute => "1,3,6,9,12,15,18,21,24,27,30,33,36,39,42,45,48,51,54,57", :command => "#{deploy_to}/script/runner -e production 'Worker.grab_from_twitter'"} end

Step 3? Profit. The new mechanism has been in place for a couple of weeks and it appears to be working without a hitch. Phew.

Just added a couple of little enhancements: http://tinyurl.com/6jl4j5

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:12:25 +0100

Just added a couple of little enhancements: http://tinyurl.com/6jl4j5

I’ve added a couple of little widgets to the Thing pages to make...

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:34:00 +0100

I’ve added a couple of little widgets to the Thing pages to make it a bit easier to both review things yourself and correct their categories.

Putting things in boxes

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:31:40 +0100

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! It’s still a bit too simple for my liking but it’s safe to play with. Here’s what you need to do:

d oo5 hollywoodland is a movie

d oo5 third by portishead is an album

d oo5 Chris Helme was a gig

Dead simple… The corrections are grabbed every five minutes (ish) so don’t worry if nothing happens immediately.

Twitter isn’t letting @oo5 grab reviews at the moment… New ones will turn up as soon as...

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:39:43 +0100

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.

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:00:22 +0100

Timelines added to people pages: http://blog.whatiminto.com/post/38957243/timeline.

I’ve been having so much fun playing with this that I just...

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:46:00 +0100

I’ve been having so much fun playing with this that I just had to release it. Dead simple and not yet finished but everyone’s peep page now has a timeline of reviews.

@oo5 and location

Mon, 19 May 2008 23:32:44 +0100

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 has been automatically geo-tagging your reviews.

I’ve not had time to do anything with that data yet but if you want to have a play, pop some cities into the search box and see what comes back.

I quietly added search to @oo5 the other week. I used the rather...

Mon, 19 May 2008 23:26:04 +0100

I quietly added search to @oo5 the other week. I used the rather marvelous acts_as_fulltextable plugin, in case you’re interested. I had it set up and indexing in an evening. Search results pages are also available as XML (and I’ll be adding RSS soon too), which means that you can get custom feeds of reviews, things and/or contributors out if you want.

New to all Thing pages: copy and paste the text into Twitter to...

Tue, 13 May 2008 14:30:04 +0100

New to all Thing pages: copy and paste the text into Twitter to review the Thing yourself.

New this week: Speed Racer. Jealous of: anyone who was at the ATP festival over the weekend.

Tue, 13 May 2008 12:59:14 +0100

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...

Wed, 07 May 2008 00:39:07 +0100

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.

The @oo5 black hole

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:20:02 +0100

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 at later. So my first priority was to appeal to people like me: people who wanted a permanent record of what gigs they’ve seen, movies they’ve watched, places they’ve eaten. Out of Five could be a micro-micro-blog derived from Twitter, and promoting Contributors to the main navigation was intended to promote this.

I also wanted to make that data as easy to extract and reuse as I could. People with a certain degree of technical expertise might want to pull their reviews into their own websites or applications. To those ends, I made sure that RSS and XML feeds were available for all the useful URLs to anyone familiar with RESTful resources. I also marked up the reviews as microformats to give anyone with the will another axis of access.

What I haven’t done yet is establish any real value for the rest of the world. If you’re not a compulsive obsessive diarist, a programmer or a blogger then what’s in it for you?

Adding some form of recommendations seems logical.

The most obvious way of doing recommendations is by using your social network. I can get your friends from Twitter and tell you what they’ve been reviewing… But it’s Twitter and you’ve probably seen their tweets already. Result? Not very compelling.

The scariest is working out a mathematical recommender. “People who liked the same stuff as you also liked…” The catch is that I’m not really a programmer and maths has never been my strong suit. That said, a quick flick through the Programming Collective Intelligence book has turned up a vector space algorithm that I could port. Interesting.

The simplest would be to send out a chart every week. If you mostly review films I could post you the week’s top films that you’ve not reviewed, for example. It’s simple, which is good but I wonder how much fun it’d actually be for people. Would it make it worth your while? I’m not sure.

At the moment I’m coming down on the side of simplicity but I would absolutely love to be able to recommend someone something that they found genuinely interesting. Hmmmmmm.