Aaron Parecki

Last weekend Amber, Anima and I drove from San Diego to Palm Springs to YxYY. We were streaming music from Spotify on the whole drive, and Spotify was scrobbling to my Last.fm account. Of course I was also tracking my location like I always do. Then it dawned on me that I could put together a map showing all the songs we listened to and where we were for each! Below is the result!

IndieAuth is a way to use your own domain name to sign in to websites. To sign in, you enter your domain name, and IndieAuth looks for a supported authentication provider on your site and uses that to sign you in.

Part of our work at Esri is to build open-source projects that support people building fun and new mapping applications. We are happy to announce four open source Javascript projects we've been working on in the last few months! <a href="https://github.com/Esri/esri-leaflet">Esri-Leaflet</a> is a Javascript library to help developers build lightweight applications using the Leaflet Javascript mapping library. <a href="https://github.com/Esri/geoservices-js">Geoservices.js</a> is a Javascript client for accessing ArcGIS Online services from the browser or Node.js. <a href="https://github.com/esri/terraformer">Terraformer</a> is a geometry toolkit for working with different geometry formats and building geo databases. <a href="https://github.com/esri/pushlet">Pushlet</a> is a simple API for sending notifications through the Apple and Google push notification services.

As part of expanding the functionality of the software my site runs on, I thought it was about time to start showing inline content when I post links in notes.

After I posted my article, An Open Challenge to App.net, @po shared it on App.net. You can see the full thread here.

I am no longer publishing content to my App.net account until I can syndicate my content to their service without writing a single line of code.

Lately I've been doing a lot of development in Ruby, specifically with Sinatra and Sequel, and I've been liking that development stack a lot. So much so, that when I switch back to PHP for a project, I wish my PHP stack was more like my Ruby stack.

<p>Here are 14 things you shouldn't forget to bring when traveling to a tech conference.</p><p><b>An extra mobile device</b>: It's a great idea to have an extra device while you're out and about. An iPod Touch or iPad Mini are perfect candidates. This essentially gives you two batteries, since you can use your secondary device for many things like taking notes or tweeting and avoid draining your primary phone battery.</p><p style='text-align: center;'><img src='/articles/2013/03/11/1/files/ipad-mini.jpg' /></p>

Have you ever wondered where in your city you spend the most money? This post will show you how to plot all your Simple transactions on a map! No code required!

<p><a href="/articles/2013/03/08/1/esri-events-at-sxsw-2013"><img src="/articles/2013/03/08/1/files/esri-trolley-sxsw-2013.jpg" /></a></p>

There are many ways Github can be used to improve communications in an organization. In addition to providing version control for code, it can be used to manage text documents, press release drafts, and marketing copy and design. The "Issues" feature is also a great way to replace email for discussions.

Earlier this year, @tantek posted Twelve Blog Post Writing Tips, from which I got a great deal of inspiration.

Flickstagram, a service which will export your Instagram photos to Flickr, has had far more users in non-English speaking countries, and has also appeared in more non-English blogs than English ones.

<p>Google Analytics provides some hooks for tracking Facebook likes on your web pages as well as other social interactions. This lets you see how many people have "liked" your pages, and which pages are most popular on Facebook!</p> <p>This is a quick guide on how to set up Facebook like tracking in Google Analytics.</p>

You may think I have some crazy obsession with collecting this much data and will do anything it takes, but in reality I'm pretty lazy about it and look for low-friction solutions or I can't sustain the project.

The Indie Web

This morning, @tommorris struke a nerve with the Hackernews community with his post Dear "API providers," I don't want a relationship.

Every time I see a web app display a date as "30 minutes ago" I cringe a little. This was cute 10 years ago when rapid publishing on the web was new, but there are a number of problems with this.

This post describes OAuth 2 in a simplified format to help developers and service providers implement the protocol.

IndieAuth is a service that implements RelMeAuth, originally proposed by Tantek Çelik in February 2010. The original algorithm was described in a short text update on Tantek's website. Later that evening, Jeff Lindsay and Paul Tarjan implemented RelMeAuth in an open source Python library at Hacker Dojo and discussed/tested it in IRC. Tantek later launched a RelMeAuth prototype on his domain, which you can try out at tantek.com/relmeauth.