if:else

I created a quick Greasemonkey script on my lunch break so I could watch the markets collapse/rebound in (almost) real-time. It updates the business chart on the New York Times homepage every 10 seconds (anything less is uninformative and unnecessary).

You can download the script here, or here.

After 9 months in various stages of development (starting as a prototype within a Firefox plugin) TimesPeople was launched on Monday 22nd across the nytimes.com web site.

I've the distinct impression that I shouldn't go into the specifics on this project just yet. I will say that it was the most rewarding and challenging project I have been involved in. Watching the number of existing and new Times users beginning to use it in real-time took my breath away.

So far the feedback is mostly positive which is always nice.

As of writing the next push of tweaks and changes should address some minor issues that won't matter to 99% of people. Among them are corrections to existing microformats and fixes to ensure full W3C compliance (current at: 59 Errors, 4 warnings, soon to be: 0).

One thing I will say, based off my experience - I will be very very happy when IE6 is no longer a white-listed browser.

Back in 2006 I worked as part of the team for the Travel redesign project. It was intense and fun and I got to work with a lot of good people. It was also my first opportunity to use third party APIs in my commercial work - and since Google's map service was so new it was a lot of fun to work with.

I don't think I will ever be able to articulate how awkward it feels to be in a video... its the whole 'that doesn't sound like me' thing plus bad hair day in one.

Still, Google Maps was a big factor in my moving to a web app based direction. The actual page for this is here.

For many reasons I've found the need to scrape article pages of The New York Times - either to prototype something or gather sample data (though this should become obsolete once the API's become public).

Automated scraping of anything is easy but with the nytimes.com any automated is going to hit an interstitial advert at some point.

The easy way to avoid this is to append "no_interstitial" to the URL arguments.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/business/30bags.html?no_interstitial

That was easy. One less thing to worry about.