the ryan king

….validatin’ ur HTMLz

I’ve been working on a side project for awhile, called inursite.com. The basic idea is that you signup, give it a few URLs you care about and it’ll check them about every 24 hours to see if the HTML is valid. You can then get a feed of the results. A simple idea, so simple I’m surprised no one’s done it before.

For now, the site is somewhat limited: you can only have 5 URLs to be checked, and it will only check them on schedule (you can’t force it to update), but I plan on lifting some of these restrictions and adding new types of checks in the future, and there’ll probably be a subscription premium version, too. I releasing this now because I want to get more feedback on the ideas and design.

So, go check it out, then tell me what you think.

I don’t usually write personal things here, but I felt I needed to make an exception for this.

Awhile back Matt suggested I “write down the things that are most important to [me] going forward”.

I tried to think of concrete things that mattered like “I want to work on projects like X” or “I want to change the world to make it more like Y”, but to be honest I don’t really know what X and Y are. At least, X and Y seem to change from week to week.

There’s the problem though– I have a million different things I’d like to see happen, but I haven’t been making them happen, but instead just wishing they would fall into place without any risk taking on my part. The worst part is that I’ll sometimes be disappointed when things don’t go my way, even though I didn’t do anything to make it happen. I forget that the world doesn’t owe me anything.

After obtaining a degree, no matter how small, of success, its easy to forget what it was that got you there. For me, I forgot how many risks I had to take to get where I am.

As Mark Twain said:

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

Ok, enough of the personal, watch out for a few announcements of the technology type here soon.

Over the course of the last year, I’ve had many ideas for blog posts that, for whatever reason haven’t been written. As inspired by Tim Bray [1] [2], I’m just gonna dump them all here in one post. I figure a short quip is better than silence. If anyone seems to take interest in them, maybe I’ll write up more thoughts on the subject.

Scalability

Scalability isn’t about growing, it isn’t about getting bigger, it’s about working at various sizes. It’s about making things constant despite changes in N. It’s about making N less relevant.

Redo ‘Friends and Neighbors on the Web’ using XFN

An interesting paper that should be updated to use XFN-based graphs.

Confounding Things and People

People complain that XFN confounds people and URLs. However, people do this in the real world, too– witness vanity license plates. Sometimes the plates refer to the car, sometimes the person, sometimes both, sometimes neither.

Parsing Microformats

I gave a presentation on parsing microformats, but never blogged about it or shared it with the mf community online. I think there’s some good material in there that I should develop more.

The name is inspired by the sf_indie yahoo group. The idea came from Mark Trammel. The music came from my friends.

What we have here is the modern equivalent of a mixtape– a series of songs mixed together in a single MP3. There’s no theme to this one, just a bunch of songs I like that fit together.

Here it is: There’s a First Time for Everything (mp3).

Track listing:

1. Box by Tokyo Police Club from Smith
2. Bigger Than Your Boyfriend by Washington Social Club from Bigger Than Your Boyfriend
3. Hands in the Dark by Chromatics from In Shining Violence
4. You’re a Wolf by Sea Wolf from Leaves in the River
5. Take Me to the Riot by Stars from In Our Bedroom After the War

1. Quit my job
2. Get a new apartment.
3. Get called “crazy” by my mom.

Obviously the third follows from the first two.

And yes, I literally submitted my letter of resignation and signed my lease on the same day. The rest of my day was less exciting.

Some explanation…

Leaving Technorati

I decided recently to leave my job at Technorati. The reasons are varied and mostly personal.

I’ve been at Technorati for quite awhile. I started in May of 2005 as an intern, while finishing grad school at USF. After finishing school, I came on board full time.

When I joined we were about 18 or so people. We grew to around 45 but have since been reduced, through layoffs and departures to around 25 or so. Of the people working at Technorati now, only 4 who’ve been there longer than I have.

I’ve worked on many different projects: some launched, some dead, some popular, some unpopular. My work has touched pretty much every area of our infrastructure, from our spider to our HTML and CSS. This includes programming in 6 different languages*. Seriously.

I say all this to say that I’ve given all I can to Technorati and its now time for me to move on to other projects.

My last day at Technorati is November 16th, for those in the Bay Area, there will likely be a shindig around that time to celebrate (or mourn, depending on your opinion of my decision). What the UpPownceBook-sphere (or this space) for details.

After that I’m going to be doing some consulting work. I’ve talked with a few people about this already, but as of now I have no firm commitments. So, if you’re interested in having me work on a project basis with your team, let me know. For an idea of what I could help your team with, see my resume

Moving

Cameron and I have been looking for an apartment to move into together for about four months. We were finally offered one that we like, so we jumped on it and will be moving this weekend. We’re gonna be at 26th and San Jose, part of the Outer/Lower Mission, also not far from Noe Valley, Bernal or Glen Park.

Once again, for those in the Bay Area, there will be festivities at some point. Likely closer to the holidays (did I mention we have a working fireplace? I didn’t? Oh, well now I did.)

Rebooting

As Cameron said “its like you’re rebooting your life”. Well, kinda. I seem to do this ever few years. Last time was nearly three years ago, when I picked up and moved from Kansas City to San Francisco for grad school. I knew no one in San Francisco at the time (besides my grad school advisor). Of course, at the time, I was miserable living in KC. I’m not miserable now, just uninspired and in a funk.

* PHP, PERL, Python, Javascript, Ruby and Java (plus I’ve written HTML and CSS)