Brad Fitzpatrick has written on his LiveJournal about the possibility of Perl on App Engine. Seems they need a hardened Perl interpreter in order to support it. It would be awesome if this really happened.
Johannes Plunien has been helping us polish MojoMojo, our open source Wikistyle CMS tool. His motivation was to replace his private MediaWiki installation, and to that end, he's written a concise howto for setting up a private MojoMojo installation: MojoMojo - make it private.
We're going to have some planned downtime for iusethis at around 00.00 GMT tonight to perform a system upgrade on our database server. We'll try to be as quick as possible, thank you for your patience :)
update the downtime was moved to early august.
Here's the facebook profile app for a well known person in the mac community.
First one to get the correct answer gets an iusethis tshirt. Leave the answer as a comment below.
update The correct answer was given by Frédéric Blanc. Look in the comments if you want the spoiler :)
One of the features we decided to re-implement when widening the site earlier this summer was "New versions of your apps". This feature has been pretty obscure until now, under a separate tab in the menu. Now it appears as a sidebar view with the icons of your apps. To see the name, hover over it with the mouse. If you click the More link, you come to a fullscreen view, which also supports subscription via RSS.
Here's a shot of the sidebar from my profile:
As you can see, iTunes 7.7 was just released to support Apple's new app store. Expect to see something more from us on that very soon :)
Club Tropo wrote a great analyses about why Shared hosting is doomed. Personally I belive this to be very true, and with the low cost of virtual service hosting, I see little reason for people to keep using suboptimal shared hosting. However, they are saying shared hosting does not scale for the providers either in the long run, and they have great graphs to back it up :
Seems someone has set up an iusethis twitter account that tweets from iusethis. Might be a nice way to follow new apps on the site. I'm not so happy about how the tweets are formatted tho. Would there be interest in an official iusethis twitter user? If so, what would you want it to tweet?
Get Satisfaction is a direct connection between people and companies that fosters problem-solving, promotes sharing, and builds up relationships. This is a great way to be open about how you are running your business, which is open to Arne and I, so we've set up a getsatisfaction account for nordaaker and our products here.
We have also added the recent list to the iusethis contact page as a first step, and we are considering adding the Get Satisfaction Help Center as well. I find this to be a great use of OAuth, a protocol that has been of interest to me lately.
While I was updating the about pages, I also added a couple of new ones; The tools page is a list of stuff that people have built against our apis and feeds. I've probably forgot some, so feel free to remind me, and I'll get your stuff added to the list asap. I've also added a small info page for icrawlthis, our friendly neighborhood spider.
Boston Globe's The Big Picture has been getting a lot of attention online lately for their uncompromising focus on presenting interesting pictures, and untraditional format. I really like this interview with Alan Taylor, the creator of the blog.
We've been working hard on finding a good way to present photo diaries on the net with phiary.com for the last year, and this post was a great inspiration. I feel our format is really good for portrait style pictures, but we do have something to learn from Alan on presenting landscape-mode pictures. We're in total agreement about the content tho
you can find some mind-blowing images there, but I always felt like it lacked context, depth, story.
That's absolutely the direction I see for great photo blogs in the near future.