Music playlists of tunes you love to match your mood
Since I started using Twitter I have been thinking more and more about how to use all the data that these new services gather for us, Facebook, Last.fm, Twitter and Delicious etc. They store all this data and some of the more popular services spark a whole ecosystem of tools and third party sites which visualise or leverage the api to create new services based on other services. This is a fantastic evolution for the web and something that will only expand. Imagine visualising all your links on your desktop using an Adobe Air application which then suggests other links and topics, and automatically categorises links for you!
I’ve always been intrigued by listenening to music based on mood and tempo. After all, sometimes your music will bring back great memories and change your feelings. Media Monkey has the feature of setting moods to music, so that you can have upbeat tracks, party tracks, uplifting, moody, chilled and all that.
I avoided tagging my tracks with Last.fm as it’s always been a bit of a ballache to tag stuff. Now that I’m using the Last.fm client with iTunes (argh) on my work Mac, I’ve started tagging my tracks with mood, tempo and type tags. The stroke of genius comes in that Last.fm allows you to listen to those tags! Check out my tags as an example, http://www.last.fm/user/Neon1024/library/tags. This means if I’m looking for something upbeat I can just listen to my upbeat tag. If I’m wanting a playlist for a party I can hit my party tag. Fantastic!
If anyone knows of tools and third party applications for Delicious, please do link me up in the comments. I think this service has fantastic potential for visualising links, or basing third party tools on the wealth of data. Imagine merging that popular data with Digg, Magnolia and other sites to create a super popular page, which aggregates all that RSS and creates a true “Top 20 links on the Internet today” page!
jQueryUI
How awesome is this?! I’ve been using jQuery for all my javascript stuff, which isn’t much over the last few months. I really had no idea what a UI framework was, but I’m sold on the fact that you can drop in so many common components so easily to take your web app from, okay to awesome. This is the javascript which gets me excited about web dev, stuff that’s so optuse and subtle that you hardly know that it’s there, but the page without it just wouldn’t be the same.
Great! Definitly going to be trying to get this into some apps in the future, especially that date picker! No more lines of date validation for me 
http://jqueryui.com/home
Things that it can open?
Neon|work: Does it open ancient crypts sealed with dark black magic?
Neon|work: Does it open Nun’s legs?
Neon|work: Does it open that really stubborn jar of strawberry jam that’s been in the fridge for ages, but you can’t remember quite how long and you just fancy some, but you can’t get the lid off to sniff it just to be sure that if you eat some it’s not going to kill you, yet the toast has already popped and now you’re thinking about binning it anyway and having peanut butter instead, but you do really fancy jam..
A new theme, a new start, a new language?
Finally got around to adding the new theme, thinning out the content and fixing a few bits here and there. Should make the site a little cleaner, easier to use and less cluttered.
I have become one with the great unwashed since last week. Pretty good really in hindsight, gives me a fantastic opportunity to go find a better job and really leverage my skillset to the benefit of another business. Woah, perhaps I have been completing too many forms. Still it’s all good, just a smidgen of sunshine over the weekend and I’ll be happy.
Toying with picking up Ruby on Rails again after my last forray proved entertaining and entirely doable. Must dig out my RoR books and mock up a project to build something in it. Ah, actually there’s an idea as I write this.
I’m now wondering why it’s not dark and realised it’s 7pm. Well I guess that’s the day then, time to cook some dinner and get the kettle on.
Updates to follow!
Decided it was time to do some work on my site. New theme and further upgrades pending. I’ve found a few idea’s on what I want to do with the site, but may just design and build myself a wordpress theme.
