Travel Tips: Where to Stay in Philadelphia; Bars in Philadelphia
By Steve Poland • April 30, 2008 • No Comments »
I’m going to be visiting Philadelphia in the coming weeks and have no clue where to stay or what to do. I tried looking online, but can’t find anything that just says “Stay in this area if you want to be walking distance to bars and restaurants”. So I called up a buddy Chris Difonzo that lives out there and he gave me some info.
Here are my scattered notes, hopefully this helps someone else in the future. Also, if you have any recommendations of bars or restaurants or touristy things, please let me know in the comments. I’m going to see the Frida exhibit at the art gallery there.
Hotels:
- Sofitel
- ANYTHING in old city or rittenhouse square area
- latham hotel — rittenhouse square area
- windsor suite — out of the way
- radisson plaza hotel — good area
- NOTHING in university city or business district
- marriott hotel — really nice hotel
- omni hotel — old city; good
- comfort inn — out of the way; wouldn’t stay there
- westin — middle of biz district; on edge of rittenhouse square area [probably wouldn’t stay there, but not bad].
- loews — really nice place; same grade as sofitel. take cab or walk 12 blocks.
- society hill hotel — great location in old city.
Other stuff to do:
- #1 restaurant in Philly right now — Amada — spanish restaurant in old city; probably can’t get reservations; possibly can get a seat in 45 mins if you come in after 8 or 9pm and hang by the bar.
- old city — irish pub — Plough and the Stars — definitely check that out.
- Between market and chestnut on 2nd street — that block has everything you could possibly want — grungy orig music place to martini bars to irish pub around corner to brazilian dance club.
- Constitution center — check that out; it’s history.
- Phillies game — stadium is awesome.
- Gino’s cheesesteak — or pat’s.
Facebook API Question: Access of Friend Photos?
By Steve Poland • April 25, 2008 • 3 Comments »
If anyone has experience with the Facebook API — I’m curious about two calls (maybe more): friends.get and photos.get [and possibly photos.getAlbums].
What I’m trying to do is have a logged-in FB user, in my FB app, be able to browse photos uploaded by friends [not necessarily with themselves in those photos — but just to see photos by their friends]. Is this possible?
My other question is whether it’s possible to grab comments on photos, for display in my app.
Thanks for any help!
International Domains - which are actually used?
By Steve Poland • April 24, 2008 • 3 Comments »
If you’re buying domains that are for your potential global execution of a website — what domains are realistic to buy? Ones that come to mind are: .es, .co.uk, .de
… but what about others? .it, .in, .nl
… I feel those are realistically used in those countries, but what about these: .co.nz, .de.com, .eu.com, .eu, .asia, .de.com, .uk.com, .no.com, etc.
This place lists a bunch of these TLDs — ...
I’m just wondering, in those other countries — do they still use your ‘.com’, or do you really need all these local TLDs?
Skill Tests for PHP/MySQL/etc?
By Steve Poland • April 18, 2008 • 2 Comments »
Looking at someone’s resume can help, but it doesn’t really tell me how bad/good/great a programmer is with PHP 5 or MySQL, etc. ODesk has tests, but other than that — is there any skill tests that programmers can take, which are respected in the industry, and can really tell an employer how smart they are with programming?
IDEA #83 - Digg for Twitter!
By Steve Poland • April 18, 2008 • 3 Comments »
Erick brings up the fact that there is too much noise with Twitter and FriendFeed — that there is way too much information to possibly consume it all. That’s basically what happened with news/articles on the web — and then along came Digg.
I think someone (could even be Digg) needs to create a browser plugin that will allow Twitter users to “thumbs up / down” someone’s tweet. Then we could basically have a Techmeme for Tweets, finally — because right now, people don’t link to each other’s tweets; we just laugh or nod in agreeance… alone!
The only problem with what I’m talking about is that this would just be for users browsing Twitter via the Twitter web feed — unless the various Twitter plugins were to enable this functionality as well.
Heck, maybe Twitter itself could create this technology — and then there’d be a new tab for each user profile that shows the most ‘dugg’ twitters done by your friends. Of course, then the spammers come into play — and start digging their own tweets — but users could “bury” tweets in this interface as well — and if a user keeps digging something that keeps getting buried, they’ll be punished [or be less influential].
Inspirational Quote for Entrepreneurs: Talent & Drive
By Steve Poland • April 17, 2008 • No Comments »
Script Sought: Web Address Error Redirect Service
By Steve Poland • April 16, 2008 • No Comments »
I’m looking for a script that does DNS/Domain error redirect. Thus, a toolbar is running in my browser, and when I input a URL that has a DNS problem, the toolbar throws my query to this script on a web server, and then presents me with suggestions (links, ppc ads, etc).
Roadrunner has it - here’s an example. See how they do spelling correction and try to determine what the user was seeking?
Anyone know of a script out there that does this?
Update: I found some answers, but not a script that I can just purchase. “NXD” means non-existent domain. Yahoo uses Simplicita (Sandvine now). Barefruit is another — and their wikipedia entry lists: Some of Barefruit’s competitors in the DNS error space include Nomimun (the founders of BIND), Paxfire, Golog, Simplicita (recently acquired by Sandvine) and OpenDNS.
Lijit Getting Spammed
By Steve Poland • April 15, 2008 • 1 Comment »
Just saw this guy’s lijit widget filled with a certain domain. Makes sense that this would begin happening — basically, type your domain into any lijit widget a bunch of times, it’ll become most frequently searched for item on a blogger’s site, and then you’ll get free enlarged visibility of your domain on each of those blogs. To ensure extra sneakiness, do this from multiple IPs. [I’m sure lijit will work to remedy/prevent this; sucks that spammers have to be everywhere]
Prediction: Al Gore to Run for President (again) in 2012
By Steve Poland • April 1, 2008 • No Comments »
This is no April Fool’s Day joke — if I could bet money on this, I would. While Bush is f’ing up the country, Gore is looking like a godsend, even if it’s just one of a flurry of issues: Global Warming. Gore just announced a $300mm ad blitz with a non-profit climate group.
I saw him on TV yesterday parading around like he was already running for the presidency. Al has another four years to prep, then you’ll see him on the ballot for another run at it.
Idea #82 - FriendFeed the new Twitter? WTF.
By Steve Poland • March 26, 2008 • 10 Comments »
OK, so I finally signed up for FriendFeed — and yes, it’s cool. I just feel like it’s been around. I mean, it has via different services already (MyBlogLog had this awhile back, but just never launched it; Plaxo has Pulse; SocialThing!; etc).
My question is — why haven’t any of you coders built this thing for Twitter? I should go to your website, input my usernames for these different services [flickr; youtube; etc] and then your service pulls/pings the RSS feeds for each, stores that info (even if temporarily), and then shoots it over to my Twitter account (because I give you my Twitter login/password).
The premise of Twitter is - “What are you doing now?”. If I just uploaded a photo to Flickr, then I’m doing that. If I add an item to my Amazon.com wishlist, then I’m doing that. When I favorite a song in Hype Machine, I’m listening to that song [and Hype Machine currently does send that to my Twitter account]. Etc…
Come on - someone knock this thing out in a night. I’ll play with it. The FriendFeed service doesn’t even need to exist; I feel it’s a redundancy on what Twitter should be.
