Sunday, August 15, 2010 at 10:04PM | Héctor Ramos I find it much simpler to share quick updates and links on my Tumblr, so I’ve added it as a sub-domain: http://blog.hectorramos.com
I realize it might be a little confusing to have two blogs, but consider this main Journal as more of a source of infrequent articles while the Blog might have more frequent short updates. I’ll see how I can merge these later into a single page.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at 9:55PM | Héctor Ramos You’ve been reading about HTML5’s new features for months. You sit down and set out to write a new website - do you remember all the best practices?
HTML5 boiler plates take care of this initial hurdle for you. Here are two that I’m currently using in some upcoming projects:
Don’t just extract the code and do minor adjustments. This is a great opportunity to see HTML5 code that has been carefully tended to by groups of web developers for months.
Saturday, June 5, 2010 at 8:37PM | Héctor Ramos The past few weeks have been hectic, so I’ll keep it short.
1. I’m leaving for Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference 2010 in a short few hours. This is going to be my second year. This time I’m heading out alone, so if you see me around, come and say hi :)
2. I quit my job. Will be working now fulltime with iPhone and iPad development, amongst other things. More on that later.
3. The best way to keep up to date with my POV coverage of WWDC is through my Flickr and Twitter accounts. Follow @hectorramos !
Monday, May 24, 2010 at 12:44PM | Héctor Ramos Last Thursday I “launched” @GowallaSpotsPR, a hastily thrown together mash up that monitors Gowalla spots around Puerto Rico and tweets out all the new spots it finds.
On Friday, I added Hot Spots to the list - any trending spots will be tweeted out as well.
This project has been worked on for all of two hours between Thursday and Friday, after which I left for a weekend getaway in the mountains of Puerto Rico so I was unable to monitor and adjust the service during the weekend.
I know some of you have some suggestions, so let me know in this thread what you would like to see.
@luisjv commented on the spamming whenever there are many new spots. I currently have it set so that it will tweet out a maximum of six new spots, with the last tweet pointing out how many new spots where not tweeted due to the hard limit of six. I thought this would be enough, since it only runs once an hour, but I agree that it can become annoying if there are many spots being created during the day.
I want to know - is it fine the way it is, since only Gowalla fans would follow it anyway and would still be interested in this information, or should I lower the limit?
Would it be better, then, to run the service twice per hour? This would hopefully split the updates in half.
@arkhangel also suggested a way to find dupe spots. I’m going to think about this, I could probably use the GPS and name to mark which are suspected dupes.
I’m also considering opening up an RSS feed of all the spots, and adding geolocation data to the tweets sent out, so that you can see the location of the spots from your favorite Twitter client without going into the Gowalla website.
Héctor Ramos
Austin! Follow @GowallaSpotsATX
Both accounts now feature geolocation and creator attribution.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at 10:49AM | Héctor Ramos Roughly one week after being submitted, the 1.1 update to COM:LINK is now available in the App Store.
Among squashing various bugs that should fix most communication drops, I’ve added a new setting to lock the Talk Button. Access it from the new in-app Menu found at the bottom of your COM:LINK.
There you will also be able to buy an upgrade to COM:LINK+ which can also send pictures to other COM:LINK users. The upgrade is for the lifetime of the COM:LINK app, so expect future updates to add to the COM:LINK+ repertoire.
