Tag: Cool Sites

Today finds me in Chicago at the first-ever Ruby on Rails conference. Among a number of interesting sessions today, the most interesting one consisted of 5-minute “lightning” demos. Each developer had just 5 minutes to get up on stage, present his application, and answer questions. Bryan Wood showed off Lendmonkey.com. Bryan explained to the crowd […]

Version 8.1 of the Interarchy File Transfer application for the Macintosh now allows files to be transferred in and out of Amazon S3. I’m definitely not up to date on happenings in the Mac world (the last one that I used had a main memory size measured in kilobytes), but this application looks really good […]

There are some fascinating posts over at the ESV blog. ESV refers to the English Standard Version of the Bible. In order to increase the accuracy of their database of Biblical quotations, they used the Amazon Mechanical Turk. The HIT was relatively simple, and asked the Worker to identify the name of the person who […]

Here are a couple of cool things that I’ve run across in the last couple of days: CrossAmazon is a Greasemonkey script that adds links to all of the Amazon international sites (Canada, Japan, Germany, France, and the UK) to pages served up from the US (Amazon.com) site. The Amazon S3 Plugin for Eclipse makes […]

RSS feeds are a perfect way to keep track of data that changes on an irregular or infrequent basis. Instead of visiting the data source yourself as time permits, you can simply use RSS feeds to subscribe to an update stream from a site or from an application. The original use of RSS was to […]

RightCart allows you to embed an ECS-powered storefront directly into any blog or web page. The site provides cut and paste HTML snippets for a shopping cart and for individual products, making it very easy for you to sell products based on, for example, blog entries. There’s also a full sales tracking system. Behind the […]

Rankforest tracks and can graph the sales rank of Amazon products over time, with graphs available over all time, 90 days, 30 days, 7 days, or a single day. Many graphs are available for free; some others require a free account, and a final few require paid membership. There are also hourly and daily RSS […]

It’s VHS vs. Beta, all over again! Back when I was young, there were two main consumer video tape formats, VHS and Beta. Both had their advantages and disadvantages, and it took years for the market to decide which one was best. VHS ultimately prevailed, to the extent that many of today’s youngest consumers don’t […]