Things that made me happy this morning:

• My colleagues in Korea did a nice screencast of GeoMaker in Korean
• A cool video of a fractal animation of generated mountains and lakes done in 1979-80 on a VAX!
• Interesting survey about the popularity of email clients from campaign monitor.
• Another good introduction to object oriented PHP – I started using json_decode(‘{foo:”bar”,baz:[“moo”,”bark”]}’);
• PostScript and PDF for HTML5 canvas – OK then…
• Cool, almost steampunk Disney design concepts
• A very large collection of search interface screenshots
• Seems like more and more airports will start tagging luggage with RFID – makes more sense than the barcode stickers anyway
• Google releases the messaging protocol of Wave as open source – this should make it easier to extend it.
• The Color scheme designer is not only really pretty but also allows you to simulate different forms of color blindness.

Things that made me happy this morning

Inspiring and fun

• Older people playing Wii and going for it
• Beautiful poster design proposals for the 2012 olympics
• Build your own starship enterprise either from an old Floppy Disk or from other random office supplies
• The ten commandments as text messages

Tech stuff

• An interesting wrapper solution for embedding video with HTML5 and fallbacks for older browsers
• Tristan says as it is the web is hackable
• Microsoft know how to fix issues – just move your mouse

My stuff:

• I’ve been interviewed in Taiwan
• My talk at the open hack day Introduction to YQL as a video

Videos:

• Total eclipse of the heart the literal version
• Han Solo, P.I and a Side by Side comparison with the original opening

Distributing your information all over the web has become a common practice over the last few years and it makes a lot of sense. By covering lots of distribution channels you can reach various audiences and get comments and feedback from them.

You also make yourself independent of a single online resource – if your server is unavailable your data is still around. I could go on with the benefits of distribution (after all I’ve written a book on the subject) but let’s take a look on the flipside: by spreading your data all over the web you also spread yourself thin and you want a single resource to act as your main URL.

People have been telling me for a while that they don’t have time to find all the things I leave across the web and that they are wondering if there’s a single entry point. One Solution is FriendFeed but you want to be able to style your “online profile” more than that.

This is where YQL comes into the equation. Using YQL, a YUI CSS grid, a few dozen lines of PHP and a bit of CSS I managed to pull together My online portfolio http://icant.co.uk and you can do this as easily. The following screencast shows you how it is done:

You can also download a readable version of the screencast for ipods.

Since I put together the screencast (which was a bit hurried as I needed to catch a flight) I’ve updated the idea with yet another script that scrapes the resulting HTML document to create an RSS feed of all my data on the web.

• Check out the source of index.php
• Check out the source of feed.php

Using YQL has a few more benefits than reading all the different sources yourself and mixing them up: the results are cached for you, YQL’s connection to the web is very much likely to be faster than yours which makes the fetching process easier and you have full control over what’s happening as YQL output gives you diagnostics information.

I’ll talk more about in YQL in various talks in the nearer future, and there are even more interesting changes to the system itself around the corner. Stay alert for awesome updates.