By Colleen, on May 16th, 2009%
What is OAuth, and why should you care? Here’s the deal: Just like Skynet of Terminator fame, web apps have lately been doing a lot more talking to each other on the “back-end” instead of all web communication being between a human and a web app. This is a GOOD thing as long as the humans control what talks to what and what data is shared. Instead of copying and pasting a whole bunch of data from Web App A into Web App B, you can now just give Web App B permission to go get it. And if you ever change anything on Web App A, you only need to change it there: Web App B will pick it up. This makes things convenient, but in the past it required giving Web App B your password to Web App A! As a developer, I understand why they really do need this info, but you don’t need to be a paranoid security analyst like me to imagine how easily an evil person could promise an app that does something cool, suck up your credentials, and use them for nefarious purposes. And nowhere is this more true than on Twitter.
Continue reading OAuth: Totally!
By Colleen, on January 15th, 2009%
Well, it had to happen. It is amazing that I’ve been using WordPress so long without getting into its guts. While hacking on the Tweet this plugin ever so gently, I started to get the feel for how WP plugins work. So I wrote a couple myself. The first one is serious old school, as it’s modeled on some older plugins. The second one actually uses more object oriented methodology, and so should be easier to read, maintain, and hack on.
But I’m sure most of you don’t care about that as long as the plugins work. And probably you are wondering what they do. Continue reading Try my beta Word Press Plugin
By Colleen, on December 4th, 2008%
This is a yahoo pipe that gets fed my twitter name, goes to the public twitter feed, finds my “friends” who have provided geographical locations, and uses that data to map them. Yahoo pipes are amazingly visual ways to build mashups. If you don’t want to build your own, not to worry. There are many many published pipes that you can just use, the same way you use RSS feeds.
Continue reading Map Your Tweeple (twitter friends)
In a previous post I blathered about defacing toonlet® graphics. That activity was for the purpose of refining the best toons into a cohesive book. The first edition (40pp) is now available for download! Here are samples. The ebook has about 60 strips. It’s a free download for the time being. If you like the book, I would appreciate it if you would blog or tweet about it with a link back to this blog post. Enjoy! 
This little 
After two pretty cerebral hard core posts in a row I’d better have something fluffy, but in a geeky way. So here you go — A Twitter Mosaic. If you have significant friends at all it generates a pretty hefty chunk of HTML code to slap into your blog.
I was recently reading
Try my beta Word Press Plugin
But I’m sure most of you don’t care about that as long as the plugins work. And probably you are wondering what they do. Continue reading Try my beta Word Press Plugin