Data visualization fascinates me in general, but today I realized that when the data is my own the visualization become so much more interesting. Nexus, a Facebook application, plots out the relationships between all my Facebook friends.

I spent a happy half hour navigating different periods of my social life as represented by dots and lines. My time abroad in Australia resulted in an isolated web of friends. My first job out of college created a perfect star shape of friends. Read the rest of this entry »

This application provides a system for discovering, saving, sharing and ranking websites, with the beautiful element of randomness thrown in. I’ve recently started to stumble with a co-workers. We send each other sites using the browser tool bar, and subscribe to each other’s “sites I liked” RSS feeds.

The first time I read about this kind of random web surfing was in Steve Krug’s book “Don’t Make Me Think”. He wrote about a site called eTour. Before their demise in the dot com bubble, this startup had a similar theme of random web surfing. By clicking the “Next Site” button you would be whisked away to another site that fell into one of your checked off categories of interest.

This concept held zero interest for me because I imagined it would mean randomly wading through all the horrible content on the web. But when I gave StumbleUpon a whirl I found quite the opposite. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the simplest blogging platforms I’ve come across. Stripped down to the essentials my “Tumblelog” resembles a stream of consciousness, one thing at a time, all the way down the page.

The interface is mindlessly simple, and there is only one thing I would add: an easy way to get from “dashboard” to “view my site”. There is a button for “dashboard” when viewing my site, but not vice versa. Instead I have to navigate a drop down under Account, which is not very intuitive. Luckily, there are only 3 drop down links so I didn’t have to look far.

Discovery of the day! If I forward an email with an ical invite to add@30boxes.com the event is placed on my calendar - even if the invite is from a PC. So much easier than opening the ics file in a text editor and scanning for the date and time.

Thanks for visiting the brand new caitlinwinner.com.

Version five, like version four, runs on a WordPress platform, although this time around I was more ambitious with my implementation and site architecture.

First, I wanted to have a clear division of content. Rather than lumping everything together on one blog I separated content areas by section and styles, using a few custom WordPress themes. Once I had the framework up and running my goal was to make the content as dynamic and self-sustaining as possible.

In order to generate dynamically updating content I made use of the Flickr API and a few WordPress plugins, including Lighbox 2.0. Based on how I tag my images in Flickr they stream into this site in the appropriate areas. The portfolio and blog entries are easily managed, sorted and filtered through the WordPress admin tool.

Ultimately, I hope this site can act as a portfolio and a snap shot of my web-exploration with only minimal maintenance from here on out. Read the rest of this entry »