Taking inventory of old Github projects

Setting up Octopress has given me a chance to look through some of
my old Github repositories and re-assess what’s there and how to
improve on them.

This is more like a wish list than an actual set of directions, and it
reflects how much the world has moved since I first signed up for a
github account.

1. aadl-amazon-linky and superpatron. Both of these are interfaces
   to the Ann Arbor District Library catalog, which has a very accessible
   programming interface with things like RSS feeds for catalog searches.
   I’d like to go back and revisit two parts of this. One was a Greasemonkey
   plugin to put library results in Amazon; that should be a Chrome plugin.
   The second was a “wall of books” report displaying an RSS query as a
   page full of book cover images. Of the two, the second looks easiest to
   recreate; I just checked in some new code, wall by keyword, which does
   the trick.

2. vielmetti-shelltools. This is a small collection of shell scripts
   that I carry around with me and put on whatever system I happen to be
   working on. It would be worthwhile to go back through and compare
   what I used then with what I use now and refresh the collection.

3. postcard. This was a hopeful project to use various web-to-postcard
   APIs to generate custom postcards on the fly from the command line. Alas,
   several of those APIs have disappeared. The real action in this market is
   sending a real postcard from your iPhone or Android phone, with products
   like Postagram leading the way. The other neat feature is to go to a drugstore
   and make an instant print, then stick a stamp on the back and mail it.
   (Steve Cisler taught me that trick.)

4. twitter-mutual-friends. Once upon a time, the Twitter API was so
   simple that you could write a useful application in four lines of shell
   script. Now the API has improved itself, and it’s gotten a lot more
   complicated. Look at simple apps like latest_tweets by gianu to
   get an idea of what you’re up against now.

5. mobile. Again, once upon a time, I had a Blackberry phone which
   had the world’s worst usable web browser. Fortunately there were enough
   web sites that had a minimalist presentation that I was able to put
   together a directory of workable sites, which I used for quite a while.
   Now I have an Android phone that runs Chrome as well as apps and I don’t
   need the list of sites quite so much; still, it’s worthwhile to have
   a place to collect them when I find them.

So when it’s time to write some code here are some ideas for where
to start again!

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