Ask Bjørn Hansen’s blog

New secret project

nobody@vox.com(Ask Bjørn Hansen) — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 23:42:48 -0700

With a few friends I've been working on a new site, now called YellowBot. Recently we removed the password protection from our beta, but it's not entirely ready for the world to use yet so we are doing a "quiet launch".

That's one of the reasons for this vox post rather than a post at my more widely read regular weblog.

Another reason, of course, is that we are HUGE Vox (and Flickr) fans. It's funny how a few years ago you'd go to Amazon for design hints - now Cal, Mena and Nate is who we look to!

We love the sensibilities of Flickr and Vox! Our site isn't anything like them - it's a yellow page / local search site for starters, but it's been interesting to observe where we've gone looking for patterns when we've needed them. When we dream we dream of being the FlickrVox of local search (well, we dream a few other things too, but let's not have to mark this post "may be offensive").

Anyway, please try finding your local pizza place, read Vani's review of Sushi Ike (our local sushi joint) or see my profile page over there. Yes, it's embarrassing that we don't even have a place for Vox, Flickr or even a weblog url there! Hey, we had to make the basics like searching work first! :-)

We also have grand plans for making APIs and such to make it easier to integrate our stuff (and more importantly your stuff if you write reviews or tag stuff on the site) elsewhere. Get in touch if this is something you'd like to play with and I'll get you hooked up as soon as possible!

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Composing in Safari

nobody@vox.com(Ask Bjørn Hansen) — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 23:26:04 -0700

I was excited to notice that clicking "compose" in Safari (actually, a recent Webkit nightly build) doesn't give the "It's not going to work, even if we love you" warning anymore, but after trying it -- it should be there!

For starters, in Safari some of the formatting buttons aren't there (who cares) and more importantly the _link_ button isn't there (argh!).

Here's Firefox:

Picture 8

And here's Safari:

Picture 11

Ooops! Makes it hard to make link-y vox-posts!

Second problem I noticed: When I uploaded the pictures with Safari they ended up looking funny (they showed up next to each other). I tried clicking between them so I could add a few lines between them - which took me to my Vox page. Oops. Clicking the back button took me back to a blank Compose window that now wasn't editable!

So, dear Vox-creating-friends: Please either add the "It's really not going to work, just give up now" warning back, make it work in Safari or ... I forgot option 3, but option 3 would work too as long as it involves your awesome problem solving skills.

I try to use Firefox, but it just doesn't feel slick and pretty enough. Safari/WebKit is slick and pretty. Oh, and feels faster. I know it's supposed to be the other way around.

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Vox Mobile

nobody@vox.com(Ask Bjørn Hansen) — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 00:22:53 -0800

Vani told me about Vox Mobile today. Very neat! It is a palm os (and symbian etc etc) application that lets you post weblog entries (like this one) and photos from the phone. Too bad my Treo has such a terrible picture taking device.

What would be really neat would be "Flickr Mobile" built into my camera. Click and upload next the camera is on a wireless network! The camera would need wireless, but that's starting to happen.

(edited to add links - couldn't figure out to do that from the phone...)

Update: Oops - it made my phone (Treo 650) crash while I was in the Vox application. Not cool.

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Use the public service for the private data

nobody@vox.com(Ask Bjørn Hansen) — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 01:32:53 -0700

I've never been much for putting my data "somewhere else". Flickr, of course, convinced me to do it for my photos. Vox, I think, will convince me to do it for some of my weblog publishing needs. (I just hate writing "blogging", yuck).

My usual weblog is completely devoid of anything particular personal. Sorry, I'm just too shy to write anything personal to 50 to 150 thousand perfect strangers.

With the clever "friends only" setting on Vox, maybe it won't be so strange to do. We'll see. Until then I'm just enjoying the slick UI.

~~(Of course, even if I only want to invite an insignificantly tiny marginal fraction of last months 75000 visitors to askask.com, my one remaining invite to Vox is going to fall a bit short).~~

(Yay, got more invites, thank you benevolent benefactor)

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Fun!

nobody@vox.com(Ask Bjørn Hansen) — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 10:03:45 -0700

Woah. Vox UI Pretty.

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