Tedx Mumbai was an independently organized TED event that was held in at BlueFrog, Mumbai on 3rd April 2010. Unfortunately for me, the event was held on the day before Easter, and so even applying to attend was out. Around the same time I was dabbling with a Ruby Script to automatically collate tweets matching a few keywords and tags. So I thought, let’s collate all the tweets from the event and then see the event from the eyes of twitter.
Some frantic coding later, my script was live on my server and I was set. Or so I thought.
The very next day, halfway on the way to work I realized that I had forgotten to setup a script to monitor the hashtag for the event. Out came my new Android phone to the rescue!! I managed to access my server, through Net2FTP and then copied the existing script and modified it using a web based editor and set up the script using my control panel, all from the phone. Whew!!
Net result was that I was setup, but about an hour late, so I missed out on a few tweets. I let my scripts run for the entire day as well as the next. What follows is an attempt to make some sense of the many voices out there. I do hope this bit of random craziness, gives you something interesting to read. (more…)
Archive for the ‘Coding’ Category
Amazon Wish Lists in Wordpress
Monday, August 3rd, 2009Recently Bhooshan contacted me for help in translating his ideas for a re-design of his existing blog. One of the features he had in mind was the display of his Amazon Wishlist on his blog. Now, I understand that there are several plug-ins that let you do that, so I thought that this should be easy as pie. It turns out that it wasn’t.
I first installed one of the most popular plug-ins called AVH-Amazon. This is one of the most extensive plug-ins available for Wordpress, so I figured that it ought to do the job. However, after installation I learned that due to a change in Amazon policy I would need to register at Amazon Web services and get a secret API key. The plug-in author didn’t provide one, as the key was going to be used by Amazon to monitor API usage and bill customers for use of those parts of its API that it charged a service fee for. Naturally the plug-in author didn’t want to risk it with his own API key, due to potential for misuse.
So faced with this roadblock and not wanting to go the extra mile and get an API key, I started looking for alternatives. I remembered that Amazon provided a RSS feed for a users Wishlist items. So I thought, what if I managed to extract the information from the feed itself ? As it is, I just wanted the item title, image and link to the item page, all of which were there in feed. Some tinkering in PHP and a few minutes later, I managed to parse the feed and show the items from the Wishlist. Voilà !! Instant Wishlist. 
While I am happy with the result so far, I was wondering if there are any other good plug-ins that would let me do this a bit more efficiently. Any ideas ?
Labs goes live !!
Monday, March 10th, 2008After a long delay, Labs is finally online. You can check out complete experiments and projects as well as read some articles that I have written. The Labs section will primarily showcase some of my small open source based projects as well articles and papers.
The very first project available for download is Loupe, the rails+flickr image gallery. This is the same gallery that I run my photography site on. So please visit the site, and download and try the scripts. Any feedback would of course be welcome.
Drupal
Sunday, February 24th, 2008I’ve been playing around with the open source CMS, Drupal. I wanted a CMS to use for my Labs section, and wanted something that was easy to set up and use. I have used Joomla previously, and while the set up is a no-brainer, feature wise Joomla is a bit more tedious to use. Good thing about Joomla is that it supports almost everything one could want, however to get the specific output from it, I had to tinker with a gazillion settings – something I didn’t quite enjoy.
But I digress, so back to Drupal. I took to Drupal since it seemed to be easier to set up and use. However in hindsight I think I was mistaken.
I'm Elroy Serrao, a technologist, photographer, and part time blogger from India.
I love to design web sites, program in php and rails in my free time and of course go trekking and clicking pictures in the great outdoors.
I'm from Mumbai, and am an alumnus of Mumbai University and NMIMS.