Normally, I don't do New Year's Resolutions, but this year, there is one simple one that popped to mind that A) is easy to do, and B) may be very valuable.

- Make a Home Inventory video -

I vow to set aside 30 minutes or so to videotape my household posessions, getting brand names, model numbers and serial numbers where possible, and storing that video "offsite". (An excellent use for free/cheap online storage sites like OmniDrive). You may never need it, but (Heaven forbid) if something should happen to your home, you'll at least have a document of the things that were in there to help with your recovery.

There are more helpful tips in this article as well.

Oooh - update, lots more good ideas over here in this MSNBC article.
 

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As a project to help me dive deeper into PHP and MySQL, I decided to put together a GoogleMaps-based site, called Storymap (I even nabbed the domain http://storymap.org). The general idea was "Here is a place where you can create a map of your own, and use it to help tell a story (ex. "Best coffee spots in Seattle", "Our vacation", "My friends", "Civil War battlefields", etc). The maps would be taggable, public/private, and hosted. Well... Storymap never actually saw the light of day, and now likely never will.

I spent many a night working out details, re-inventing a few wheels so I could learn a number of lessons I really needed. After the initial groundwork, i started losing steam, and running into some serious UI difficulties... The project languished, and I felt guilty about not working it to completion.

Then, a couple weeks ago, I found out about Wayfaring.com. Wayfaring does exactly what I was setting out to do, and frankly does it better and slicker. It's such a nice interface, I can't recommend it enough - if you're looking to make your own annotated map.

So, now that Wayfaring totally nailed what I was after, what do I do with Storymap? Walk away and feel great about it. They've filled a need that I felt was out there, and done it very well. My stuff was still weeks from completion, and was really headache-inducing in recent weeks. Plus, I learned a ton from the initial setup, so mission accomplished there.

About the only thing that I had in Storymap that Wayfaring doesn't have is the ability to grab and use Flickr images as map icons, I still hope to see that sort of thing integrated somewhere (I have it prototyped). I'm not going to link to my prototype page, because, frankly it's a bit of a mess. If you're dying to see it, you can drop me a line.

At any rate, it's great to get rid of a nagging project because A) most of my goals were met, and B) somebody else did it justice, and the idea saw the light of day.
 

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Web Mashups. I'm up to my neck in them this week.

First off, I was honored and happy to have given a talk about mashups at the TTI Vanguard NextGens Conference in Washington, DC yesterday. It was great fun, and the audience was fantastic (more conferences should be like this one - every audience member had a live mike in front of them, invited to chime in and be challenging). The slides from my chat are here, should anyone care to see them (and/or decipher them).

Secondly, I've got a new mashup (actually a chained mashup involving 4 separate APIs). Using the Washington Post's RSS Feeds as a source, I'm generating a "Washington Post current events booklist" once an hour. There are three sections, one for the Post's Nation, World and Politics sections.

There's more on the about page, but the short description of the API pipeline used to create the lists is: WaPo RSS -> Yahoo Term Extractor -> Yahoo Web Search (restricted to amazon.com domain) -> Amazon API Book Lookup (restricted to Current Events).

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