Although I’ve made tweaks, I had never redone my personal home page, , until  now. Nothing major, but it wasn’t very pretty or that well organized, and as it’s effectively “my face on the web,” it needed a bit better than that.

It’s still a very simple page; in fact I actually removed most of what had been there, without adding anything other than including my most recent project in the list of projects. Like the old version, the page is marked up with , not that I expect it to be all that useful. No Javascript is used, because there’s nothing that warrants it. It’s a bit more readable on both desktop and mobile devices.

In some ways having a personal home page almost seems quaint, but I can’t imagine not having one. I cringe a bit when I see people use a page on a service controlled by someone else (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.).

It’s been an incredibly long time since my last post on this blog. This post is partially a reminder to myself, that I have no intention of ever closing this blog. In fact, I often compost new posts in my head when not online, and never get around to posting about them. I need to fix that.

So, in no particular order, here is some random stuff I’ve been involved with or are on my mind right now.

• I still run viagra online, a project I introduced in my previous post. While it is the same basic site as it was when I first announced it, it has been improved in almost every way since then. There’s lots more still to go. Waste Nothing has it’s , but I have largely only been announcing major updates on there, and the same goes for the .
• Largely as a result of Waste Nothing, there are lots of little viagra online or techniques I’ve done that I think are worth sharing with others, and I’ve intended for a long time to write them up here for everyone’s benefit. I’m still planning on that.
• I had put my viagra online project on hold to focus on Waste Nothing, and that is still the case. Someone wanted to use quizify.com, and as I wasn’t really using it much, I let it go. So if and when I come up with an online quiz/study tool in the future, it won’t be at that address. I’ve returned to Quizify’s old url, , and that page will have further information if there every is any.
• Waste Nothing provides information about all sorts of waste reduction options; largely local services that are different everywhere. I’ve now begun one such local service, the , which is in the early stages but will probably have its first event in April.
• I was initially pretty upset about the closing of viagra online. After all, I’m am extremely dependent on it, and have been for years. I switched to it after years of using Bloglines, when that services was starting to fail too often to use. But I’m starting to think that it’s a good thing… many similar services are starting to spring up and existing competitors are improving their operations. I refuse to believe this is the death of RSS, and perhaps it’ll lead to greater innovation that Google Reader was effectively stifling.
• viagra online… so many years on, and I still haven’t figured it out. I have a couple of accounts (personal, Fagan Finder, Waste Nothing, Repairathon), but writing short things frequently has never been my style. I’m much better at spending a long time to do something carefully researched and thought out. Despite this, I’m trying to force myself to adopt the Twitter-style cultural norms for my newest project at the . It feels weird. On my Waste Nothing Twitter account, I follow tons of other accounts related to reducing waste in some way (over 1,300)… which sounds cool, but it makes Twitter completely useless for actually reading. The signal-to-noise ratio on the site just does not work. There’s a feature they have (Discover > Tweets) that works a bit better, but I know there’s got to be something much better than that still.
• I thought the viagra online offered by was really cool when it first came out, but it was far too expensive for me to even consider it. Not anymore, and I finally did the test a few months ago. My ancestry results were very much what I expected, but it is still very neat to see that all, as well as the health information. Oh, and I’m 2.5% neanderthal.

Long time no blog, I know.

Some time ago I put Quizify on hold to work on a new project. I like Quizify, but I wanted to do something more important, something that can make a difference to the environment. I’ve been working on , which is a long-term project for me. It’s a simple service where you can look up what to do with anything you no longer want, from orange peel to old books to makeup and more. In fact, you can try it out right here:

The main reason that I haven’t mentioned it before is that much of the data is location-specific and might not apply to everyone reading this. Thanks to Toronto’s Open Data initiative, I have brought in Toronto data as a demonstration and am now looking for other cities and organizations to partner with; to bring in their data and make it available to their residents.

If you find it useful and want the service available where you live, let me know.

Waste Nothing is built on Ruby on Rails, which I had been putting off learning but am now very glad that I have. Waste Nothing may never have gotten this far without it.

It has been about a year and a half since my  post, which continues to be quite popular. I immediately started writing a followup, and naturally never finished or published it.

Since I’ve been getting questions about it lately, I hereby present my entirely unorganized notes that would have been used to actually do some research and finish the followup:

amplify has some improvements, but you need to slightly change the API call… need to compare it to the older one

calais updated some stuff … do I need to relook?

new features on alchemyapi

other changes
* note evri non-commercial use and that you can’t store longer than 2 weeks
* look into opencalais having ’semantic links’ (read the comments)
new APIs
*Wingify doesn’t really do what I want but may be of interest to others
; API details if you contact them…
* let’s you do some simple classification based on giving it some training data; there are
a number of sites like this but not what I’m looking for

comment on original blog post by Andraz Tori

* no api, but

* Apache UIMA incubator project
*

and – two examples with no public APIs