In order to finished up another one of my grandiose website ideas The Mint Consortium will have to wait a little longer. I really think my new site idea is a good one. I don’t want to give anything about it until I get closer to finishing it.

The robots are coming for us!!

After failing miserably trying to find a way to successfully updating my Jaiku status externally, I decided to give up. It has seemed like I had tapped all the resources online describing how you do it, but I just couldn’t get it to work on my end. My first attempt was following Jaiku’s instructions in using OAuth to connect to the site, but I soon found out that the callback URL pass doesn’t actually “call back” to your site. Anyway, I started trying my somewhat limited knowledge of cURL until I finally struck gold. Here’s what I got:

$username = "your_username";
$personal_key = "your_personal_key"; // Get yours here
$status = "your_status_message";
$icon = 300; // For the whole list go here
postToJaiku($username, $personal_key, $status, $icon);

function postToJaiku($username, $personal_key, $status, $icon = 300) {

  $ch = curl_init();
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://api.jaiku.com/json");
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array("Content-Type: application/json"));
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
  curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "user=" . urlencode($username) .
      "&personal_key=" . urlencode($personal_key) .
      "&method=post&message=" . urlencode($message) . "&icon=" . $icon);

  curl_exec($ch);
  curl_close($ch);
}

mikekrisel:

Just finishing up the sweetest site known to man. http://www.what-noway.com

Joking, It’s just a hobby. A very fun and delicious hobby.

Indeed. Soon it will be ready to take on the world!

A few years back the Mint Consortium was born out of 2 developers and a few tins of mints. The Mint Consortium grew with each passing week as a new tin was added. The Mint Consortium was built with the intent of creating a diversity of mints. It was only a matter of time until one of the co-founders started introducing bad tasting mints to the Consortium until it was no longer tolerable. He was therefore banished from the Consortium and soon established the Mint Empire. The Empire and Consortium dueled for months until both associations dwindled down to a few mints each. The Mint Consortium has been in hiding for some time.. until now. Witness the Rebirth of the Mint Consortium!

Fun with images :D

Courtesy of 300 and Black20

Today I created an account for my online Gravatar and was faced with one of the most difficult decision this year.. rating my Gravatar. To be honest I was kind of thrown off by this concept, but I guess it makes sense since I’ve seen some pretty crude avatars as of recent.

I have a regular set of images I tend to use for an avatar on various sites I have an active account with. My favorite by far I call, “Bat-to-face-man.” Click here for the original source image. I wasn’t sure whether to rate my Gravatar with a G or PG rating. I mean, it is voilent in a sense, but it’s a harmless picture nevertheless. I ended up giving it a PG rating cause there is some mild violence… and also because G ratings are for cartoons and wussies.

What I felt like after trying to work with Jaiku’s API and utterly failing.

I actually came up with this idea a few years ago, but didn’t have the motivation to go through with it until now.

The general idea came from Conan O’brian’s sketch “What in the World?” where he would show an extremely magnified image and then zoom out until the image was recognizable. I took the idea and ran with it a little bit and decided to make a game out of it. Basically, users will either upload and crop their own images for others to figure out or make guesses on other contributor’s images.

If you can read this, then I successfully used Tumblr’s API to post a blog entry. Woot! Hurrah!