It’s the first day of 2010! What a better time than now to make a post about my favorite music of 2009? Just a quick note, I am not making a claim that this is the ‘best’ of 2009. Just my personal favorites.

Top 15 Albums:

1. Bill Callahan – Sometimes I Wish I Were an Eagle. Bill Callahan (aka Smog) has been around for a while. I’ve always enjoyed his music. However, this one just put me in a trance. I found myself listening to it more than any other album that came out in 2009. It’s relaxing with a good hint of darkness to keep it interesting. Sadly he doesn’t have a video out, but you can listen to some tracks on the Drag City link above.

2. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion / Fall Be Kind EP. This was going to be number 3 on the list until Fall Be Kind came out. While technically it’s another album, I see it as a companion piece. Both the album and the EP are amazing and should be checked out.

3. Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orcca. Another Domino release! I’m a programmer, not a writer. So, I’m going to end my descriptions here and just post the video :-)

4. Cass McCombs – Catacombs. Domino Again!

5. The XX – XX

6. Micachu – Jewellry

7. The Monks – Black Monk Time. Yes, this is a re-release.. but it needs to be appreciated. The founders of punk.

8. The Mantles – The Mantles. Sadly no video for these guys. But you can download their single off of their site here.

9. The Very Best – Warm Heart of Africa. No clue if this is an ‘official’ video.

10. The Sandwitches – How to Make Ambient Sad Cake. No video for these gals either. But you can listen to the track ‘Back to the Sea’ here.

11. Girls – Album.

12. White Denim – Fits

13. Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest

14. NODZZZ – NODZZZ

15. Kid Cudi – Man on the Moon

Apologies for going MIA. I had a bout of the swine flu and then came Thanksgiving, getting slammed at work and then Christmas. So least to say, it’s been quite busy.

And now, we are at that time of the year. The ‘year in review’ post. I’m a music junkie and I am an internet geek. That means I love making lists, and especially love making year end lists.

However, I don’t necessarily love writing a blog, so I’ll keep this short and quick. 3 lists. That’s all.

Top 6 things of the year:

1. Getting married. Yes, as cheesy as that sounds, it’s number one. It was a great time, and I couldn’t be happier.

2. I finally made it to Europe! For the honeymoon we went to Italy. We hit Venice, Rome and Cinque Terre. I can’t recommend Cinque Terre enough. If you want to go somewhere amazing, that isn’t packed with tourists, and isn’t outreagously expensive, I recommend Cinque Terre. You can read more of my thoughts on it on a past blog post.

3. I’m not going to put anything here. The first two deserve some separation from the rest of the pack.

4. Seattle. I have wanted to go to Seattle for more than 10 years. The climate always appealed to me (I have trouble breathing in humid/warm air, so cool climate gives me more energy). The beautiful scenery and all the national parks in close proximity sure doesn’t hurt either. It was all that I hoped it would be.

5. Pentax 6×7. While I’m a tech geek, I like to dabble with the old as well. I like collecting old photos, and I like taking photos with old cameras. For christmas my wife bought me a Pentax 6×7. I was borrowing one from a friend, Mark Katzman, and to my surprise, it is the one she bought me. So I was lucky enough to try the camera out before deciding that it was what I wanted. I have been looking for a medium format camera with a built in light meter for a while. And this one is perfect. The quality of the photos it takes are amazing. Now I have no excuses when I take bad photos! Also, the shutter sounds like a pump action shotgun, which makes me feel pretty bad ass.

6. Dropbox. Dropbox is by far one of the best tech finds of the year. It makes backing up files, quickly sharing photos, or moving files between home and work easy as can be.

Top 3 things I’m looking forward to next year:

1. MYOS. It’s a CMS I built at my work. It is still pretty young and immature. But it’s coming together better than I hoped. So far, it is making building CMS based sites infinitely easier, quicker and more solid.

2. Boxee. My wife and I just bought a tv for the bedroom. I had an old micro form computer sitting at my parents. I built it a couple years ago. It’s all passive heating and is super quiet. I plan on dusting it off and putting Boxee on it!

3. iMac. I think this may be the year I upgrade my iMac. The 27″ iMac’s look stunning. Hear’s to hoping the solve the flickering and the shipping problems that end up with a busted corner.

The final list, my favorite albums of the year will be coming shortly (i mean it).

I have no idea if the economy is really improving or not. But I can say that work has picked up drastically this quarter. It seems like everyone was waiting till now to spend. Hopefully it keeps going into 2010…

Anyhow, just a short update. I’m working on the new kiosk for The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. It is flash based and will have a little bit of 3D. I noticed while working on it that all the dynamic fonts got really fuzzy once rotationY had been tweened. Even if I reset it to 0 there wasn’t anything that would remove the fuzziness.

Much thanks to Edzis for his post called “Blur on rotationY = 0 Use transform.matrix“. In order to set the font back to normal you will need to manually update the rotated objects transform.matrix.

Hopefully Adobe will fix this in the future.

In December of last year I left MediaTemple for WebFaction. And in less than a year I am back at MediaTemple. This is now my third time with MT. What is with this love that I have for them?

Well, this time I’m on their Dedicated Virtual (DV) plan. Their grid server plans may be great for some, but I will no longer use them or recommend them. MediaTemple has always had great support. I love their panel, and they have a great knowledge base and are very pro active in the community. Their Grid Server, however, can just be downright slow at times.

However, I’ve come around to finally realizing and admitting that that is just what you get when you are paying under 20$/month for hosting. I can’t afford dedicated hosting. So Dedicated Virtual is the next best thing. And in my opinion, MT offers a great package. And since I now host my email with Gmail, I don’t even need but half of the space on the plan.

So I made a pact. A friend of mine, Nate Sprehe of the newly founded Almanac went in with me to split a DV account. We each only get 10gig and 15 domains. However, it’s plenty for me. I’m paying $20/month and getting dedicated service.

Don’t get me wrong, WebFaction was better than most shared hosting providers, despite their unique way of managing sites and domains. Towards the end they did have some email problems which prompted me to move all my email to Gmail – a move which I highly recommend. SpamAssasin can not compete with Gmail. In addition to email, I had some issues with a couple aspects of the WebFaction setup:

• Email user names. You can have name@domain.com as your email. However, that isn’t what you log in as. You log in as a user name created in the panel. This name could be anything. It doesn’t have to be related at all to your email. This can be nice when you have a number of emails coming into one inbox. However, for some reason this user name doesn’t just have to be unique to your account, but to the server you are on! So if there is another ‘tyler’ on the server, well, that can’t be my email user name.
• When you FTP into the server, you can navigate up one level and see every users folder on the server. While I do not have permission to enter these folders… it just bothered me that I could even see them. I am no security expert, so I can’t say if that is a security issue or not. My gut just felt uncomfortable by it.

So.. good bye WebFaction. It was a fun 10 months.

Hello MediaTemple.. I guess you knew i’d be back right? Third time’s the charm? I hope so.

At TOKY, we’ve built a couple sites for clients who wanted a site search. Rather than re-invent the wheel we’ve tried using Yahoo’s search (this was pre BOSS) as well as Google’s Custom Search Engine (CSE). We have had problems with both search applications. In particular, the results would be different from page to page. For instance, when searching an item it may tell me that there are 300 total results. But then three pages into those results it would tell me that there were really only 37 total search results.

This would make it quite difficult to include total search results for a search on the page. It also prevented us from providing pagination as a method of browsing the results. Instead we can only provide Previous Page / Next Page style navigation of the results.

I contacted Yahoo, and they explained that they were working on it. The issue was mainly because the search would hit a different server with each search call.

I tried contacting Google, but never had much luck getting an answer.

However, after testing CSE a bit more, I noticed that this issue was consistently happening on certain searches and at certain pages within the result set. Therefore, the issue couldn’t have been the same as it was with Yahoo’s search app.

I started playing with every parameter that can be customized when calling CSE. I found one that seems to fix the problem: filter. Here is what the API says about filter:

“Optional. The filter parameter activates or deactivates the automatic filtering of Google search results. See the Automatic Filtering section of this document for more information about Google’s search results filters.

The default value for the filter parameter is 1, which indicates that the feature is enabled.

Note: By default, Google applies filtering to all search results to improve the quality of those results.”

I turned this filter off and search results were consistent from page to page. Google may recommend that the filter is enabled, however, in the majority of my tests the first couple pages of results were the same with it on or off. If the filter was turned on, I would still encounter the issue where 3-5 pages into the results the total number of search results would drop dramatically.

If the main difference is that I get extra pages of search results, I’ll take it. I’d much prefer that over the chance of changing the total search results from page to page or even worse, using pagination and allowing the user to go a page of search results that doesn’t exist.

It is now one month to the day since I last posted.

I really do want to post more often! Sigh… This month was just a busy one, and it didn’t get off to a great start.

I was in a car accident. Nothing major, no one was hurt. Just a fender bender where I caused the bending. I was merging onto the highway and after looking over my shoulder to make sure i had room to merge, when I turned back around everyone in front of me had started slamming on their brakes. I wasn’t able to swerve quickly enough and ended up catching the person in front of me.

I have never been in an accident before. The main thing I remember is the smell.

Shortly after this, my month did get better. Rachel & I took a short trip to Seattle. I had never been to the northwest, let a lone to Seattle. I love the combination of a metropolis nestled in such beautiful landscapes. Mountains in every direction and right on Puget Sound. We were there only three days but we were able to experience every kind of weather that Seattle can produce – one day was sunny, hot and beautiful. The next was cloudy with a 5 minute drizzle. The last day was off and on with thick storms.

We had one day where we could make a day trip out of the city. We decided try our luck with weather and go to Hurricane Ridge. If you are unfamiliar with Hurricane Ridge, it is in the Olympic National Park. It has an elevation of 5,200 feet amazing views of the mountains within the Park and to the north, a view of The Strait of Juan DeFuca, Victoria B.C. as well as the coastal mountains of mainland B.C.

Sadly, as we started our accent of the mountain the clouds rolled in, along with the wind, and sleet. What was a 65 degree day dropped below 40 as we climbed. When we got to the top we barely had 40 feet of visibility:

Both Rachel & I loved our time in Seattle and hope that we can make it out there again soon. I’d love to have more time to experience the city and areas near by (Mt. Baker, Bellingham, Anacortes, San Juan Islands…etc).

I wasn’t making websites when the bubble first started, so I don’t know what it was like. But it always had a wild west lore. It seemed like anything could happen. Everyone was excited about the possibilities of what could be done. This is what iPhone development seems like to me – or rather I should now say ’seemed’.

I’m sure that I am like every developer out there. Trying to come up with the one app that could make you thousands of dollars. However, Apples approval process seems to be getting more press than the apps that are actually getting approved. For the most recent example of Apple App Store ineptitude read about the Facebook app approval process at theAppleBlog.

What makes the internet great is that anyone can put anything up. No matter how stupid, silly or great it is. Everyone can do something. It’s how little side projects can turn into unexpected internet sensations. Apple’s current approval process stifles all this. And, honestly, as a developer doesn’t make me want to develop an iPhone app.

This plugin has a new home. It will now permanently be hosted on Wordpress.org:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vimeo-badge-widget/

If you downloaded it off my site, you may want to re-download it from Wordpress.org. One person who was trying to use the plugin was running into problems because their server didn’t have cURL installed. I found wp_remote_get() in the Wordpress Codex. Sadly, it’s not documented at all.

So, if you’d like to make a call to another server, it looks like wp_remote_get would be the function to use. It checks to see what is available on the server and then uses the appropriate function. You can use it as so:

$response = wp_remote_get($remote_url, array('timeout' => 60));


About a week or two ago I was building a blog for a client who asked if a Vimeo Badge could be added to their sidebar. I expected there to be a plethora available. However, I was stunned to find that this was not the case. I tried Vimeo RSS, but I wasn’t really satisfied.

This afternoon I decided to write my own. Just a simple widget that allows a user to select the number of videos, and then grab the videos for a user, a users album, a group or even a channel.

It was also my first venture into Widgets since Wordpress released 2.8 and their new Widget API. I must say, I’m really impressed with the new API. For someone who has never used it before, I was able to develop a widget in under two hours. It’s nice, simple and very intuitive.

I’ve submitted it to Wordpress and hopefully it will be in their repository soon. In the mean time, you can grab it here: http://tylercraft.com/vimeo-badge-widget.zip

Tylr Slidr has been updated and is now at 1.5.

The latest release has had the following updates:

• Tested for 2.8.
• Upgraded swfobject from 2.1 to 2.2.
• Using Flickr slideshow swf version 71649

Download it here.