Much to my surprise, the Waterfall (side bar) has been working well in providing me an outlet to rant about random things without polluting the main content area for interesting posts. However, the inability to "wade" through the stream history in a clean UI has been slightly irksome, and of all the content, the photos are perhaps the most interesting to review.

Which is why I whipped up a simple Gallery to get an organized overview of all the interesting photos uploaded (accessible from the new Camera icon in the top right menu).

Gallery view of my pictures

It's quite simple, but should suffice for the time being. I am particularly eager to migrate some of my older content and see if there are any interesting patterns that emerge in my pictures over the years.

Was digging through some screenshots I took earlier and stumbled upon this gem:

Google search magic

From what I recall, it was after hearing a pretty great NPR interview where I heard her name and tried to search it on Google. I don't know if it is phonetically analyzing the query or what, but it is pretty remarkable that the search engine was able to correlate exactly what I was looking for as the first result.

After seeing so many projects shift over to GitHub, I decided to give it a quick try recently, and it really feels like the simplest way to get started with a hosted git repository. The setup workflow is pretty smooth, the code browsing/diff tools are decent, and they even have a pretty awesome 404 page! I'm really hoping that they add some form of code search.

While racking my brain as to what to actually host, I figured I would learn a bit more about Chrome extensions. Surprisingly, the whole process, from experimenting to publishing, was pretty seamless. I ended up creating a small extension that just copies all the current tab’s addresses to the clipboard (which I often find myself doing as an oldschool way of keep track of links).

In general, the Chrome extension API seems pretty powerful allowing you to manage many aspects of the browser from history to tabs and windows. I really like the simplicity of the structure of an extension package, but the docs can use a little more organization, and the edit->save->reload workflow a bit more automation.

If you’re bored, check out the extension at the Web Store, and at GitHub.

Using the free micro EC2 instance (first year only) and S3 at a cost of:

April – $0.05
May – $0.08
June – $0.07
July – $0.07
August – $0.07
September – $0.08
October – $0.19

Have I mentioned how awesome Amazon's web services are?