http://benjaminsmithphotography.com/

Photography has been a hobby of mine for awhile, and I have thousands of pictures on Flickr. I’m the first to admit that most of them are utter crap. As I’ve gotten better, the ratio of crap pictures to good ones has gotten better. Still, even out of my good pictures, there’s only a few that I’d like to show to the world as my best work.

So, I decided to build a little Rails app that would show off my best photos from Flickr. I created a Set on Flickr and added my best pictures to it. Then using the Flickr API, my Rails app displays the photos in a nice, clean, professional looking layout (although I think there’s some bugs in IE). I also decided to pull posts from my blog relating to photography, giving the site some nice content as well.

I’m thinking about cleaning up the code and open sourcing it. Maybe even added support for other photo bucket sites and out blogging engines. For now, it makes for a sweet way to show off my photos.

The Clymb is a new deal site that sells outdoor gear, and I got a beta invite! Beta invite, plus cheap gear sounds right up my alley. The site which goes live on Wednesday follows a model similar to woot.com. One deal per week at very discounted rates. They also have a concept of GreenShipping, which is an interesting idea.

The Clymb has plenty of competition. I already monitor steepandcheap, OutDoorDaily, REI’s Deal of the Day, Whiskey Milita, and SpadOut. So we will see how they fair.

If you’re interested in checking out the site and signing up for a beta account you should DEFINITELY use this link: http://theclymb.com/invite-from/BenjaminSmith because if you use that link, and you end up buying something, then I get $10 credit towards my next purchase! And since I don’t have an actual job at the moment, I will need as much free credit as I can muster for new gear!

Meet Bobble Head Ben. Thanks guys, I’ve had a great year working at OpenRain!

It seems to be very easy to fill your blog up with useless crap. A common example of that would be 99% of the myspace profile pages that exist. I can’t help but want to add things that I think are useful though. What I would really like is to have the whole right side bar disappear until the user moused over a certain icon or area of the screen. Keep it nice and clean until the reader wants to see more. Hmm… ]]> http://disjointthoughts.com/2006/06/29/delicious/feed/ 0 http://disjointthoughts.com/2006/06/28/golf/ http://disjointthoughts.com/2006/06/28/golf/#comments Wed, 28 Jun 2006 22:09:19 +0000 Ben http://disjointthoughts.com/?p=89 I never learned how to play golf (except my brother and I seeing how far we could drive on the farm, then using the quad to ride around picking up the balls). My father wanted me to learn how to play because he felt that all the big business deals were made on the golf course. If I didn’t learn how to play, he thought I would run into a glass ceiling or something. Every now and then I wish I knew how to play, but I don’t think it has effected my career.

In related news: Woot (who typically sells techy/geeky/nerdy things) has a driver for sale. ]]> http://disjointthoughts.com/2006/06/28/golf/feed/ 0 http://disjointthoughts.com/2006/06/23/aim-phoneline/ http://disjointthoughts.com/2006/06/23/aim-phoneline/#comments Fri, 23 Jun 2006 10:35:32 +0000 Ben http://disjointthoughts.com/?p=86 I signed up for a local phone number via AOL’s free voip service. It’s supposed to allow you to accept unlimited incoming calls. Combine this with Skype’s free outgoing calls and you’re all set. The problem is AOL sucks! I signed up for the service, downloaded and installed the latest AIM client and tried calling myself from my cell. The AIM client notifies me that there’s an incoming call, but when I click on the Answer button it just sits there trying to connect my call. From the calling end, the line keeps ringing until it goes to voice mail. I tried running it on my work pc and my laptop without sucess. There also seems to be some bugs when you run two AIM clients at the same time and try to answer a call from one.

I think it’s still in beta, so I guess I can’t be too harsh. I would say it’s definately worth signing up for a local number incase there’s a limit on how many the give out. But I would wait for the service to mature before attempting to use it.