In your web page, you want to print out a few identical items in a loop.  Perhaps you want 5 rows worth of initial inputs available in a form.

Problem:

Django’s template language has no way to do a simple numeric loop.

Solution:

{% for i in 12345|make_list %}

    {{ i }}

{% endfor %}

Notes:

Clearly this is not beautiful.  But, it works nicely for small cases, and it doesn’t require you to set up any additional template tags or add a range to your context in your view.  I’m sure others have used this approach before, but I couldn’t find anything about it by searching so I thought I’d share.

I just published my first post on the VideoSurf blog. It’s about a Greasemonkey script that I wrote to insert our VideoSurf visual summaries into Google, Yahoo! and Youtube search results pages. I think the script is pretty sweet and quite useful.

If you’re interested, there are screenshots and installation instructions on the VideoSurf blog:

http://www.videosurf.com/blog/never-get-rick-rolled-again-42/

If there are any Greasemonkey scripters out there, I’ll also share a cool discovery that I made along the way. There’s now a very easy way to include jQuery’s great functionality into your Greasemonkey scripts. You just need to add this line to the file’s header:

// @require http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.js


Having jQuery at your disposal can really speed up development and make it much, much less tedious. Check out the source of my VideoSurf script to see some of the ways that I used it.

Update: I made it on to Techmeme:

Update 1/8/2009: We turned it into a Firefox extension and added some awesome new features for the Youtube video page. Check it out, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10218/.

I’ve joined an amazing startup in San Mateo called VideoSurf. They’re doing some really innovative stuff with online video and I’m extremely excited about all the possibilities. Everything is still in stealth mode, but you should start to hear more about it in the coming months. If you’d like an invite to try the site out, email me and I’ll see if I can make it happen. No promises yet though.

As for FeedEachOther… While the site is extremely useful and loved by many, its current incarnation isn’t getting the traction necessary to turn it into a real business. Perhaps I’ll take it in a new direction in the future. I’m very proud of what I’ve built, but trying something new now is the the right move for me. I will still keep the site up and running, but active development has pretty much stopped.

If this worries anyone who’s currently relying on the site, I’ll be happy to help you export any of your information from the system. Send your requests via the FEO feedback page and I’ll work to add new export features to the site or run one-off scripts to get the data for you if necessary. However, take heart that the site will still be running for quite some time because I use it daily myself and I know that quite a few others do as well.

So, that’s that… Woah.

Viva VideoSurf!

However, the next day, she started getting a flood of phone calls from family members and close friends. “Woah, I just saw it on Facebook. You never told me you were seeing someone! Who is he???”. The source of this confusion? An item in her Facebook news feed that was broadcast to all her friends. It looked like this:

 Jane Doe is no longer listed as “Single”

This is extremely misleading and it can cause quite a bit of trouble. My first thought was that this is clearly a bug. A classic oversight in a complex set of interactions.

But is it?

Another friend that I discussed this with said, “dude, you’re being naive. Facebook does that stuff on purpose. They’re trying to stir up trouble. To get people talking. ”

That blew my mind a little bit. Am I naive? Are the product people are Facebook really so diabolical? My hunch is that they’re just young, busy and fallible. But, I could be wrong. It definitely got me thinking.

Maybe I need to be a bit more diabolical myself…

I like how “People” is so big.

Check out this one of a McCain speech, and this one of Obama’s race speech.

The main reason I’ve dropped off the blogging planet is that a few months ago I moved down to Buenos Aires. You could say that I outsourced myself.

A curious thing happens when you remove yourself from The Scene. You slowly stop getting urges to turn every glimmer of original thought into a full fledged online essay. You just ponder it, mention it to a friend, and move on.

That said, I do feel a bit delinquent in my duties because there have been so many interesting things going on in my life and so many fascinating things that I’ve noticed from this new perch of mine.

So, I write today to let you know that I’m still alive and that you can expect some more from me soon.

You can check out some of my Argentina pictures here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/udi/sets/72157603942126492/
(You need to be my friend on Flickr to see all the good stuff, sorry)

Lastly, please check out the hot new look that FeedEachOther is sporting today. The announcement is over at the FEO Blog. Personally, I think it’s a massive improvement when it comes to usability. Try it out, spread the word.

I’m reminded of this classic Chris Rock bit:

You know the worst thing about n***as? N***as always want some credit for some shit they supposed to do. A n***a will brag about some shit a normal man just does. A n***a will say some shit like, “I take care of my kids.”

You’re supposed to, you dumb mothaf***a. What are you talkin’ about? What are you braggin’ about? What kind of ignorant shit is that?

“I ain’t never been to jail.”

What do you want, a cookie? You’re not supposed to go to jail, you low-expectation-having motherf***er!

“Don’t be evil”. Well, of course you shouldn’t be evil. It’s obvious!

If this motto is seen as revolutionary or wonderful, then what does that say about our collective opinion of Corporate America?

Are things really so bad that not being evil is some sort of an accomplishment? Really? Why did we all fall for this? Shouldn’t we aim higher?

She also asked if anyone could think of any examples of deliberate inefficiencies built into social websites. After racking my brain for a few minutes I realized that we had actually done this on Yahoo! Answers.

When you ask a question, you have to wait a few hours before selecting a best answer. This forced waiting period pisses a lot of people off, but it’s a key piece of what makes the site work well. By forcing the asker to wait, enough time is allowed for more, and potentially better, answers to roll in. In the long run, this forced inefficiency benefits the community.

I’m really curious to see what other examples her readers come up with.

Here’s a brief excerpt from the story:

But there were a few reasons I found this preferable to the conventional ways of gathering interesting rebuttals to your own reasoning. If you send out a sample argument to all of your e-mail buddies, you will probably get some useful replies, but they may start to think you’re a little weird for asking them to evaluate your thought processes, especially if you do it over and over.

This hits home because I find myself constantly bothering friends and family for feedback on my new site, Feed Each Other. Everyone is happy to pitch in, but there’s a fine line between being charmingly inquisitive and being just plain annoying. After the 100th revision of the site’s registration flow, friends aren’t going to be interested in testing it anymore. It would be great if there were other people I could bother. People that could approach my site with a fresh, detached point of view.

Yahoo and Google pay people quite a bit of money to come in and do such usability testing. They have fancy labs with video cameras and one-way mirrors. It’s immensely useful to watch people play with your products in this manner, but it’s also expensive. Amazon‘s Mechanical Turk offers a poor man’s alternative.

After reading the story about the guy using the Turk to argue, I realized I could use it to get feedback on my website. I spent 5 minutes and whipped up a quick script asking people to visit my site, sign up, play around a little bit and write down their impressions, thoughts and questions along the way. I asked the Turk to let 10 people give it a go for $1 a piece. In the first hour I had my 10 responses.

Here’s why this is really cool:

1. It only took an hour. That’s pretty fast feedback.
2. The responders ranged from people that hadn’t ever heard of RSS all the way up to a big time blogger and JS geek that I read regularly.
3. 7 out of the 10 responses were reasonably interesting. They contained the sort of stream of thought information you’d expect from a proper usability test in a lab (although a lot less of it)
4. The other 3 were also interesting, but a bit too brief to glean anything other than a general impression. This is also still useful though.
5. This only cost $10 and not $1000
6. No one on my staff had to spend the testing time with the 10 users. All you have to do is write up one script.
7. These people are totally detached from my site and can offer honest, fresh perspectives.
8. I just got 10 new users! :)

Is this as effective as having a trained facilitator sit down with a user? Absolutely not. But, it’s a fantastic way to quickly get candid feedback from a variety of different people.

I plan on experimenting with this idea a bit more. It seems that $1 was enough to entice people to participate rather eagerly. I’d like to see how low I can go and still get reasonable responses. Also in question is the total size of the Mechanical Turk user pool. When will I run out of fresh users? I’d also like to try posing more specific questions. My initial script was only asking for general impressions of the site and of the registration process and I limited them to half an hour which was probably too short. A few of them mentioned that they were running out of time.

Here are some excerpts I enjoyed from the responses:

This is a fascinating site! I’ve known about Feeds but never got around to actually subscribing to any. I thought it was too much work. But your site makes it all so easy. Your site will save me so much time browsing to many different sites one at a time.

That put a smile on my face.

Generally I like the mission of the site and it does seem rich with content and perhaps a user-friendly experience.

Perhaps? :)

It seems like this site is a giant forum type site where people can post any random things that they’d like.

Hmmm. Kinda, I guess.

I will definitely join in because you fill a “need to know” I have re RSS. I feel like you are going to make it possible for me to organize the information I am interested in seeing in the best and most efficient way possible. More importantly, the sharing aspect is so very appealing to me. It’s like looking at what people have on their bookshelves. How better to learn something new, or something new about the person who owns the bookshelves than to see what they are reading? This is a fantastic concept and I wish you all the very best of luck with this project as I am sure it will be a great and positive success.

That’s what I’m talking about!

The links at the bottom need larger font size IMO. We baby boomers get tired of squinting!

That one’s for you Ofer. Done.

Wow, this registration thing was really good. Probably the simplest you can get, right?

I’m really proud of my simple little registration page. More than meets the eye.

Overall I really like the idea of the site and how it works. My only compliant would be that when a different theme is selected ( I chose black) the logos and images in the header get all blurry (I’m a graphic designer, sorry… ) But really, it’s a cool site. Like a combination of stumble upon and a feed reader, pretty awesome idea!

Not a bad way to put it.

I think it to be an Aladdin’s cave, so much to explore and to know about.This site will be very useful to explore the web n find out new n interesting facts and news etc. I think this site would prove very useful.

Aladdin’s cave!

This should give you a small taste of what type of feedback you can get with this method. I didn’t post the more critical items here because I’m not that daring, but there were indeed some and they were by far the most useful part of this exercise.

Here’s what Joshua had to say

Netflix rents most of its movies from the catalog of past movies, not from the current list of blockbusters. Same with Amazon and books, iTunes and music. Christopher Anderson goes into a lot more details in the book he wrote on the subject: The Long Tail.

When content is digital, a public good, it is freely distributable by electronic means. It is infinitely copyable at 100% fidelity. Moreover, as the Long Tail shows, libraries of content can be built cheaply which provide value for the long term. Once Google digitizes all the books in the world they won’t ever have to again.

In other words, all content is available at all times.

What does this lead to? The Paradox of Choice! There are simply too many things to choose from. Which of the thousands of movies on Netflix do I rent? Which of the books on Amazon do I read? Which of the songs on iTunes do I listen to?

He’s right on. Too many choices leads to confusion. The only way to help people find personally relevant things in such large collections is by giving them new ways to slice through the choices. Amazon, and later Netflix, did this brilliantly, and necessarily. Without such tools, their sites would be pretty useless.

The thing I’d like to point out about all this is that there are way more pieces information out there on the internet than there are movies and books. Yahoo! and Google index billions of web pages. Billions. And, that number is growing every day. How the heck does someone dive into that sea of information and come up with a small set of things that are worth actively monitoring? It’s not easy. In fact, it’s really, really hard. It’s similar to the problem that Amazon and Netflix have been tackling, but it’s a new space. Google did a pretty good job with search (and they did so with social design). But what about browsing? What about keeping up with the new stuff? What’s the canonical example of a tool to tackle the long tail of the browseable web? What comes to mind? Anything?

It feels to me like there is a void to be filled, and this is exactly why I felt the burning need to build Feed Each Other. A feed reader is a great way to keep track of information sources you care about, but how do you find out which sources to care about?

All of the leading feed readers were dropping the ball on this. They were giving people access to the largest set of information sources that has ever existed and providing them with an efficient way to monitor them, but they were putting almost no effort at all into helping people explore and discover new things. I just couldn’t believe that the market leaders were missing this opportunity. It seemed so obvious. I felt like I was taking crazy pills. Something had to be done.

The reason that RSS reading has not caught on with a mainstream audience is that until now it has been designed as a solitary experience. You pick the feeds you want to read. You read them. That’s it. Well, if you ask me, that’s really boring.

The only people that can think up a list of feeds worth reading at this point are geeks. We’re ahead of the curve. The sites we read every day were the first ones to add rss feeds. We’re willing to go through the trouble of cutting and pasting ugly urls, and we already have a huge list of bookmarks to work with.

But John Q. Citizen? He opens up a feed reader and goes “uhh, now what?”.

John Q. Citizen gets his online news from the NY Times. He reads his sports at ESPN. That’s about all he needs, and he’s pretty happy with that. He doesn’t even know that there is all of this other amazing stuff out there that he’s missing. He doesn’t know that there are 20 interesting blogs out there that could teach him more about his favorite hobby. He isn’t aware that there is some guy out there publishing an unofficial feed of set-lists from recent shows by his favorite band. He has no idea where to start looking or even that he should be looking. He has no need for a tool that lets him efficiently monitor many information sources because he doesn’t have many information sources that he wants to monitor. He doesn’t know that they’re out there.

John Q. Citizen needs a place where this long tail of the fresh web is exposed. Where he can see what his friends are reading every day. Where he can browse the fresh web by topic. Where he can find other people who share his interests.

Feed Each Other is an attempt to do this. It’s a full fledged feed reader. It does everything you’d expect from a good reader. But, it does more. It shows you feeds related to the feed you’re looking at. It points you to like-minded people who have similar subscriptions. It lets you go to the profiles of those people and see what else they’ve chosen to read. It lets you share the things you find in your feeds with your friends, family or co-workers (with very granular group & privacy controls of course). It shows you that your friend Steve just subscribed to a feed about stamp collecting (and you love stamp collecting!). Well, chances are that Steve found a keeper. You’ll probably want to jump on that and check it out.

Feed Each Other gives you the tools you need to explore that mess of stuff out there and find what is most personally relevant to you. It makes this herculean task into a more accessible group endeavor. You get introduced to narrowly focused news sources that you’ll love. This lets you unsubscribe from other noisy, broadly focused news sources that only rarely hit on the topics that you’re really interested in. The result is that you read more interesting things in less time. It’s just way more fun and interesting this way. Every day you can discover something new and potentially get rid of something old.

I tell people that I’ve built a new, social website and their eyes glaze over. “Social” has been done to death. I know this.

But you know what? This makes sense. It was done this way for a reason. It’s actually useful.