We wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone for making our launch week a success!

Happily, we find ourselves at the end of the week having met all the goals we’d set, having met some cool folks, and–of course–having learned about a bunch of interesting spots!

Special thanks goes out to all of the folks that have taken the time to report problems and to offer suggestions. We can’t overstate the value of your many contributions.

Thanks again for being part of Spotstory’s story!

GregPC from Over the River reveals that he is really getting a kick out of Spotstory. I wonder how many more Picasso statues will be uncovered? (This will make sense when you read his post!)

Greg’s spots include two of my recent favorites: the MIT Skull and The Longfellow Bridge Towers.

We’re looking for someone to help us re-envision the page designs we’ve been staring at for the last six months! We want to improve usability, appearance, and ultimately provide a more delightful experience for our users.

We’re looking for someone who is:

• at least a little experienced and/or trained in design/UI/UX
• passionate about finding innovative, attractive, and elegant ways to present information
• user centric
• reliable
• preferably in the Boston, MA area

We can actually pay for this work though our budget is limited. We can also offer Ruby on Rails development services in exchange. We might consider a more strategic relationship with the right person.

If you’d like the opportunity to work on a neat site with a couple decent and fun guys, email me at matthew@spotstory.com for more details.

When you launch your website, you’re supposed to have a schwanky launch party. Not wanting to flout tradition, that’s just what we did.

We held ours at the Bruegger’s Bagels in Belmont Center (Belmont, MA), yesterday at 10 AM. The event was held in the booth in the corner, which is ideal since it is near an outlet.

The first photo is of Aron enjoying himself. Aron had already eaten his bagel by the time I had arrived. He’s usually not that hungry and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t even late.

The photo to the right shows the lavish spread laid out for the festivities. That’s a honey grain bagel with jalapeno cream cheese and some sort of mango juice drink.

A great time was had by all.

Tonight, we took down the ever-so-mysterious landing page from www.spotstory.com, and put up the site we’ve been plugging away on for the past few months.

This doesn’t mean we’re done working on the site—not even close! We’re still looking for any and all feedback: complaints, suggestions, questions, or whatever. You can reply to this email, or look on the “contact us” page to find all the ways you can reach us.

To those who’ve already been on the site, thank you so much for your help and your time. It is difficult for us to express how much we appreciate your support. Thank you. Thank you.

If you haven’t been to the site yet: welcome to Spotstory!

Now, for a little entertainment! Here is the worldwide premier of the Spotstory Launch Theme:

Update

Here is an write up and video interview from MarksGuide.

This article which appeared on the cover of The Boston Globe last week reminded me of how much there is to see on the MBTA’s Green Line.

First, you can try to spot the different type of LRV (light rail vehicle) cars. There are three types in service right now: Type 7 I (numbered 36xx), Type 7 II, (numbered 37xx), and Type 8 (numbered 38xx). Honestly, I can’t tell the two different Type 7s apart without looking at the car numbers. At Boylston station you can see some older trolleys: a very cool retro looking PCC car dating to the 1940-50s, and an old-timey looking car from the 1920s.

Boylston station is itself a curiosity: it’s oddly shaped and the track follows a path of tortuous contrivance. It’s nonsensical. But apparently this madness is a product of age. Earlier in its life Boylston was the junction of several tunnels and inclines which required this more complex design.

The tunnels themselves have a number of sights to be seen, but you’re going to have to sit in the front of the car, stare intently out the front window, and ignore the people wondering what you’re doing. Here are a couple of examples.

Just after leaving Boylston heading towards Arlington, you can see a new tunnel veering to the right. Between these two stations are supposed to be traces of: the Charles Street incline, the Public Gardens incline, and a part of an unfinished tunnel. I think I concluded at one point that I am describing the Public Gardens incline, but I can’t be sure. I’m still intently searching for traces of the other two.

Coming into Kenmore, if you look to the right, you’ll very easily see the rails of the Kenmore Portal which once led up to Commonwealth Avenue. If you disembark and return to the surface, it’s easy to see where the incline once emerged.

There’s more than that to see. The MBTA shuts down pretty early for a major metropolitan area (somewhere around 1AM, I believe.) I wonder if anyone has ever tried to organize a sanctioned, after-hours tour of the system. I know I’d take it, even if it is past my bedtime.

If you’d like to read more about this, I recommend 100 Years of the Tremont Street Subway. If you have any details on other things to see I’d love to hear them.

As I posted on Sunday night, I participated in the BarCamp Boston 2 programming contest.

Mike Walsh has been gracious enough to edit and host a video of the contest presentations. Many thanks to Mike for his work and to everyone else for making BarCamp Boston 2 a great experience!

Dave Winer has been building and publicizing some really interesting things with pushing RSS-based content into Twitter.

Sites have had SMS and email alerts for ages (CNN’s breaking new alerts; ESPN’s sports score updates). All of these older models needed unique sign-ins, distinct configuration options; a wholly non-uniform experience.

With Dave’s (and other’s) work, Twitter becomes an extensible platform for micro-distribution. Any site with an RSS feed is now able to broadcast updates to Twitter subscribers. They need not worry about their own SMS integration. Users don’t need to worry about endless signups or giving away identifying information to all of these sites.

RSS is the syndication format (in and outbound); SMS/web are the delivery mechanisms, and Twitter is the intermediary.

Matthew claims that I am a superstar, but it’s really less glamorous.

Part of the BarCamp Boston 2 conference was a programming contest.

During the whole first day, people wrote words on a blackboard. At the end of the day, some 11 words were chosen. From these words participants needed to build software which used at least four.

My entry, Pixels to Penguins was one of about seven different entries from different teams of different sizes. All the presentations were very well done, and all quite light-hearted; a great end to the weekend.

Pixels to Penguins took user input, performed a flickr search for related tags, then performed another flicker API call to find images which matched those related tags. The images were mapped onto an ASCII-art rendering of Tux, the Linux penguin; JavaScript made these images appear gradually. To accompany this beautiful scene, all of the data was converted into an integer stream and a 4-track MIDI file was generated. What beautiful music!

The judges named Pixels to Penguins the winning contest entry. The top two teams (three of us in total) won a helicopter ride with Phil Greenspun. I’ve never been in a helicopter!

The (Ruby on Rails) code for Pixels to Penguins is here. I’ve found that it works best under the FireFox browser. My presentation is here.

Update: I’ve had reports that this hack hangs some browsers, so buyer beware. I have been using it successfully on Firefox/MacOSX, but Safari hangs. Firefox/Windows seems to also have problems. If you figure it out, please add a comment to this post!

Update2 I think the browser hangs have been resolved. I was toggling visibility by altering opacity from 0 to 1. A number of browsers were not happy with so much opacity changing so quickly. Now, I’m simply changing the visibility CSS attribute. Please let me know if you still experience troubles with my Pixels to Penguins hack. (Really, it’s nothing more than a cute hack.)

First I want to say thank you to everyone who put together and paid for Boston BarCamp 2. I know that it’s billed as “organized on the fly by attendees” and I know many people chipped in a few dollars, but a small group of generous and hard working folks shouldered most of the load.

This was my first BarCamp and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, and I’d have to describe my experience as mixed, but positive overall.

I only attended the Saturday sessions. Sunday’s agenda had very little that appealled to me and I didn’t want to make the trip over to MIT. However, I could have stepped up and presented something, and chose not to. I’ve been to many a $800 conference with a dead day on the schedule and felt angry at the loss of my time, so I don’t actually count this against the unconference.

The quality of the sessions I attended on Saturday was mixed, but at BarCamp you can get up and walk to another session, which I did. Some were downright excellent. (Many of the sessions discussed financing startups. It would be interesting to see folks from the venture community show up at the next one and host a talk.)

There was lots of conversation in the hall and over coffee and lunch. I don’t know if that is a function of the event’s size, the nature of the attendees, or both.

So overall, it was a good experience. I’ll very likely be at the next one. I came away having learned more about some subjects than I expected, received pointers to interest and opportunities, and met (and re-met!) some new people. Not a bad return on a few dollars and a few hours!

(Aron attended both days and became a big star! He will be posting presently.)