The Third Monday of January

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Aaron Jorbin

Every year for the past ten years, I have spent at least part of the third Monday of January listening to Dr. King’s “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” speech. It’s my tradition and one I encourage you to partake in as well:

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How was my site shared in 2011?

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Aaron Jorbin

A cool project that my team at AddThis worked on to start the new year was to build an individual info graphic for a number of our publishers. To do this, we built a basic HTML page and used PhantomJS to convert them into pngs. We then used imagemagick to spice things up a bit. All in all, they turned out pretty cool and hopefully the publishers agree once they have had a chance to check them out.

Check out the info graphic for this site after the jump. It’s pretty cool to see how people shared my content over the last year.
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Two Chrome Extensions I’ve Started Using

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Aaron Jorbin

I’ve started using two chrome extensions lately.  Both are pretty simple and are designed to make one thing easier.

The first is The Png Project which makes it so that on any Noun Project page, you can download the image as a png.  I used it when I made Aaron Jorbin in 2011.

The second is by Evan Solomon and it adds a link the the SVN repository of any WordPress plugin on the plugin repository page you are on. WordPress.org Plugins SVN Link comes in handy if you’re the type that looks at the code of various WordPress plugins. Evan put the code on github and accepted a pull request of mine to remove a dependency on jQuery.

Anyone have any chrome extensions they’ve found come in handy lately?

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It wasn’t long ago that there was a “Blue Collar Caucus” in congress that included a mill foreman, a barber, a pipe fitter and a house painter.

Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House more than doubled, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars, excluding home ­equity.

Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly, with the comparable median figure sliding from $20,600 to $20,500, according to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from the University of Michigan.

via Growing wealth widens distance between lawmakers and constituents – The Washington Post.

Perhaps if our representatives were more like us, they would care about the things we care about.

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Aaron Jorbin | Leave a comment

One Week with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Aaron Jorbin

One week ago I bought a new top of the line phone for the first time since 2001 when the high end feature I wanted was “Vibrating alerts”. I’ve now had the galaxy nexus for a week and have gotten comfortable with it. Here are some of my thoughts:
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Real Time Search and Social Analytics

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Aaron Jorbin

Over at AddThis, we just released an expanded version of our Live View Analytics. We now are bringing together what was multiple screens of live data in to a single live view.

This was a pretty fun project. The server generates a stream of data that we then use client side to render all of the content. Of all the new features we added, the one I would recommend checking out is single URL view. Click on any url to get a single URL view that includes a moving bar graph (that fills in with data as it happens) along with the search terms and copied terms for that specific page.

Read more about it on the AddThis Blog and then go log in and start seeing how people are using your site right now.

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Russia proposes draft resolution on Syria

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Aaron Jorbin

After Russia (along with China) vetoed a resolution on Syria back in October, the UN Security Council has remained in a stalemate. This week though, Vitaly Churkin, the Russian ambassador to the UN, introduced a draft resolution on Syria that while not strong, does put some pressure on the al-Assad government to end the attacks on its own people.

Churkin told reporters that he hoped the resolution would help “stop violence, uphold human rights” and expedite government reforms. “We all believe the Security Council must do something.” He said the council should not play a role that would “fan the conflict” but instead “bring an end to the crisis.”

via Turtle Bay

I find the language pretty soft, with the resolution mainly calling for both sides to follow the peace process plan laid out by the Arab League. The most interesting part is the decision to readdress the situation in thirty days, which I take to mean that Russia might be open to more concrete action if the situation does not improve.

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