Month: March 2008

Mobshare.in Broadcast Widget

Mobshare.in Broadcast Widget

Here’s a sneak peek of the Mobshare broadcast widget I’ve been working on. If you look to the right and below, you can see that in action live. You’ll see the last ten pics I’ve uploaded and direct from the widget you can subscribe to my feed or send me an SMS.

The widget is the first released code which uses our internal API. While the API itself is undocumented [which hopefully will soon change], it’s public and it’s JSON (which makes implementing Javascript widgets incredibly easy).

How do you get your own widget? You can’t do that easily right now (the pleasures of cutting-edge code eh?), but paste this code somewhere:


<iframe width="150" height="150" src="http://mobshare.in/user/:mobshare_id:/broadcast/widget"></iframe>

…and change :mobshare_id: to your Mobshare ID.

Try it out and let me know if you like it!

Loving Git

I suppose this must be the zillionth post about how Git is so cool, but I’ll tell you what I love about it:

  1. Ultra fast commits. Coming from subversion, typing commit and getting a prompt back instantly is so surprising that you double check the first few times.
  2. Branching! God, you don’t realize how much you miss it until you have fast branching and merging. Without the pain of creating cps, just a simple git checkout -b branch_name and git merge branch_name and everything just works.
  3. The above was the reason I tried git in the first place. mobME’s an SVN shop and we do the usual trunk, tags, branches dance. When the trunk shapes up to be stable though I can’t seem to do anything on it. I can fork off a new branch in SVN but that’s too painful to even think about. What do I do now? git clone it, create a branch, and do regular git svn rebases and dcommits.
  4. Oh did I mention bidirectional SVN support? Without which I wouldn’t/couldn’t have switched no matter how much I wanted to try this cool new thing.

But it’s great and it really changes the way you think about VCS. Notice something? I didn’t even talk about distributed source control, and that’s coz even when I use git like I use SVN – committing to a central repo at the end and pulling changes from it, it’s brilliant. I’d definitely want to explore cool stuff like github soon for personal use (some gracious soul gave me an invite some time back).