Microsoft Popfly

I've been playing with Microsoft Popfly and created two different mashups. The technology is pretty neat, but it has a long way to go before I see a lot of people using it. The biggest thing missing is useful blocks – I had a lot of trouble filtering data and keeping it in order to show correctly. It reminds me of my AI classes in LISP since the idea of passing list of data around is the key. Anyway check them out and let me know what you think.

Traffic Mashup with Virtual Earth

View my Facebook Friends in Virtual Earth

And as far as what Silverlight can do – it's very impressive. This will be interesting to see what happens. But trying to use from my Powerbook in Firefox was not fun – it keep freaking out… Thanks -

Using Word 2007 as Blog Editor

I hate writing a lot of text inside of a web editor – they never seem to catch the multiple types of issues I have when writing anything. At work we are using SharePoint to manage a lot of projects and we have a running blog of development issues that we have resolved. The nice thing about the Microsoft suite is that they have a link on the blog that launches your blog editor and I didn't realize that Word would help manage that. I've been using it with SharePoint for the last few months and have very few issues with it – images don't really work too well and long blog entries don't split into a summary and read more link, but I'm chalking that up to SharePoint and not the editor (or my lack of knowledge of both products and blogging in general).

Anyway, I am working on my Masters Project blog and figured I would try out Word as my editor for it – so this is a test of the Microsoft Word Blogging System when publishing to Blogger. Hopefully this works well and the html code behind is pretty clean. I'm sure there are better editors out there, but I'll have to wait until another day to research those…

Also – here is a link to my Masters Project blog in case you want to follow it… http://peerchannel.blogspot.com/