Austin on Rails Happy Hour

The week of SXSW is fast approaching and evening events are starting to pop up. Last year I helped organize the first Austin on Rails Happy Hour with Damon Clinkscales and Rob Jones. This year the Stikkit team will be pitching in to help make this event happen and Rael, Asha, and I will be there and look forward to meeting you in person.

Last year's event was a ball—we had over 150 people show up and many great introductions were made and friendships formed.

The Austin on Rails Happy Hour (stikkit!) will be held on March 12th from 6-9pm.

The venue will be the same as last year: Buffalo Billiards is comfortable and inviting, has shuffle board and pool tables, and plenty of room to meet fellow Rails developers.

There will be free drinks and appetizers. If you are not attending SXSW and don't have a badge, you'll need to RSVP. Check out the Upcoming event for more details.

Technorati Tags: community, sxsw, rails, stikkit

IMified supports Stikkit

I've been on something of an IM-as-super-client kick for some time now, and when Rael first unfolded the idea of Stikkit to me, my first thought was that someday perhaps we could even stikkit via IM.

The entire Stikkit team lives and breathes in IM and we've kept meaning to find a few spare cycles to pull together our very own StikkitBot.

And so we're pretty excited to see that the recently released IMified has just hooked up Stikkit as an available IMified service. Send a message to the IMified bot and you instantly receive a URL to follow to add Stikkit to your newly-created account. Once you've added Stikkit as a service, you can create stikkits through the bot. They plan on adding more features to the service soon.

Overall, IMified is an impressive first take on something that I hope will become more and more mainstream.

Stikkit in your pocket

This is just too freakin' cool for words. You know those groovy fold-it-yourself PocketMod booklets?

Using our new Stikkit API, Aaron Straup Cope has stuffed his stikkits into his pockets to take with him when he's away from the keyboard.

Writes Aaron, "The possibilities are endless if by endless you mean four or five letter-sized sheets of paper . . ."

Wow!

Grab a feed of your stikkits (now with yummy Basic HTTP Authentication)

In all the kerfuffle around here to get all our new API goodness out the door, we plum forgot to mention that you can subscribe to an Atom feed of all of your stikkits (or just your calendar events, to-dos, peeps, or bookmarks) using Basic HTTP Authentication (i.e. username and password).

Point your favorite feed reader at http://www.stikkit.com/stikkits.atom, when prompted to do so (assuming your feed reader supports such authentication), enter the email address and password combination you use to log into Stikkit and, Bob's your uncle, your stikkits should magically appear before you.

You'll find more on Stikkit's feeds on the Stikkit API page.

We're SXSW Awards finalists

SXSW 07 will be my fifth year at what I consider to be one of the best web related conferences I've been to. I consistently look forward to early March, and upon leaving Austin always come away with a renewed sense of creativity and pride for what I do. Attending SXSW during the post dot-com boom made it plainly obvious that while excessive and senseless investment was gone, the passion for creating useful tools and services was still just as strong (if not stronger) as it was in previous years.

And this year I've yet another reason to be excited: Stikkit has been named as a finalist in the SXSW Web Awards for Technical Achievement. As you can imagine, this has everyone at Values of n pretty excited. We truly believe we're making a difference when it comes to building web applications and it's an honor to even be considered.

And while the judges will ultimately decide whether or not we're the best in our category, you get to decide the outcome of the People's Choice awards for each category. So we encourage you to make your opinion known by casting a vote for your favorites — whether or not that includes us (although you know our preference).

Also, if you're going to be in Austin in March, seek Rael, Asha, or myself out and say "hello." We're all scheduled to speak or lead panels as well and I'm certain some of our philosophies on application development will be evidently expressed. (Oh, and if you're not already scheduled to go: why not?)

See you in Austin! And don't forget to vote.

Stikkit awaits your API calls

Stikkit may, at first blush, seem to be all about emulating its ubiquitous paper counterpart. And while we certainly do draw inspiration and analogy from the role of notebooks, sticky notes, receipts, index cards, and other scraps of paper in organizing your life, Stikkit is no more about virtual paper than the sticky notes spackling your office and home are about actual paper.

At the core of how we conceived of and are designing and building Stikkit is the belief that the success and endurance of the humble sticky note is its being an affordance. Its dimensions encourage the bite-sized, the smallest atomic unit, the stand-alone. Its shape invites arrangement: horizontal for process, vertical for lists, or just clustered by relatedness. Its color runs the gamut from strictly representative — importance, status, assignment — to simply pleasant.

Above all else, sticky notes represent particles in flow. They're appointments to be scheduled, to-dos to be done, bookmarks (both literally and figuratively) to be re-found, and fragments to be rewritten, re-filed, or simply re-stuck.

Every time I see a cluster of physical notes either purposefully stuck in a neat line or seemingly clustered in some novel formation, I can't help think about where that information's headed and for what purpose.

While we do obviously have strong ideas about the present and future of Stikkit itself, we've never presumed to know just where, how, or to whom you're going to stikkit. Nor how you want to use your data. And in what formation it'll be most useful to you.

So, to provide at least the more programmatically-inclined of you the ability to fold and form your stikkits for your own purposes, we give you the Stikkit API.

We've opened the back door so the tinkerers and mashuppers among you can get your hands and code on your Stikkit data quickly and easily.

By "quickly," we mean that there are no hoops to jump through to get rolling with the API: if you've got a Stikkit account, you've got the key. Log into Stikkit and then visit your account settings to grab your unique API key.

By "easily," we mean that we've made the Stikkit API as simple and intuitive as possible. The API is REST-based, so you simply pass it HTTP requests, and you get back data in the data format of your choice. And even more than that, it's Stikkit-based, so it works just the way the site itself does — just the way we think an API should work.

So let the origami begin! Visit the Stikkit API page for details on how to get started. And be sure to drop by Stikkit API forum to ask questions, share ideas, propose hacks or apps, or show us what you've built.