New iPhone App called RssChat [free itunes link] that takes your favorite blog author's stories, and turns them into "private" chats. The stories are typed out, character by character as if the author is typing them at this very moment directly to you. It's fun, and forces you to read every word of the story vs. skimming and skipping ahead.

I like to read techcrunch this way, especially stories by Michael Arrington. And when I'm waiting in line at the grocery store, or waiting anywhere else, it's amazing to take out RSS Chat and feel like Michael Arrington is "chatting" with me directly. Silly? Yes. But it really does help with my skimming problem. I end up reading the full articles and I like that better. Perhaps I have a reading problem because I'm starting to want all books presented this way vs. normal reading.

When I first saw Oprah's "No Phone Zone Pledge" it made total sense to me. For a while now I've been trying to never use my phone when driving. I try and make the mental decision, "No phone call or txt is so important it can't wait. Just ignore the phone and drive." But then I'll come to a red light. And I'll hear my phone make the new message sound. And I'll think "the car is stopped, no harm is just reading that one message." So I take my phone out of my pocket and read and then traffic starts moving, and there I am replying to the txt while driving!

So I came up with these 3 promises I make to myself before each drive. 1) Leave phone in pocket for entire drive. (That one should be enough, but I need re-enforcement.) 2) Even if phone makes a noise (ring or new txt sound) STILL leave it in pocket. 3) When stopped at red lights or slow traffic STILL leave it in pocket. But it's hard to keep these promises! Enter the iphone app DrivePromise [free itunes link]. It makes me agree to the three promises and logs the date and time of the promise. Might seem silly, but it's harder to break the promise after I take the time to use the app and agree to all 3. And the log keeps me honest. I can show a record of my promises to my family. Drive safe everyone!

Occasionally, but not often, I take a look through interesting github repositories and see if there any cool projects I should know about. I found three20 this way. A few days ago I found the Wax iPhone Framework. For the record, when I first started learning Objective-C to make iPhone apps I looked into a Ruby/Objective-C bridge to see if I could just write all the logic in Ruby vs. C. And I even posted this on stackoverflow. Because, well I just didn't understand why we had to use a langauge like C when there are other languages out there. Wax gets me. Wax understands I want to write cool iPhone Apps but with garbage collection, less code, no header files, no static types, closures, and all the things a cool language like Lua brings to the table.

Did you like how I just slipped "Lua" in there? Did anyone say what's Lua? Well, that's what I said when I first looked at wax. I had never heard of Lua. Apparently it's a real progrmaming language and been around since 1993!

This blog is running votay software and it's all open source, but there isn't any documentation. Until now that is. Okay here is the quick and simple docs on how to setup votay on your own google app engine account and run your own blog. This isn't for everyone yet. You'll have to really want to run votay to jump through these hoops but hey, it's free. Also I'm hoping someone else forks the github project and really runs with it. Then someday we can have a product that competes with wordpress.

Step 1. Clone the github repo and change the app.yaml application name to your GAE app name and deploy the app.

Step 2. Goto http://yourappname.appspot.com/admin and select the create author link. Make yourself at least one author.

Step 3. Go back to the main admin page and select manage images. You can't delete images yet. Upload it again with a new filename to replace an image. Once image is uploaded copy the filename to your clipboard.

Step 4. Go back to the main admin page and select create post. Give it a title, and paste the image filename into the textfield. Write your story or paste in some html to the markup textarea. Notice how to use an html comment with the word break to tell votay where to stop the preview and make a "read more" link.

So you've been thinking about using Amazon's S3 to store and serve the images for your website. Good idea. It's a good poor-man's Content Delivery Network.

But there's also Google App Engine. Can you store and serve images from there just like S3? Yes. But you need a little python program installed on it first. Oh and unlike S3, Google App Engine is free. If you exceed very large limits you have to pay, but it's free for normal use. With S3 you have to pay for even small use.

Glossy Tooth is an open source project to make Google App Engine work like S3 for storing and serving images. This will reduce your bandwidth bill for hosting images yourself, and make your site faster and better. Is your hosting provider as good as Google for serving up images to people from all over the world? I didn't think so.