Author Archives: Buster

Today was my first day back at the co-op after a long 10-day silent meditation retreat (43things entries here) in Onalaska, WA. Oh sweet enlightenment. Almost as sweet as the chicken yakisoba I feasted on with fellow robots while fielding questions on the highlights and lowlights of going off and being by yourself for extended periods of slow-moving time.

Josh mentioned that he went on a 3-day silent Ignatian Retreat back in the day and had a strong religious experience. During my 10 days I didn’t have any religious experiences, but then again, it wasn’t a religious retreat. Mine was more of a systematic dissection of the body and mind… trying to dissolve the gestalt of body and mind into its separate, temporary, independantly motivated and functioning parts. And I had many weird mental and physical experiences that were stranger than most drug experiences I’ve had.

We discussed the fine line between deep, guided, experiences and brainwashing. The techniques for delving into the subconscious and exploring biases, illusions, and ultimate sense of self are eerie and powerful tools that are difficult to trust in strangers’ hands, even in your own hands.

People are naturally interested in the cult phenomenon as it relates to any experiences this far out of the mainstream. Was this retreat an indoctrinization into a cult? It depends on your definition of cult, of which there are many. It implies some strong desire to control its members, usually to the leader’s benefit and the members’ cost. I could find no strong cost aspect in this particular organization… could giving money to an organization that encourages striving for happiness in all beings really be any worse than giving money to organizations that produce products of any other kind? Are people not just as brainwashed by advertising, cultural pressures, employers, families, and fashion?

I expressed interest in possibly going again. Eric expressed a conclusion that it had then “worked”. Josh then asked, “Will you pay next time?” I said no but really I meant maybe. Next up, the landmark forum. THEN maybe we can have a real conversation about cults.

Did you know that we have pretty extensive web services for most of our sites? We’ve been slowly adding to them over the last several months, so maybe it’s time to take another look. Learn all about them here:

1) 43 Things web services
2) 43 Places web services
3) 43 People web services

They all use the same architecture so you can use the same API key for all three services. All Consuming’s will be coming up shortly.

We’d love to hear about any new applications you build with these. We’re beginning to use them ourselves to prototype new sites.

Sample uses

By using the authenticate methods you can use the services to log people into your site with their 43 Things username and password.

If you’re not happy with the many javascript includes and RSS feeds that we offer to allow you to display goals, places, people, and products on your website, use the web services to develop your own wild blog integration.

Integrate stuff with iCal, mash them up with other wacky websites, graph your social network, build plugins for various blog systems, or…

Why not do something completely crazy and unexpected?

Bonus tip

Many of our methods that involve getting a person’s information will allow you to pass either a Flickr username instead of a 43 Things username. Check the documentation for more info. This could potentially make it easier to create a Flickr/43 Things mashup. Just sayin’.

One day we were talking about creating a community genealogy site to help people track family trees, and we came up with this wacky feature on 43 People:

Your family (or rather, my family).

You can add your parents, your children, your pets, significant others, and even exes. Check out Brad Pitt’s family.

If your parents have parents, they’ll show up as grandparents on your page, and if your children have children, they’ll show up as grandchildren.

This feature is a bit hidden at the moment, but give it a try and see if anything funny or surprising happens. We’ll probably continue to fiddle with it, so let us know if you’d like to see anything else family related on any of our sites.

Bonus family feature

If your family members have 43 Things accounts, you can filter All Consuming activity to show only items consumed and being consumed by family members. Just select “by people in my family” in the second dropdown (you’ll have to be logged in to see the dropdown).

We’re not very good at letting people know about new features are out there, so I’d like to try and remedy that in this new year by highlighting a feature every day or so that might’ve otherwise slipped by unnoticed. To start, here’s one of my favorite, yet obscure, features that some people might find useful if you have several different places around the internet that you write and post stuff.

Add an RSS feed to your account

If you’re not familiar with RSS, here’s a good explanation. We try to keep it as hidden away as possible, but for those that do care, here are some interesting things we’re doing with it.

As you may or may not know, you can add RSS feeds to your account on 43 People (go to your page, click “View your recent entries”, and then “Add a feed to your account”). From here, you can add any RSS feed from anywhere on the internet (your blog, your del.icio.us account, your library, etc). It will automatically have all of your 43 Things/Places/People and All Consuming feeds, as well as your Flickr feed if you have given us your screen name, but since I’m an RSS MANIAC I’ve also added feeds from my library, my Live Journal, my TypePad blog, my Tada Lists, and my NetFlix activity. (Here’s my page if you’re curious to see how this ends up looking.)

Subscribe to me instead of to an RSS feed

The great thing about this (in my opinion) is that people can then subscribe to ME, rather than my feeds. I think people are more interesting than RSS feeds… and when people move around, I don’t have to worry about updating all the feeds. When I get a new account somewhere (hey, look, Yahoo Answers has an RSS feed for all my questions!) I can add it and everyone that’s subscribed to me now gets this new content.

Choose only what you want

Now, some people (like me) probably are a little overzealous about adding content… so there’s a chance that you don’t actually want to see every blurry camera phone picture I post. For cases like this, you can unsubscribe from particular feeds within a person’s set of feeds and still be subscribed to the person as a whole. You do this by clicking on their name in the sidebar and selecting only the content that you want.

Your subscriptions page

If you’re subscribed to me and 100 other people, you can get an up-to-date list of all the entries from your subscriptions page. Or, you can export the content as a new uber feed and read it in your RSS reader of choice.

Add feeds to other people’s pages

You can add feeds to anyone’s page, not just your own. And, if you want to read feeds by people that don’t have a 43 Things account, you can do that too. For example, here’s Miranda July’s feed page. ))<>(( Forever!

Random bonus NetFlix feature

If you have a NetFlix account and add your NetFlix “Most Recent Rental Activity” feed (available from this page), we’ll automatically mark movies that are shipped to you as “I am consuming this” on All Consuming account. When you ship them back, we’ll mark them as “I have consumed this”. We love combining things like this… even if only 5 people are using it at the moment. If you are one of those 5 people, enjoy!

RSS is made out of people! Okay, time for lunch… I hope I don’t lose at credit card roulette as I need money for tonight’s one-year anniversary party. Hope to see you there if you’re in Seattle.