About this Blog
Hi, I'm Dominiek, co-founder of a stealth startup, former CTO at Smart.fm and owner of Synaptify Consulting. This blog is about Technology, Innovation and the Web.
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Using Wakoopa to broadcast your Geek Life
Last year I discovered the website Wakoopa.com. At first I didn’t quite get the usefulness of using Wakoopa but after using it I really came to love it. Wakoopa let’s you broadcast your software activity usage by installing a little tray icon. On your Wakoopa profile you can track your software usage trends. Since I’m a proud Mac user and believe in radical transparency I am broadcasting the usage of my software to the world:
Right now on this blog you can see my Latest Tweets and Interesting Links. That data get’s updated everytime I bookmark something (using Delicious) or tweet something (using Twitter). I really like the real-time and heartbeat aspect of it.
While taking a shower a couple of weeks ago I was thinking of using the Wakoopa data to make a little widget. Most of my time is spend in front of my Macbook, so it would be nice to display what I’ve been doing the last hours on my Mac. I want to display it in a simple single sentence like “Recently I’ve been programming”. I don’t want to overload my visitors with too much data. Of course when they click on the sentence they are taken to my Wakoopa profile
I contacted the Wakoopa team a couple of weeks ago to ask whether they could provide this activity data in form of a JSON feed (essential for making a badge/widget). They replied to me within a couple of hours and implemented it! That’s agile baby! Unfortunately I wasn’t so agile on my private projects and only build my widget yesterday.
Using the just released Wakoopa JSON api I’ve written a big ugly piece of Javascript that serves as the widget:
<script type="text/javascript"> var wakoopa_activity = {'Design': 'designing', 'Communication': 'mailing and chitchating', 'Browsers': 'surfing the web', 'Programming': 'coding like hell', 'Audio': 'slacking off', 'Video': 'slacking off', // jacking off? 'Tools': 'doing some funky stuff'} var wakoopa_username = null; function wakoopa_doing_now(data) { var app = null; var activity = ''; for(var i = 0; data.length > i; i++) { if (app == null || app.active_seconds <= data[i].active_seconds) { app = data[i]; } } if(app.category) { activity = wakoopa_activity[app.category.name]; if (!activity) { activity = app.category.name; } if (app.category.name == 'Tools') { if (app.name == 'iTerm' || app.name == 'Terminal') { activity = 'unix fu'; } } } title = 'my software usage on wakoopa.com'; document.getElementById('wakoopa_activity').innerHTML = '<a href="http://wakoopa.com/' + wakoopa_username + '" alt="' + title + '" title="' + title + '">Recently I\'ve been ' + activity + '.</a>'; } function wakoopa_recent_activity_for(username) { var script = document.createElement( 'script' ); wakoopa_username = username; script.type = 'text/javascript'; script.src = 'http://wakoopa.com/' + username + '/recently_used.json?callback=wakoopa_doing_now'; document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild( script ); } </script> <img style="float: left; margin-right: 6px" src="http://wakoopa.com/favicon.ico"/> <div id="wakoopa_activity"></div> <script type="text/javascript"> wakoopa_recent_activity_for('dominiek'); </script>You can copy and paste this in your blog to display what you’ve been doing recently on your machine. Make sure to replace my username with yours.