“Let me rub on your phone.”
For whatever reason, a bunch of people have been sending me kind emails in the past few weeks on topics such as “what ever happened to grabber?” “I signed up for the gobbler beta ages ago, did it ever launch?” “I’m reminded of gaffer, is that still around?” and other such queries.
Well, no, Grablr still hasn’t launched… but it’s still up and running and collecting data. I’ve even been (slowly) updating the code over the past couple of months years. Today I’m even moving my personal site back to it after all this time (when the DNS catches up, tedroden.com will get you there). There is no need to fear my tumbilarity, I’ll still post just as much as ever to tumblr and everywhere else keeping it at an even 7 for many months to come.
As we’ve been getting reacquainted over the past couple of days, Grablr and I have been having a massive love fest. I just wanted to point out some of the things I like about the site, that were so far ahead of it’s time a couple of years ago… and some things are still not done by anybody else.
The crux of site is that it understands you post a lot of content to a bunch of different places for a bunch of different reasons. Grablr knows that not all posts are created equal and tries to behave properly with all of that content. For example, Flickr is a photography site (despite what it looks like when you visit that site), so it should always show ALL of the big beautiful photos. On the other hand, if you post 100 photos to a single post on posterous, Grablr understands that those are all related and puts them into a little slideshow (without using flash).
It also understands similarities between sites. For example, Tumblr allows you to post a bunch of different things, but they’re all types of content that exist on tons of other sites. So a link on Tumblr is exactly like a link on delicious. A quote? Just the same as a tweet.
You know those features that your favorite sites have been pumping out this year? Grablr had them last year. It had “endless scrolling” before that was a thing, and it got noticed. Endless scrolling works from both the main homepage of a site and from every single permalink page.
Grablr also does a bunch of stuff that nobody does even now. For example, it understands just because it imported a post from Wordpress, a video from Vimeo or a photo from Flickr, the import doesn’t end there. It continually imports each comment on that post forever… and it does it quickly too!
The beta will still come at some point, when it or I am ready to launch it. But I’m glad to be back on it myself, with all my content in one place, and super fine grained control of what goes up and what stays off.
I’ve recently been doing some extensive research.
Proud of you, Buster! Way to go.
Thanks, Samantha. Your post here was how I found out about this. :)
Well played, Buster.
One of us is six months old today.
Streaming will never stop downloading -
“Why would we voluntarily increase our reliance on expensive, scarce wireless bandwidth delivered by abusive thugs when we are awash in cheap, commodity storage that grows cheaper every day and which we can buy from hundreds of manufacturers and thousands of retailers?”
“Hard problems can’t be solved with technical denialism.”
Isn’t it fairly hardcore denialism to suggest our wireless bandwidth won’t get better?
One way or another we will have access to much faster wireless internet speeds. It’s also not going to keep getting more expensive. Sure, we’re going to take it on the chin for the next couple of years… but bandwidth will not be a limiting factor.
“Just an idea: next time you see something you like, write the person who made it a note telling them so. Even better, explain why.” — Favrd.