Murray Woodman

veryhappening.com is personal project which glues together web services from different sources. Primarily, veryhappening.com uses Google to rate various things (people, bands, companies, characters, shows, etc) by recording the number of “hits” a thing receives. Who do you think the most popular person is? Amazon web services are used to provide recommendations for each thing and category. I have also hooked into the Technorati API to provide users with info on the latest chatterings in the blog world. Finally, RSS feeds from the Yahoo Buzz are used to identify which things are currently buzzing in the internet world. I am currently working on adding racial, national, gender and birthdate (star sign) metadata to the top people so that I can break down the results for people according to these dimensions. Early results indicate that the net is white, male, American and aged about 50

Update: Currently the site isn’t working because WebHost4Life decided to remove a URL Redirect ISAPI filter I had installed. They told me I had to upgrade to dedicated hosting in order to get it back! Hang that. That made me move all my other sites off their hosting platform over to Linux and Apache where I get mod rewrite. I’m now with WestHost. I’ll fix up the ASP code one of these days and get it working… maybe.

A picture’s worth a thousand words. This little web page takes a JPEG image and converts it to an ASCII representation. You can upload your own image and supply the text which will make up the completed image.

Update: This site no longer works because I moved from ASP hosting. Take a look at the code section where you can download it.

topicmap.com is a site dedicated to all things topic maps. I set this sit eup sometime in 2000, just before joining Ontopia and XML Europe. It doesn’t get updated so often but eventually it gets up to speed.

I don’t tend to bore people as much these days about my passion for Topic Maps but I’m still very interested nonetheless. topicmap.com provides info on topic map software, vendors, resources, tutorials and news.

The “unspeakable beauty” is a concept which attempts to capture the inspiring vision of love: the dynamic, energetic life force of the universe. more…

I have rescued a number of older web site experiments and snippets from my early days on the web – 1996, 1997. Looking at the stuff I did back then I can say it certainly was a bit more graphically interesting than what I am doing these days. Back then Javascript was completely new, just released. Image rollovers were the most amazing things. I found some code by Taylor at Webmonkey and just went from there. Animated GIFs were incredibly cool too because you didn’t have to push images down an open connection. The web really was exciting. It wasn’t “multimedia” – something new. As far as deign was concerned I feel that there was greater freedom to experiment with different narrative styles etc. Anyway, here are a few goodies. more…