Sky art
A few weeks ago I saw the first spectacular sky phenomenon since I'm here in Norway.
No, it's not an aurora borealis but something else equally stunning and beautiful.
The norwegian word for them is perlemorskyer: polar stratospheric clouds aka nacreous clouds.
It seems that these phenomena are quite rare, so I consider myself lucky to have seen them live!
I wasn't prepared for them, so I didn't take nice pictures, but at least these photos have the particularity to have been taken in daylight, and not during twilight as most of the great photos you can see in Flickr.
Take a look also to this amazing photos my colleague Claudio took in those days and shared with the mankind!
Now I'm looking forward to see the midnight sun next August when I will travel far north to Svalbard for a short trip!
Enclosure:
I love feeds
Yes!
Feeds are simple to use and many well known web sites provides web services with a lot of different feed's flavours, so it's simple for everyone to find the favourite format and use it on web pages.
Recently I've used the personalized feeds from last.fm and flickr.com for adding some fun in the sidebar of the main page.
last.fm
I've got a profile there and now I use the recent tracks feed for showing the last 5 listened tracks.
There is a little problem with this feed, I've seen that it has a sort of validity time, if you don't play something for a while the feed returned is empty.
As workaround I use a caching system, if the feed returns some valid data, it is cached, thus the last tracks played are always available.
flickr.com
I've started to use Flickr to store and organize my photos and now I use the personalized public photos feed for adding the last 5 photos in the sidebar.
I've choosen the RSS 2.0 format which provides also the links to the 75x75 px thumbnails! Cool!
For both I use 2 Perl modules, LWP::Simple and XML::Simple.
With the first I download the feed, with the second I parse it and extract the data I need to feed the sidebar template...
Simple uh?!