How to use “use”

Posted on April 10, 2009 by gshellen

Since we launched in January, we’ve received a few compliments on one of our rotating taglines: “Hey, didn’t you use to have a blog?” This particular tagline came from a comment someone made to Jason at a cocktail party a few months before we launched.

Since then, though, there’s been considerable debate about the grammar of the sentence. When we first posted it, I thought the correct form was, “Hey, didn’t you used to have a blog?” After a reader of Maggie’s blog posted a comment enlightening me, however, I have seen the light: the correct form is “use.” According to The American Heritage Book of English Usage:

“We use the verb use in its past tense with an infinitive to indicate a past condition or habitual practice: We used to live in that house…When do occurs with this form of use in negative statements and in questions, the situation is reversed, and use to (not used to) is correct: You did not use to play on that team. Didn’t she use to work for your company?”

Several people have written to us to tell us that the current version is wrong, sharing my earlier confusion over this somewhat tricky rule in this very perplexing language. However, rest assured that this is not an oversight and we stand behind “use to.”

Also, we need to get outside more often.

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April Fools’ roundup

Posted on April 2, 2009 by gshellen

Ah, April Fools’ Day. Since the widespread use of the Internet, all kinds of hucksters have taken their pranks online, trying to get us to believe that they’ve invented a web-based time machine, that there’s water on Mars, or that future radio personality Rachel Maddow has been born.

I really wish I didn't have to remind you that staging a murder is not an appropriate April Fool's Day prank

We realize we could have messed with you, faithful Plinky user, but we chose not to. Mostly because we thought of it too late. Instead, we decided to collect April Fools’ pranks from you. And we got some good ones:

Now everybody please return to being serious for the next 364 days.

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Welcome guest contributor Maggie Mason

Posted on March 23, 2009 by gshellen

This week, we’re trying something new. While all of our prompts to date have been written in-house, prompts from March 23-29 were written by a very special guest contributor, Plinky advisor and blogger extraordinaire Maggie Mason.

Maggie has been blogging at Mighty Girl since 2000, back when you had to explain what a “blog” was. Her shopping sites, Mighty Goods, Mighty Junior and Mighty Haus, all provide tasteful, keen-eyed guidance to the confusing world of online shopping. Her book, “No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog”, was a major source of inspiration for Plinky.

For all these reasons (plus she’s the life of any party), we’re proud to hand over the keys to Maggie this week. We recommend keeping your arms and legs inside the vehicle, just to be safe.

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Plinky @ SXSW Interactive 2009

Posted on March 13, 2009 by gshellen

This weekend, Jason, Grant and Wesley are heading to the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin to hobnob with other web types, learn a thing or two, and hopefully find some inspiration in the Texas air. If you’re going, too, join us at the 32 Bit party on Monday, March 16. We’re co-sponsoring with Get Satisfaction, Laughing Squid, Lullabot, Sticker Giant, 30 Boxes, Automattic, Zynga, ShoutNow and Gowalla. Follow 32bit on Twitter for more details.

At the very least, try to track us down and make us give you a sticker or two. Also keep your eyes peeled for some exciting news about us after SXSW.

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Plinky MVPs

Posted on March 12, 2009 by gshellen

We were surprised to hear early reviewers of Plinky describe it as a “micro-blogging” service. As we like to say, it’s only microblogging if you don’t write much.

Sure, you can be as brief as you’d like. Sometimes you might not have more than a couple of words to say about the prompt at hand. But usually, simply telling your friends that you like to eat crayons when you’re stressed isn’t as interesting as explaining the whole story of HOW you developed that particular waxy craving. Here are some answers by folks who have taken a little time to craft some really interesting and unique answers:

The response to our Bear vs. Shark question was fabulous. So far, more than 500 people have weighed in on this great Darwinian debate. None, however, were as detailed, thorough, and thoroughly LOL-inspiring as JoelHowe‘s description of three intense rounds of interspecies throwdown.

The day we discovered Skorp‘s answers, the office was full of uncontrollable giggling (to be fair, we also had a pillow fight that day). Here, he explains why keeping both hard drugs and an autographed picture of Prince can keep you, surprisingly, out of trouble.

We expected “grown-up” books in response to our question about books that changed your mind or opened your eyes, but vaguelyartistic weighed in with a beautiful account of one of my favorite children’s books, “Harold and the Purple Crayon.”

Lots of people bared their souls and shared embarrassing memories, and our good friend joshacagan was no exception. His tales of theater school humiliation brought both kinds of tears to my eyes: laughter and pity.

One of the most faithful Plinky users is jess, who writes interesting, insightful and funny answers to almost every prompt. One day, she stunned a lot of her followers by revealing that she was diagnosed with cancer about a year and a half ago, and developed a disdain for the sunny message of Lance Armstrong and his yellow “Live Strong” bracelets. Read and be inspired.

Finally, there are times when a simple, succinct answer is all that’s required, as Shaon showed us with this answer about what this country really needs. Hear hear.

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Building better short urls

Posted on February 26, 2009 by gshellen

To mix things up a bit I, Wesley Beary (aka geemus), a Software Engineer, will be taking the blog for a spin of a more technical nature.

At Plinky we needed short url support for our Twitter integration. I wasn’t quite satisfied with the ruby implementations I looked through, though.

Their basic approach was:
1. Create a random token for the url of some arbitrary length.
2. Do a db lookup to ensure this token is not already in use.
3. Record the record, subsequent lookups depend on this token being indexed.

I didn’t like the arbitrary token length and arbitrary mapping to records. You end up with longer tokens and eventually exhaust those available and get tied up in collisions. I wanted shorter links that grew as needed, even if it disallowed arbitrary tokens.

I decided to create links using the next shortest available token and use a natural mapping between links and tokens. Drawing inspiration from base conversion I came up with this:

module Base
	module_function
	BASE_CHARACTERS = '0123456789BCDFGHJKLMNPQRSTVWXYZbcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxyz'

	def encode(int)
		str = ''
		while int > 0
			character = int % BASE_CHARACTERS.length
			int = int / BASE_CHARACTERS.length
			str = BASE_CHARACTERS[character..character] + str
		end
		str
	end

	def decode(str)
		int = 0
		str.reverse.split('').each_with_index do |char, i|
			int += BASE_CHARACTERS.index(char) * (BASE_CHARACTERS.length ** i)
		end
		int
	end
end

Easier to read copy can be found at gist.

To get a link’s token, you call Base.encode(link_id), and get a tokens link id you call Base.decode(token).

Links will be as short as they can be (we left out the vowels and special characters, for prettier urls and to prevent english words as tokens), map clearly, and use the available auto-incrementing id.

It took a couple near misses to get here, but I’ve been happy with it so far. Let me know if you have questions, if I’m overlooking anything or if you reimplement this in the wild.

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Keeping up with prompts

Posted on February 9, 2009 by gshellen

We recognize that what we’re doing with Plinky is a little different from similar services or websites you might use. As such, I’ll be posting some tips on what you can expect from us and how to get the most out of Plinky. Today: prompt notification options.

You might have figured this out already, but we post one new prompt every day. It’s possible we’ll change this in the future, but for now, one prompt a day is the standard. The new prompt goes live every day at 5 a.m. PST (8 a.m. EST, 13:00 GMT). There are several different ways to be notified of our new prompts:

Daily email
Opt in to receive the prompt via daily email in your email settings.
Weekly email
If you prefer, you can receive a weekly digest of the last week’s emails (we’re still experimenting with the day and time, but it will probably remain on Thursday or Friday).
Twitter
Follow @plinkyprompts to get the daily prompt via Twitter.
iGoogle gadget
If you use iGoogle, you can add the Plinky gadget (screenshot below) to see the current prompt and flip through previous ones.

Prompt feed
If you use a feed reader, subscribe to the prompt feed.
Visit plinky.com
Maybe you’re old school and you simply like checking in every day to see what’s new. We don’t blame you. By all means – pay us a daily visit.

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A peek into our minds

Posted on January 30, 2009 by gshellen

With most of the craziness of trying to launch a product behind us, we thought we’d give you a peek into two Plinky staffers’ thought processes regarding Plinky’s value and purpose. Enjoy:

Ryan Freitas, director of product design: “The Empty Box Problem”
Grant Shellen (that’s me!), community manager: “Meet Plinky”

(Tomorrow: Soon: more about what to expect from us and how to get the most out of Plinky.)

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Plinky is here.

Posted on January 22, 2009 by gshellen

Friends, today we’re proud to announce the launch of Plinky, the little bundle of joy we’ve been gestating for oh so many months.

What is Plinky, you ask? Well, in case you haven’t already jetted over to plinky.com to check it out, Plinky is a service that makes it easy for you to create inspired content on the web.

Every day we provide a prompt (like a question, or a challenge) and you answer. Depending on the prompt, your answer may contain photos, maps, playlists and more. You can easily share your Plinky answers on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and most other major blogging services.

Go check it out, and let us know what you think.

From the desk of Ryan Freitas.

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Around town

Posted on November 18, 2008 by gshellen


We realize it’s been a while since we said anything about Plinky publicly (unless you’ve cornered one of us at a party). We’re still not quite ready to reveal anything yet, but we wanted to assure you that we’re still here, still working hard to put out a great product, and we’ll be delighted when we can finally show you what’s come out of these months of work.

Meanwhile, please enjoy these photos of Lafayette, Calif., the town Plinky affectionately calls home.

This great breakfast spot is not owned by an actual squirrel, to the best of our knowledge.
Site of many an after-work drink.
Authentic Pretend Mexican food. “Volcano tacos” just like mi abuelita used to make.

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