Welcome to Whatfettle!
The personal site and infrequent journal of Paul Downey (@psd), a doodling hacker living in Berkhamsted, England.
UPDATED! Check out the latest from Whatfettle!
Principles for prototyping June 2014
Anybody can make a thing. Making the right thing is harder.
Dyhipstertopic June 2012
That's a cool idea, but isn't it evil?
Pivotal Cards May 2012
A bookmarklet to generate index cards for Pivotal Tracker stories.
Dangerous doodles February 2012
Idle doodles on post-it notes
SolderPad September 2011
A Web site for Open Source electronic projects.
NAND Cat has a Posse August 2011
After encountering the small act of genius that is The NAND Cat the world deserved clean SVG and PDF versions. A "has a posse" sticker was inevitable, really.
Happy Cybus 2 Day! March 2011
Worrying about my friends queuing for an upgrade of locked-down hardware which is under a single point of control.
I-Spy The Web February 2011
A talk at Ignite London #4 on I-Spy books and curation on The Web.
FTE is People! November 2010
In a financial meeting overwhelmed by abbreviations someone made the mistake of asking “What is FTE?”
For a Confused Visualisation November 2010
An attempt to visualise JP's Enterprise 2.0 Boston keynote in real time.
Preso October 2010
A reformulation of ProjectCecily into Preso, a zoomable landscape presentation tool.
The Tarot of REST October 2010
A collection of playing cards; an oblique stratergies for REST, if you will.
Plot Unfolder October 2010
Choose your own adventure folding books made using TiddlySpace and available in HTML and PDF formats.
REST Design Cards September 2010
Playing cards for paper prototyping RESTful designs and HTTP interactions.
HTTP Pocket Book September 2010
A HTTP quick reference made using TiddlyPocketBook [PDF].
WS-Bluff September 2010
An enterprisey "Call My Bluff" game made for the XML Summer School.
OSHUG April 2010
A logo and Web site as the co-founder and compère of OSHUG— The Open Source Hardware User Group, a monthly meetup, in and around London.
The Progressive Enhancement Podcast November 2009
An rare podcast about The Web made with the marvelous Phil Hawksworth.
TiddlySlidy September 2009
A TiddlyWiki based slideshow authoring tool.
Unicode Snowman has a Posse August 2009
The Unicode Snowman has a Posse, so he does.
Open Source for Business September 2009
Flyer for Osmosoft's work on open source governance.
Geekery is The Social Capital of Britain July 2009
A map of Britain, from the point of a geek.
ETSI 2.0 July 2009
Invitated to give a provocative talk on Web 2.0 at an ETSI board meeting. There were fireworks.
No Numbers July 2009
The code for Andrew Back's artwork “No Numbers”.
TiddlyPocketBook May 2009
A TiddlyWiki to make folding pocketbooks, inspired by Brian Suda and Natalie Downe.
Standards are to Peace as Standardisation is to War March 2009
Invited to speak at QCon London on a “historically bad idea”, the obvious subject to speak about was “standardisation”.
The rdfQuery Logo April 2009
The logo of the rdfQuery project.
Standeace March 2009
A portmanteau for a sampler on Web standardisation.
Sketchnotes Notes scribbled at events where it's not too dark to see what you're doing.
CharBotGreen January 2009
An avatar for Libby Miller's twitter bot. We were super-excited to hear Charlotte Green's reaction on the radio.
The URI is the Thing October 2008
What began as an explanation of the value of Openness and The Web for integration ended up being a dark tristesse on the state of enterprise software development: Middleware hell, ruled by BPELzibub.
One World, One Web August 2008
My contribution as a One Web Day ambassador — a promotional tea-towel of Web culture.
TiddlyProcessing May 2008
An IDE for processing.js in TiddlyWiki.
Moral Compass Pins November 2007
Badges made from a corner of The Web is Agreement, as sported by some of the best people. Stop me and ask for one.
The Web is Agreement November 2007
A Tolken-esque map of how Web standardisation works.
Bile Card October 2007
A card to cut out and keep with you.
Lissajours Tables May 2007
Lissajours figures drawn using HTML tables.
W3C Databinding April 2007
Time served as Chair of the W3C XML Schema Patterns for Databinding Working Group.
Mashing Up The Mobile April 2007
A demonstration of “Web Dog and Bone” — a Twitter clone with groups, capabable of making conference calls at WWW2007 conference in Banff, Canada.
Fielding has a Posse March 2007
Warning: people care about The Web and guardians of REST can be a scary bunch.
Hardboiled hCards Experiments with presenting hCards using nicely degrading markup and CSS3.
Accounting Sense != Common Sense Made to explain why being assigned a budget isn't the same as being able to spend money.
BT Mojo A RESTful exposure of the Web21C SDK, which was nice.
Quiz Sheets Cryptic picture quiz sheets made for the annual school spring fair. Amazingly we sold more than 160 of these each year.
Clustr An experiment in presenting a group's flickr photographs for a single event as a timeline.
Flyr Search for and view geotagged Flickr photos on a map. Possibly now defunct and irrelevant with Flickr maps.
Good Web APIs are just Web sites A talk advocating building Web sites accessable by both machines and people rather than APIs.
Chad An IRC bot for conducting preference polls used by a number of different W3C working groups and 300 very odd people at the 2006 Technical Plenary.
Textorizer A PHP extension for Max Froumain's Textorizer, superseded by his JavaScript version.

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