Well said. Via pressflip
This week’s Chinese cooking project was sweet and sour pork. Previously I’ve tried sweet and sour chicken, and sweet and sour shrimp, but the pork came out the best. I made the pork pieces nice and crispy, and the sauce was my best sweet and sour yet.
Last time I deep-fried, I dredged the meat in egg and then in flour. The coating wasn’t thick enough, and as a result, the meat wasn’t crispy enough. This time, I discovered the secret. Whisk together 1 cup of flour, 3/4 cup of water, and 1 egg in a bowl, and let it stand for an hour. Then dip the meat in the batter before deep-frying. The pieces will be nice and crispy with a thick coating.
For the sauce, the winning combination is: 1/2 cup of sugar, 1/2 cup of vinegar (red or apple cider), 2 tbsp of soy sauce, 1 tbsp of ketchup, and 2 tsp of cornstarch. Bring to a boil and stir until the sauce thickens.
To finish the dish, I quickly stir-fried some chopped bell pepper and onion, then combined those with the meat and the sauce, and served it over rice. Delicious!
Beer of the week: Shiner Bock. Not bad for a bock from Texas. Still, the aroma is off-putting and the aftertaste is hard and metallic. I don’t really like it.
epic
Starting today, you can now add applications to your Pressflip account. Applications allow you to search other sources of data in addition to our standard news and blogs content. We released applications for Digg, Reddit, Fark, Twitter and Topix today.
Add the Digg application, and Pressflip will match stories from Digg against your saved searches. The same goes for Reddit and Fark. The Twitter application follows the links that your friends share and matches those to your searches, and the Topix application matches news stories from your home town. Stay tuned! More applications are on the way.
This is a quick explanation of how to add/remove and configure applications on pressflip.
Searching for information is a pretty standard exchange: you type in your query, and the search engine gives you a list of links. That’s all well and good, and most of the time you find what you’re looking for.
But where do those links come from? Google, Yahoo, and other search engines crawl the web, following links they find on web pages to other web pages. All the links you see in your search results look the same, no matter where they came from. What about the context? Where did that link come from? What are people saying about it? If there was a long conversation about a link on Digg.com, wouldn’t you like to know?
Integrating Services to Search
Pressflip is an interesting search application because it’s not Google - our users save searches and get results over time, as they are published. Because it’s not Google, it doesn’t work like Google: Google is like a librarian who can find what you need to know, but Pressflip is like a guy who watches a news ticker and hands you what you’re looking for as it’s written.
Because it works differently, we can do some really neat things with the stuff Pressflip reads.
We have been working for the past two months, changing our backend architecture. We’ve been changing it from a plain-vanilla saved search application to a platform for saved search applications. This means that when we find a silo of information, we can write an application using the platform to read that information in context.
For example, one of the applications we’ve developed on this platform is a specialized reader for the social media site reddit.com. If a link gets upvoted to the front page on reddit and it matches one of your saved searches, we think it should be given special treatment. Maybe you’d like to upvote it on reddit. Maybe you want to go join the conversation. Now you can.
More to Come
We’re launching five applications today:
- Digg: search over top stories from digg.com
- Reddit: search over top stories from reddit.com
- Topix: type in your ZIP code, and Pressflip will search local news stories from topix.com
- Twitter: enter your Twitter username and password, and Pressflip will search links that people you follow post to Twitter
- Fark: search over top stories from fark.com
Think of an application as a source you want Pressflip to read for you. Each source has some nuanced detail, so using the platform, Pressflip will tailor the result to the source it came from, and your feedback (by either reading a story or flipping it) will work just as it always did.
There are more applications in the works, so stay tuned.
Jonathan Davis from Korn covering “Got Money” by Lil’ Wayne.
W.T.F.
I predict failure. Via pressflip
