Sam Purtill

I like to keep a few small, fun projects going to keep things interesting when I get rambunctious.

Jump to any project:

• StanfordMob.com
• Books I’ve Read
• What I’m Reading
• @sampurtill
• Buckingham Alums in Higher Education
• 31fps blog

StanfordMob.com

Ok ok, I’ll admit it. I’m CrackBerry addict. Yes. I check my emails and read the NYTimes twice before I budge my head from its comfy spot deep inside a pillow every morning. And yes, since you were going to ask, I check Facebook like a religious text. Anyways, back to the point of this. The Stanford Daily didn’t have a mobile site for mobile phone users, and I wanted something that I could read in bed before I rolled over and slammed the snooze button again. I thought of different ways to build this, and finally came up with a quick solution by ripping their RSS feed and building a NYTimes-esque mobile site out of it. The project took 4-5 hours to code on a Friday afternoon, and by Saturday morning I was reading the Stanford Daily in bed, just like I wanted. I also added a small weather feature on the homepage that shows the current weather at Stanford… so I know what to wear. I put all the code in a public repo on Git, so you can view it / download it / mess with it, etc. It’s all yours :) Read The Daily from your bed on StanfordMob.com »

Books I’ve Read

I’ve kept track of every book I’ve read since May, 2006. I wanted to keep a detailed spreadsheet of all this information because I feel like reading is one of the most important things in life. It’s also fun to look through from time to time and adjust the scores of books as I get older; I’ve realized which ones are more impactful than others. I try to tackle one ~1000 page book per year. The best book I’ve ever read is Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. I think it should be read by every person alive. View my book list »

What I’m Reading

I keep a steady stream of articles I read online and would recommend. I mostly use this as a lightweight bookmarking / commenting system so I can go back and find articles that I read a few weeks ago and send it to someone. And because I got tired of inundating my Facebook friends with links… nobody reads anymore, let’s be real. See what I’m reading »

@sampurtill

I treat Twitter like a big block party: everyone is invited to join in on the unfettered madness. Just beware that most of my tweets are either in jest or completely sarcastic… Follow me on Twitter :)!! »

Buckingham Alums in Higher Education

I went to high school at a small charter school in Vacaville called Buckingham Charter Magnet High School. I graduated with 72 kids in my grade and I recall about seven classmates going to four year universities. I wanted to start a project that would encourage more students at the school to aim for a four year college by showing them all the other alums that had done it in the past and giving them access to them. And while the interaction part of the project is still a work in progress, we were able to launch with a mural in the front of the school with pictures, bios, and facts about alums that had made it four year colleges. The Vacaville Reporter (hometown newspaper) was kind enough to do a write up about the project. For some reason the article has gone offline, but I have a picture of the article in the paper I saved here.

31fps blog

31fps is (well, was) the optimal frame rate for Flash movies back when I used to write ActionScript. I like to look back at my writing and see how much I’ve changed… basically, a lot has changed in the last few years :p. Also, I think the WordPress installation was hacked a few months ago — it’s on MediaTemple and their WordPress installations seemed to get hacked every other week. Read 31fps »