• December 30th, 2009
• Filed in
  • Life Hacks
  • Shameless Promotion

Something crazy and unexpected happened to me this year that I was not ready for. I discovered a new way to peel a banana I had never known before and I wanted to share it with everyone. I ended up sharing it with more people than I ever expected.

How did it happen?

In July, I stayed with my friend for a week in Arlington, VA after a wedding in Maryland. When I was there I wanted to eat a banana that was a bit too ripe I couldn’t just crank the handle back without mashing the banana to pieces. His sister-in-law Brittny was staying with him at the time and was carrying a grilling spatula. I asked her if I could borrow it to make a cut in the rid.

Brittny: “Oh you don’t know how monkeys peel bananas?”

Me: “No..”

Brittny pinches the tip of the banana and opens it from the bottom

MY HEAD EXPLODES

I couldn’t believe it, how did I go through 28 years of life not knowing this? PEOPLE MUST KNOW!!

I immediately tweeted my discovery:

“holy crap, I just learned the way monkeys peel a banana (just pinch the end and peel) http://twitpic.com/9n7r3“ 9:08 PM Jul 7th from Tweetie

My friend Alistair re-tweeted and replied.

“DUDE! Youtube it”

It wasn’t until the next morning when I was making breakfast and wanted to put banana in my cereal that I thought about Alistair’s tweet. I should put my discovery on Youtube, why not?

I tweeted

“Dropping some knowledge, my 1st YT how-to video: “Open a Banana Like A Monkey” http://bit.ly/dmIId @F1LT3R thanks for the push ” 10:37 AM Jul 8th from Tweetie in reply to F1LT3R

I setup the camera on the counter and recorded the first take, fumbling over my words and massacring English in the process. I uploaded it to Youtube later that afternoon and when my friend Mike came back from work I showed it to him. He got a kick out of it and submitted it to Reddit, he’s pretty active in the community there.

Part of the reason it shot up in Reddit I believe was because the athiest community saw my video as reply to Ray Comforts religious slant on peeling a banana, the monkey method basically blew his line of thought out of the water.

The clip ended up making its rounds in mid July. It was a crazy ride. Eventually around 600k views on YT I was invited to their partner program. I didn’t know I could make $ off of the Youtube clip. Eventually I did up earning a couple hundred bucks for sharing my discovery.

Some Milestones

55th most popular link in 2009 on Reddit!

Popular on YT: World-Wide

Lifehacker
Featured as a Food Hack

Yahoo Homepage! Twice!
Reuploaded on Yahoo! Video, Voted to Best Videos of ’09

Busch Gardens made a video response
with Kashina, a REAL Gorilla!

I’m on TV in Japan!
NHK Video Clip, transcript

Lots of interesting video responses, some concerning.

Lots of supporting comments. Lots of not-so-nice comments.

Could I do it again? Doubtful

• No Script, genuine. Just me (in my pj’s)
• Polarizing subject – you loved it or you hated it. You knew about it or you didn’t.
  MIND = BLOWN or You’re a MORON
• Monkey Pants (I swear I did not plan that)
• Killer headline on Reddit “Holy crap, I never realized I was peeling a banana wrong my entire life [Vid]“
• Timing, released early in the week, went more viral as the week went on
• Wasn’t the first to do a YT banana peeling video. (I like to think that it was my likeliness that made it catch on like it did)
• It seemed like a perfect storm of factors brought it together at the end.

Lots of copy-cats. First, my clip was picked up was poached from YT and submitted to Yahoo! It made the front page and got 2mil+ views before I submitted my own original then I contacted them and got it pulled. I got to the homepage again with this resubmission in the best viral videos batch.

I tried to capture screenshots of the craziness as it happened in my Banana Trail Flickr Photoset.

If I were to estimate, between YouTube, Yahoo, all of the articles, and times I saw it refactored & reused I’d say the video received over 10mil+ views worldwide. Maybe more.

That’s Pretty Awesome To Think About

• July 16th, 2009
• Filed in
  • Life Hacks
  • Shameless Promotion
  • Web Development
  • jQuery

Over a year ago I put out a bookmarklet that I used for delicious. Then delicious did a redesign which broke the bookmarklet. Finally I got around to fixing it. Here’s the new bookmarklet. Enjoy!

So I have a confession to make, I love delicious, but I’m lousy at tagging bookmarks. I have a horrible memory so in my travels (and I delicious links a lot) I find myself wanting to tag a bookmark with as many keywords as possible on some off chance I don’t know what to search on to dig up the particular bookmark I’m trying to retrieve. I end up manually toggling every popular tag that is shown on a given post. It’s too time consuming for me.

I’ve been working with jQuery and bookmarklets a lot lately so I had the idea of leveraging the two to create my own LazyTagger bookmarklet for Del.icio.us.

The LazyTagger process is simple

1. You must have the Del.icio.us ‘post’ bookmarklet installed. Try my customized version (does away w/ the popup window which I find annoying) post to delicious « drag this to your toolbar
2. Drag the LazyTagger bookmarklet to your browser bookmarks toolbar
   
3. Copy and paste this code into the ‘location’ of your newly created bookmark – you’re going to have to go and edit the bookmark manually from the browser. This has to be done to the avoid character limit on drag-and-drop bookmarklets.
   

   javascript:var%20s=document.createElement('script');s.setAttribute('src','http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.min.js');document.body.appendChild(s);s.onload=function(){var%20tags=[];$('#save-reco-tags%20ul.tag-list%20li,#save-pop-tags%20ul.tag-list%20li').addClass("on").each(function(){tags.push($(this).text().match(/\D*/g)[0]);});tagit=tags.join('%20');$('input#tags').val('').val(tagit+'%20').focus();};void(s);

4. ‘post to delicious’ just like you normally would
5. When you’re at delicious, click the LazyTagger bookmarklet
6. All of the popular and recommended tags will be selected automatically. Laziness rocks.
7. After all of the tags are toggled the focus will be placed on the tags input so you can begin typing any other tags you deem necessary.

That’s LazyTagger. I’ve been using it for a long time and I can honestly say I don’t think I could go back. Feedback appreciated.