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collected ajax code snippets, a nicely developing set of widgets and tools for making web applications
May 2005 Archives
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weekly haiku competition, submit your contemporary haiku daily, more fun thatn su doku
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article on creating a company and why your first idea is not always the best
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I started using textpattern recently and I'm really liking it
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like it says, if you can't wait for tomorrows Independent etc
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If you haven't read it yet, it is a good read
I'm off to Amsterdam for Xtech on Tuesday evening. I'm speaking on talkeuro and how it got created. To coincide with the talk, I've lauched a small site Social Documents to discuss this kind of social or civic software. It is currently a textpattern based site, I'll migrate the wiki from betageek there soon and the mailing lists used to develop talkeuro.
I think that there is a lot of potential in building these kinds of sites based on public documents, but with the people put back into them, hence the name social documents. Please drop by Social Documents and let me know what you think.
Whilst I've been working on talkeuro, several issues have come to the fore. MovableType is great, but it is very focused on single author or publisher setups, at least from the point of view of template management. MT does a good job of managing actually writing new content for your site, the template management side is weaker.
Where MovableType has problems is in two key areas. The first is more generic and is about multiuser access to templates. There is no obvious way to hook something like subversion into MT so that several people working on site templates can do so and not worry about clobbering one another when saving changes. You can imagine a system where all the templates are pulled out of MT and on the filesystem, then managed via subversion. There might be hooks to do this, so that an update to subversion (or CVS) will trigger a rebuild in MT. Ideally I want to edit in my development environment, preview easily and then commit changes.
Secondly a way for MT to allow the same weblog content to appear under two sets of templates. eg www.talkeuro.com and staging.talkeuro.com would be really handy to come from the same database content. Thus allowing easy testing and bugfixing, whilst not live to the world. You can fake this, by having multiple templates and publishing to shadow directories, but it is fragile.
Another issue for me with talkeuro is multi-lingual support. Talkeuro has an english and a french version. To manage both of these I need to maintain two separate sets of templates, where ideally I'd have one template and if french use (Voyez cette section) and if english use (See this section). This is roughly how the internal localization of MT works. So as talkeuro gains languages and I want to add functionality to it, I need to hand edit each template or place each code fragment in a separate template module, which starts to get tedious.
I'd love to see these areas addressed in a future version of MT, 3.16 is a good step along the road, but more is needed to make it really scale for more complex CMS type applications.
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flags of the world as visualisation of that country in terms of popukation stats, often not very cheery
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depiction of the amount of electronic junk we create as a humanoid robotic sculpture, down by London Bridge
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discussion of SPSS on tiger and panther and other options
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come and build things with the things we have
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just lovely
I've enjoyed the last few weeks campaigning mostly and I'm looking forward to having dinner with Lucy to celebrate my wedding anniversary then hanging out on irc and aim chatting with follow politicogeeks as the results roll in. My loose prediction, other than the likely Labour victory is for 75 LibDem seats which I'd hope will strengthen the opposition combined with a reduced Labour majority. I'd not expect Howard to last beyond this autumn and Tony might go in 2006. Ed Balls will be interesting to watch too. One issue I was sad that never featured as high as I wanted it was the fallacy of choice.
A couple of fun things to pass the time, Anno and Lucy have both made games for the slower bits of the evening. Anno's is a results bingo game to track most likely to be called results, with up to eight players. Lucy's game also has eight players, but is a "watch the marginals" game.
The BBC have interactive toys, a results service and a whole lot of fun games in their magazine too, oh and these political opinions are mine and not theirs...
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every geographic tld useful for those vanity domain names
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common lat long format
I got a new phone at the weekend, a Nokia 6630 with 3G and a quite nice megapixel camera. To this I've added Lifeblog which is super, it collects together your pictures and messages placing them on day by day views. From this simple interface you can then select and directly post to TypePad or Flickr (howto), with others in the pipeline. The combination has really encouraged my desire for mobile blogging. I neither know nor care about the Windows application.
One other clever thing is the data transfer application which ships with the 6630, this lets you copy across your contacts and pictures from your old Nokia phone, a 6600 in this case. Excellent idea, it even copies the application to the old phone over Bluetooth. It'd need to do until Apple can sort out iSync with my 6630, it seems it doesn't even work on Tiger yet. Further thoughts on the 6630 to come later in the month, suffice to say I thought I was happy with the 6600 and only upgraded as it was free, but it is a marked improvement.
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I agree with most of it though I'd put the lifeblog to flickr higher
