I care about… – Page 37

CSS3 Columns in Flock

After doing a little investigating, it turns out Firefox 1.5 already supports pretty much what I’m looking for. And given that Flock is based on Firefox, that means we get to use it! How’s that for serendipity?

So check it out. I made a little demo for
those of you running Firefox 1.5 or Flock. Otherwise, here’s a screencap of how it looks. Check out the source of the demo to see how this is done. Basically all you need is this:


.content {
- moz- column- width: 16em;
- moz- column- gap: 2em;
}

And here are some other resources:

Technorati Tags: css, css3, flock, columns

Geeky Things

I’ve had a couple things cross my radar recently that I’d like to see be improved somehow… either in Flock (or browsers in general), RSS aggregators or blogging tools.

Better Reading through Columnization

Which do you prefer? I think it’s quite apparent that Tofu makes reading webpages and blog posts infinitely easier and more enjoyable. So where’s the Firefox extension? Huh huh? I guarentee you this will get into Flock eventually… if not my next RSS aggregator. Or both…?

Well, looks like the recent Firefox betas already have this. Now to just see some smart Tofu-like uses of this feature!

DOM state in history

With all the hoopla about AJAX-based interfaces, it’s about time that browsers get keen to the fact that the DOM state is part of your history. It’s not some scripty side-effect — no, when I use the back button, I expect the page to be in the same state that I left it. This should be the case whether I navigate off to some other page or close the window or tab. The only way to restore the state of a page back to its original state should occur if I clear my history or exit out of my browser (or somehow reset the DOM through some other intentional mechanism).

And this should exist in the browser because it’s the thing that’s storing my path history. So what does it mean when the browser adds DOM state to my history? For example, when I use Gmail and navigate off to some other page and then return, I would no longer lose the email I was reading or composing. In fact, I could even load up Gmail in a new tab or window and find myself in the same place where I left off. Which is exactly what I want.

So the effect would be in effect to maintain your session state across tabs, windows… no matter where you are or what you’re doing, the browser would be staying with you, never skipping a beat, making sure that every little action you took was recorded and there for you to return to until you decided to start afresh.

It’s time the browser got wise to the current state of web application design. If not to encourage the further development of fast webapps like Basecamp or Flickr, but to make the browser reflect user expectations about the purpose of the back button!

Blogbars

The last thing on my list concerns a rather recent feature that Matt just launched on WordPress.com. It’s just like the Blogger toolbar, except that his bar applies to WordPress.com account holders instead of general visitors. It’s a good start, but I think it can be better. He’s open to ideas — as am I. How can this tool help you blog better?

Hmm, if only the browser could facilitate blogging somehow… heh.

Technorati Tags: blogbar, wordpress, ajax, readability, tofu

SuperHappyDevHouse IV

We now have art. So you better show up!

Technorati Tags: shdh, superhappydevhouse

Observations on the perceived failure of community after Katrina

The more I read about the crisis in New Orleans, the more I am confused and saddened at what’s happening. And the more I see and hear of the US Government’s response, the more concerned I am for the general and ongoing wellbeing and protection of America’s citizenry.
What’s unfolding in New Orleans is being portrayed as utter chaos and what comes down to a failure of the community to take care of and fend for itself. Rather, it seems, individuals are ruining the relief efforts for everyone by apparently looking out only for themselves and their families:

“Hospitals are trying to evacuate,” said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesan, spokesman at the city emergency operations center. “At every one of them, there are reports that as the helicopters come in people are shooting at them. There are people just taking potshots at police and at helicopters, telling them, “You better come get my family.”

While I don’t believe that this behavior is true of everyone or even the majority, it is significant enough to be causing the relief efforts to fail or to become to dangerous for those administering them.

And in the midst of all this, our president has the gall to callously call for a crackdown on the looting:

“I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this — whether it be looting, or price gouging at the gasoline pump, or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud,” Bush said. “And I’ve made that clear to our attorney general. The citizens ought to be working together.”

This from the man who sold us on a bogus war in a time when the last thing we as a people coming together needed was to crackdown on a minor madman. What we needed was community leadership that brought us together — and that helped us to see our common humanity. The more I hear and see of this president, the more my concerns are confirmed that he is not one who can lead us towards a greater empathic understanding of ourselves or our neighbors. Instead, his example will further encourage divisive behavior against our better nature.
Technorati Tags: hurricanekatrina, politics, george bush

Mambo spreads love, all open source-like

Looks like Mambo’s getting into the community PR business with their newly minted Mambo Love site:

This is the official community-driven site for Mambo marketing, PR and advocacy. We hope that through this site we will be able to gather extensive global community support and awareness for Mambo and it will provide resources for members of the community to spread the word and keep the project growing.

While it’s great to see more community-centric spreading projects crop up, it does seem like the flavor of these efforts don’t always capture the genuine ethos of open source. Consider this snippet pertaining to staging Mambo Days (emphasis mine):

Every proposal submission will be taken into consideration, if your proposal has been accepted, we will provide you with the information you need to start your own Mambo event, put you in touch with the people who will be able to help you plan your event and in some cases Mambo communities will offer financial subsidaries* as well.

While this in some ways is similar to how patches are accepted in open source projects, staging your own Mambo meetup is not something that should require a blessing from Mambo, even if they can offer help. Consider what a bunch of us kids did with Bar Camp. Consider what the Spread Firefox community accomplished with the Firefox 1.0 launch parties.

It’s time that these folks wanting to get into community marketing start truly embracing their communities by realizing that their users as a whole are a bunch smarter and more capable than they presently seem to be willing accept. Armed with the right tools, self-organizing advocacy communities can be far more effective than cheesy billion dollar marketing campaigns. Here’s hoping the Mambo folks, who seem a little confused lately, return to the original spirit of open source in their nascent community marketing efforts and empower the passionate grassroots advocates within their community.

Technorati Tags: mambo, spreadspread, opensource

Bar camp buzz builds; the story twists, turns, shouts!

I wanted to pipe up before this topic spiral out any further and I miss my chance to edge in my two cents.

In staging Bar camp, we, the original organizers, harbor no ill will towards Foo Camp, Tim O’Reilly or anything or anyone else associated with the project. Indeed, the original concept came to me and my roommate Andy from Tantek Celik, who suggested that there should be an alternative, non-exclusive, “open” alternative to Foo Camp. Sure, an interesting idea, but having little personal knowledge of the event, we shrugged it off to focus on more pressing things.

That was three weeks ago and Andy and I (with the Flock crew) had a browser to launch at OSCON (an O’Reilly event, mind you). Planning a second event was hardly something any of us had the bandwidth to take on, let alone the attention span to consider seriously. There was simply no time.

Yet upon returning from Portland, and with our launch out of the way, our conversations suddenly returned to the idea of the alternative conference. Listening to details of previous Foo Camps from Tantek, I decided that yes, he was on to something here… and the more I researched and discussed Foo Camp, the more we believed that O’Reilly’s ad hoc model would work beyond the limited boundaries of Sebastapol. And would not only work — but needed to be freed!

And so this past Saturday, over IRC, we initiated a face to face meeting of the BarPlanners and got the ball rolling.

When we embarked on this strange and fantastic journey, we knew that we had a week. We had no money, no sponsors, no venue and no idea if just the five of us or 50 random folks would show. But we knew that we had to stage BAR Camp and that, among other things, it would serve as a demonstration of the decentralized organizing potential of the Web2.0 Generation. We set out to prove that what the good folks at O’Reilly could pull off in a year with a couple years’ experience and tens of thousands of dollars, could be cobbled together in a week by a crazy gaggle of savvy geeks, leveraging only the web and the our reach into our social networks.

So here we are, five days later and two days from the event. We’ve had a venue donated to us. We’ve got a fabulous logo (thanks Eris!). We’ve got some sponsors lining up up and a bunch of great advisors. And we’ve got buzz. This is turning out to be the exact kind of unprecedented success we were hoping for — and from here it can only get better as we lead up to the kickoff.

Tomorrow I’m planning on giving Tim O’Reilly a ring to see what we can do to join forces (hopefully beyond coordinating on FooBarCrawl). I’d love to see the ideas he’s baked in Foo Camp spread even beyond Bar Camp. Next year I expect to see multiple satellite Bar Camps happening the world over, loosely joined via the web, bringing distributed collaboration and culture building to a much, much wider audience. Podcasted, Flickered, wikified, videographied and blogged like mad. At the very least.

Whaddya say, Tim, think we can do it?

Technorati Tags: barcamp, barcamp05, foocamp

BAR, the alternative to FOO

Today a bunch of us met to plan out Barcamp, an open invite alternative to O’Reilly’s Foo Camp. We don’t have much time, money or space at the moment, but we’re scrappy and committed to making this happen.

So check out the wiki and go sign up. While we’re not doing the whole invite thing, we are asking for RSVP’s in advance.

And yes, this should be a seriously good time. Really.

Technorati Tags: barcamp, barcamp05

Why microformats are the glue between web content and a richer online experience

In response to my introduction, Andy Hume asked me on the Microformats-discuss list:

What kind of microformat support are you looking to get in to these publishing tools? Obviously wordpress has built in support for XFN. What else are you trying to get happening?

So now it’s time for me to put on my visionary cap and mention a couple ideas I’ve been stewing on about why microformats make good sense for web publishers and web tool builders. I won’t get too pedantic or preach to the choir. Rather, I’m just gunna outline some of the obvious things to me that make creating the lowercase “semantic web” worthwhile, assuming, of course, that certain enabling technologies and innovations occur.

First, let me point out that the cost of implementing microformats is less than minimal and in fact, in some cases, can give you a net gain given the reduction on time spent figuring out what CSS classes to use. As a former-web-developer-junkie, it was my job to come up with unoriginal ways of identity bits of content on webpages so that I or someone else could come back later and figure out what the heck I was doing.

This lead to me to do things like code lists of people with a container that specified that, indeed, I was working with a list of people and not dates, dogs or envelopes. Why would this be useful? Well, what if you wanted to use a different icon to denote a person, date, dog or envelope? You’d need to know what class of object you were working with. (Just bear with me here.) This becomes a pain when you have to do this over and over again and or work on someone else’s code. However, with a sufficient store of standard microformats at our disposal, such situations could theoretically be avoided. Rather than having to reinvent a classing system everytime, I could simply turn to the related microformat standard and call it a day.

So that’s great and all, but why do you bother touching code anymore anyway with such able CMS and blog tools available? Why not just bake it into those publishing tools and be done with it?

The short answer is that that’s happening, and we need to see more of this work get done. The problem seems to be related to chickens, eggs, carts and horses, in no particular order. And until they all get sorted out, there’s a great deal of developer apathy best captured in lines like, “Why should I care?”

Well, better than just spouting out about the practical benefits for web developers, there are functional benefits which I expect to see available in the coming months. As a prelimary example, check this out:

I created a Greasemonkey user script that will find those hCalendar events and provide a link to import them into any calendar program that supports the iCalendar format (most notably Apple’s iCal and Mozilla’s Sunbird). What does this mean? Well any time you see an event on the web that has hCalendar information, you can click a link and it’ll be added to your calendar so you don’t have to copy the information by hand.

unmediated: Greasemonkey and Microformats

So just imagine once this kind of support becomes native in the browser… that’s when really interesting things start to become possible. And soon, I’ll outline just how I see this happening.

The cult of the vagabond hacker

With the success of hacker meetups like SuperHappyDevHouse and HackNight, it dawned on me that there need not be a specific, pre-planned event in order for hacker-types to converge in a physical location to hack on problems that are of interest them. This can, and perhaps should, happen in a much more ad-hoc, spur-of-the-moment manner and be just as successful and integrative. Additionally, there is a role for folks (like David Weekly, host of SHDH) who want to encourage this kind of behavior, especially those who understand that they can benefit from it.

I envision cults of traveling hackers, venturing from one city to the next, war driving and shacking up at homes and offices, seeking caffeine, a decent work environment and space for sleeping bags. Such places need not be permanant destinations, but rather convenient, temporary quarters for such hacking gatherings. Stay-overs may last as little as a day or may carry on over a week; indeed, it’s doubtful that more than a fortnight would even work for such a situation (for that, perhaps we would need hacker hostels).

Results from these events would be contributed back to a “code trough” where other intrepid hackers could either pick up the work or could remix it towards other projects, following the open source model. And the hosts would of course get some kind of working product out of the exchange or could continue to offer space in order to encourage the completion of the work should it not be finished in time.

Would hackers actually work on projects that they themselves didn’t come up with? Well, given the free room (and board, potentially), supply of caffeine (or other hacking supplement) and connectivity, the tradeoff seems more than fair for those hackers who want to work but also want to explore the world.

If such a networked, Meetup-like system were developed and I knew that I could plan a trip across Europe just stopping off at such hacker havens and not pay for anything but transportation, I would surely do so! Indeed, by pushing the social component and randomness of this kind of situation, you would be exposed to new and interesting people with diverse ideas, approaches and experiences that, it would seem, would contribute to creating fundamentally more interesting and valid products that solve more than just your own personal peeves. And if you happen to take a project with you on your travels, you get the compound benefit of having a myriad cross-section of the hacker subculture looking at and refining the ideas in your project as well as contributing effort hours towards getting something done!

I’d love to see such a system emerge and if anyone wants to offer up their home, office or… backyard? for this kind of event, let me know. Perhaps we could see something like this off-shoot from OSCON in August?

Safari coming to a cell phone near you

Nokia gets Apple If anything leads one to conclude that Apple is making a move into the cellular telephony market, it’s the new deal that has Nokia dumping the newly open-sourced innards of Safari into its phones. A significant development for many reasons, not the least of which is the choice of Apple’s browser code instead of Mozilla’s…. or even Opera’s (a fellow Scandanavian company) for that matter.

Whether this will lead to the fabled iPod iPhone, one cannot be sure, but with the iPod Photo already out there, it’s only a matter of time before they toss a phone into the mix and make take the iPod to the obvious next level.