Technology – Page 37

A million cool things

I need to get this out of my system so that I can get back to real work, but damn, there’s plenty o’ cool things in and around the web-making world lately. A sampling of what’s new and decent that you, yes you, dear reader, might check out:

In the WordPress plugin category:

SlimStat — A simple web stats analyser based on ShortStat
hCard and hCalendar creator widgets (I want XFN added to the Add Link box!)
WordPress Reports (aka TanTan Stats) — for pulling Google Analytics and Feedburner into your Dashboard
Building a slidey Shelf in WordPress

In new web apps:

CollectiveX — pulling icons from SimpleBits, a color scheme selector from 37Signals and Lokesh‘s Lightbox JS.
Not so new, but finally got an account: Assaf‘s co.mments.
GooToDo — email based To Do lists (via Lane)
Sign of the times app of the day and must-mention Google app, Calendar. With switching costs so low, it does seem like taking on anything Googlifiable is a dangerous proposition unless you’ve got a nuke (to quote Munjal).

In the Hack MySpace corner:

Mike Davidson has done something to MySpace that will no doubt lead to the second coming of CSS Zen Garden as the CSS Zen MySpace. (Bonus points for his Gmail via IMAP solution).
Previously: Keegan’s MySpace profile hack.

In “software you haven’t heard of but should try”:

Pastor — still the simplest way to store your usernames, passwords and serials
Virtue — multiple desktops, now in active development again (r122)
Endo — from the 4-letter-name app creator of 1001 and Ect, a slick newsreader
Journler (via Greg Elin) — not the most pretty, but very functional journal (oo! with tags!)
Pyro — neat use of Webkit for one purpose: showing Campfire chats (via SvN)
Corripio — super simple tool for grabbing album artwork
CamiScript — add Applescript support to Camino (script repository)

Got anything you’ve come into recently that you want to pass along? Always looking for the latest and greatest, so drop a note in the comments.

SHDH IX: The hackfest is back

After a short hiatus, it’s time to bring SuperHappyDevHouse back.

Saturday, April 29th — be there.

Upcoming updates

More updates from Upcoming, including the addition of hcards to all the event pages! w00t!

Nostalgia

Somehow I yearn for the days when the web was one, Apple was considered as much kitsch as niche and Microsoft communicated to people about one thing and one thing alone. Ah, the good ol’ days.

These things are new or weird in my world

Niall is joining Microsoft. (Oh yeah, congrats!)
Matt took funding. Just a little.
Google launched a calendar.
Google remains buddy-buddy with the world’s largest censor. (“All the world’s information at your fingertips… as long as we agree with it.”)
Google patented a bunch of scary shit. Think big picture and you’ll get it.
AT&T was outed as being a haven for US spies spying on US Citizens.
Pinko promo for a service I use: Blinksale 2.0 is rolling out soon (and then upping prices). Get in before the end of the month to lock in the current rate!
Tara got a MacBook Pro and rocked the house at Net Squared.
San Francisco and its citizens’ childrens’ eyeballs were sold to Google.
Portland’s were sold to MetroFi.
My Mighty Mouse‘s gray nipple stopped working.
I started listening to Letters to Cleo again.
Tara and I got in a funk;
I’m not so great at offering positive support to people I care about most;
I decided to work on it.

Oh, and WineCamp got a website (thanks JoÃ£o Antunes!), I started a Practical Microformats wiki for all you designers out there (now help me build it!) and Tara and I leave for Barcamp Bangalore on Sunday for 8 days.

…and Barcamp San Francisco is happening June 20. Want to help? Good — because we need it!

BostonWTF

Brian Del Vecchio pointed me to BostonWTF (Web Technology Forum) focused on the startup scene in Boston. All I can say is, “finally!” East coast reprznt!

If I did buy a car…

…it’d likely be this new diesel-powered 2006 Honda Civic Si. I mean, voice recognition, a button to turn on the car and 55MPG?! Oh yes. I’ll take one. Via i.never.nu.

ALE: Ajax linking and embedding

Those Zimbra guys are so clever. Via O’Reilly, AJAX Linking and Embedding (ALE) “provides the ability to embed rich content into an editable document and to then interact with and edit that content in much the same way as it is done with traditional office suites and applications in a desktop environment. A key difference is that … the embedded objects are AJAX components that are embedded into an editable HTML document.” Download the 0.2 spec and check out the hosted demo.

Open source rating system readied

Carnegie Mellon has sponsored a system for rating open source projects in a standardized way: “After nearly six months of tweaking and collecting feedback from users, the Business Readiness Rating has been refined to the point where its evaluation categories are now final.” More.

PBWiki hits 50,000 wikis

Hometown hero PBWiki (created by a small team of folks lead by David Weekly of SHDH fame) has hit 50,000 PBWikis (what’s a PBwiki?).

You’ll note that almost all the wikis that I use today are PBWikis: Barcamp, Munified, Coworking, CivicForge, Mash Pit and the new Micro Microformats wiki.

Why? Ease of use, simplicity, speed… and the right subset of features and a simple interaction model. It feels solid. It looks good. It does what I want it to do (I’m also watching Stikipad as it offers Textile).

And now it looks like I’ll even be getting to do some work for the team on some upcoming usability and design tasks. Not to mention microformats integration. Nice.

Bonus: So I’m curious — what features do you look for in a wiki? What’s missing from your experience? Essentially, if you ever had a wiki feature request that you’re dying for (or something you never want to see in a wiki again), what would you say?