Work – Page 2 – Factory Joe

Former Flocker joins Automattic

Lloyd’s finally announced his new role with WordPress-shop Automattic after leaving Flock:

Today is my first day of every day being an Automattic day!

I am Automattic’s Entomology Assistant — their QA person: bug finder and describer, bug gardner, quality advisor, and QA community collaborator.

I am passionate and knowledge about many aspects of software development and support.

I have enjoyed getting familiar with WordPress since first starting with Flock (one of WordPress.com’s first partner) over a year ago, spending more time these last many months, and accelerating my experience these last few weeks. I know I have a special opportunity because I am one of Automattic’s few hires from outside of the core WordPress community.

I have never been so excited to work with each and every member of a team. I am enjoying learning from everyone!

Goplan supports microformats

I’ve been playing around with Goplan and really like the feature set so far. One of the invisible features that is now visible thanks to a post by Fred Oliveira is their support for microformats — namely hCalendar:

I’d like to take some time to highlight the icalendar integration and microformats support. We’ve been fans of the Microformats project for quite a while, and are working on bringing Microformat compability for events (in the calendar, as well as due tasks) and people. This allows us to provide developers with more ways to export project-related data. For more information on microformats, see the microformats project homepage.

This is smart development. Though it might not seem entirely obvious how Goplan users can take advantage of this small addition, over time I think we’ll see excellent integration with tools like Greasemonkey, browser scripts and user styles or rendering engines. Can OpenID support be far off?

Another fool leaves the Flock

The title of this post might sound meaner than it really is, but I’m referring to the departure of Lloyd “Foolswisdom” Budd from Flock.

This is something I’ve known about for awhile (as well as Bart’s departure before it was made public), but Lloyd’s post does a pretty good job capturing what clearly was a tough decision with hundreds of photos from his stay at what some might call the yellow canary of Web 2.0.

Things for good for Lloyd and his new bride, however, and I’m excited to find out what’s next for them as they resettle in Victoria, BC.

And yeah, I presume that he’ll keep up with his masterful photography work and foodporn shots.

Heads: microformats creator for Flock

Well, it took the community to do it first, but geoFlock creator Tony Farndon’s done gone and created a Microformats creator for Flock called… Heads!

And, owing the it’s design, can easily accomodate many other formats without too much effort… excellent.

Sage advice

Implement is 9/10s of the law.

Don’t forget it.

Termie flying the coop

Photo by Jesse Andrews.

Man, should I even bother mentioning that Andy “Termie” Smith and my ex-roommate is leaving Flock when he makes fun of me in his parting post?

Well, whatever… if I can’t get over my self-aggrandizement, I guess I never will. Fooey on my self-importance.

Welcome to the pool of sumblimators, Termie, and here’s to beating me out at the top of the Google pile of search results announcing the termination of our prior employment.

A lesson from game design

When I was at Flock, one of the things that I advocated for most vehemently was to take more inspiration from game design — to look to influences in Halo, World of Warcraft, the The Sims and others to come up with novel approaches to socially browsing the web.

Well, Aaron Ruby, writing for NextGen, captures exactly what I wanted to add to the open source design process:

And that’s what game designers do: they create objects that invite play.

The Microsoft Office model of interface design no longer applies; rows of buttons simply aren’t fun and because they’re not fun they actually reduce focus and productivity.

Though there will continue to be a need for transitional browsers, I’m looking to games like Spore to set the stage for next generation interaction models and work/time flows.

Ma.gnol.icio.us

Wow. Ma.gnolia is so rockin’ lately.

I mean, I’m biased, but that’s ok.

I have a longer post coming soon that I’ve been saving up, but I wanted to get this out ASAP so all you folks out there with del.icio.us tools can port your apps to work with my favorite social bookmarking service…

Why now?

Because Ma.gnolia now supports the del.icio.us API. Oh yes. Check it out. And let crew know what you think!

A Flock podcast, changes therein; related tools

Geoffrey “Fredo” Arone seems to be stepping up as the public voice of Flock now that he’s in the position of Chief Strategy Officer and Bart‘s taking on the more abstract role as chairman.

In a recent interview with Richard MacManus, Fredo talks about Flock someday becoming a mainstream browser alongside the likes of Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Not sure what I think about that — (sure, ok, whatev) — since I think Flock’d be wiser to try to build to an extremely dedicated niche audience and then work outwards from there — preferring slow but constant iterative growth, like the iPod found… as opposed to Tech Crunch boom-and-bust sign-up and vacate cycles betacoms have come to know and despise.

It’s good to hear, however, that with Erikka Arone, Apple’s former iPod Product Manager in the Worldwide Product Marketing Group, coming onboard as Flock’s Senior Director of Marketing, they’ll have some real experience in their court to help tailor whatever strategy they adopt.

Meanwhile, Flock will suffer another bummer of a loss this September when Lloyd, heretofore Flock’s most exceptional QA Lead and unofficial staff photographer, will migrate back home to Canada. Mum’s the word on his future plans, but at the least, it’s clear that the OSM looks after its own.

. . .

Oh, and for those interested, I found a couple stand-alone Mac apps that offer similar features to those already found in Flock:

Pukka and Postr — tools for submitting your bookmarks to social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Ma.gnolia
PictureSync — support tons of web services, Flock really needs to open up choice in its photo sharing tools
Tickr — developed by one of those Slide folks, provides a good model for the disputed photo topbar
Sidenote — similar to the original Shelf concept that Daryl implemented

Note that these don’t suggest that Flock’s a bad idea (it’s not), it’s important to be aware of what else is out there that might provide opportunities to learn from.

Flock 0.7.3 lands

Simple maintenance release with the following changes:

Photo
- Photobucket sub-album and Flickr set browsing and uploading. Allow users to refine photos displayed in photobar by album.
- Several bug fixes for photobucket and flock integration
Extensions
- Allow extensions that haven’t been modified for flock to be installed. Users will be warned that the extension has not been tested with flock but will be allowed to proceed. Note that this feature has been partially available since 0.7.1. If you have installed unmodified extensions you will see a warning, “This update will cause some of your extensions and/or themes to stop working until they are updated.”, during the upgrade which can be ignored.
Spread flock feature. Allow flock users to opt into adding a flock tagline to photos dragged from the photobar or the from the desktop into a text area
Setup (First Run) experience enhancements
- Bug fixes, better discovery of current configuration and UI treatments
- Added option to allow anonymous statistics to be gathered during initial setup. This will allow Flock to further streamline and simplify the setup experience.
Other
- Added OPML export to My News
- Blog Editor fix for editing text in source view window
- Updated to use new deli.cio.us API

I’m still waiting on atomic saves in the blog editor before I use it (still composing directly in WordPress with Camino) and I’d love to see a full-screen slideshow mode in the Flickr Photo Topbar, but the product continues to improve. Go get it.