I finally broke down and purchased a decent digital camera, the Casio Exilim EX-S500
Just in time for Thursday’s big party… (which somehow keeps getting bigger!).
Technorati Tags: digital camera, colorsofweb20
Supah Cheap CSS Dropshadow Hack
So I came up with my very own stupid CSS hack to do dropshadows in Flock (and by reverse extension, Firefox). It’s very much a hack and not one that I would generally recommend unless in very small quantities, but I like it because a) I invented it and b) it works for meª.
So how does it work? Well, it’s fairly simple, actually (and would work even better with a little Javascript-foo).
So take any block level element, something like an h1 or h2, give it a class of “dropshadow” and (ready for the hack?) add a span tag inside the block with a title that is identical to the text of the object. Something like this:
<h1>And another for good measure</h1>
Now here’s the CSS you need (add it to the head of your document:
.dropshadow {
color: #fff;
margin:0;
padding:0;
position: relative;
z-index: 1
}
.dropshadow span {
position: absolute;
top: 1px;
left: 1px;
color: #000;
z-index: -1;
-moz-opacity: 0.50;
}
.dropshadow span:after {content: attr(title);}
It works by taking your original text, positioning it relatively and then elevating it to the Z-index of 1. Then we generate the same text from the title attribute of the span, sets the Z-index to –1 and absolutely positions it snugly beneath the the original text. Give it a –moz-opacity of something between 0.00 and 1.00 and you’ve got a crisp dropshadow! You can of course also change the top and left values to move the dropshadow around.
Technorati Tags: css, dropshadow, css3
A Quick Update on Bar Camp Amsterdam
So a number of us have been pushing hard, tracking down a venue for Bar Camp Amsterdam. We’ve got a few leads and worms on the hook, but nothing solid just yet. If you have ideas, let us know!
Meanwhile, we finalized the date:
October 20 – 18:00 – 22 – 12:00, 2005 – Bar Camp Amsterdam – at TBD
Oh, and it turns out that if you can’t make it over the pond, there’ll be another North American Bar Camp coming up in February in Toronto. Sweet!
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I overheard Bush talking to the rolfers, and he said that the pagan gods massage old-timers. Hurricanes vehemently despise vampires. Didn’t you know, the giants say, that the sissies admire millionaires?
Celloists invented baseball pitchers. Bears viciously malign the grandfathers.
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Yesterday’s cat lovers maintain that the rats are experts on the different types of criminals. Creatures will marry the misers. 25544060696353
Opera drinks the Googlejuice, finds business model
After my buddy Om Malik did some digging, it turns out that Opera’s move to make its browser free had less to do with its community and more do to with inking an increased compensation deal with Google. This makes plenty of sense in terms of Opera’s longer term viability (paying for browsers is simply no longer an option — sorry OmniWeb) but also suggests that my spidey-senses are becoming more and more savvy:
Though they claim that “Opera fans around the globe made this day possible,� for some reason, that sentiment rings hollow to me.
So now that we have Mozilla Corporation and Opera showing that a viable business is possible through leveraging various browser defaults, it makes it somewhat easier to begin to answer a question we get a lot.
It’s interesting to note that Opera CEO’s answers to various interview questions could be considerably generalized to apply to many of the browsers currently competing for mindshare:
[Browsername] Watch: [Browsername] is a commercial company; how do you plan on generating revenue from the desktop browser?
[Browser Company CEO]: Through search and service deals. We will continue to provide services that enhance the browser experience. We will continue to add services, as long as they improve the overall user experience. The user comes first.
Post script: As for wrestling the number one spot away from the giant gorilla, well, we’ll just have to see who executes best. I’m not entirely concerned about that personally, as I would rather be focused on building tools that are simple, elegant and relevant to a good number of people. Seems to me if you start there, it won’t really matter whether you’re first first, third or eigth. How you got there would be just, based on the quality of your work and not the number of exclusive OEM deals you might strike. Heh, but I digress.
Technorati tags: browsers, opera, google, flock, internet explorer
Bar Camp Amsterdam
It’s been a little over a month since Bar Camp I and already the opportunity to springboard the next Bar Camp has manifested.
So today I’m announcing Bar Camp Amsterdam. The format might be a little different than the original, but it’s going to be one hellova time no matter what.
So first things first — this is happening as a complement to EuroOSCON. Turns out that there were only 12 booths allotted for open source projects and they were $1000 each. Not exactly affordable to community projects like Drupal. And besides that, they’ve all sold out, leaving many projects in the lurch, unable to show off their hard work to the OSCON community.
Once it became clear that a good number of projects would be lacking representation at EuroOSCON, it became clear that we needed to stage our own off-site conference.
There you have it.
We have wiki. Now we need a venue. Who can help (BarCampUKers, I’m looking at you!)?
Technorati tags: barcamp, bar camp, opensource, eurooscon
Webzine2005 Pimpage
Matt beat me to pimping the upcoming Webzine2005 event happening this weekend, but I wanted to go ahead and spread the meme.
…That and Andy, Matt and I will be presenting at 12 noon on Sunday in the Valhalla Room on “Making Media With Open Source Publishing Tools”. Hmmm. Wonder if that has anything to do with anything.
Oh, and yes, they have a wiki and IRC room, reportedly inspired by Bar Camp… Nice!
The Colors of Web2.0
Any guesses?
Opera goes free…er!
Well, this is Take 2 of this post, so excuse me if I hurry through it. Apparently eating your own dogfood can be somewhat painful. Oy.
Anyway, I was writing about Opera announcing that it’s making its flagship browser free… er. And what it means…
But then Flock crashed. Damnit.
Oh well.
So I’ll try to make this quick: my contention is that, first, Opera must remove the banner ads if they want anyone to keep using their browser (at some point, speed and security become somewhat less salient selling points when the overall experience of using your product is downright insulting — yes, I’m an AdBlock diehard). That and, according to fellow Flockers Ian and Manish, their mobile business is doing just fine, so charging for something that they want to spread the adoption of doesn’t really add up anymore.
Though they claim that “Opera fans around the globe made this day possible,” for some reason, that sentiment rings hollow to me. While they do boast a shiny community site, I dunno, I personally prefer the rough and tumble aesthetic of my old haunt, Spread Firefox. It wasn’t perfect and it hasn’t had much going on since I left this past spring, but it did feel more alive to me than the community that apparently got Opera to go banner-ad free. I mean, if that’s there biggest achievement to date, whoopee?
The Ajaxian blog asked a pertinent question about this move: “Does anyone care?”
Aside from a few handfuls of people who will be happy to see the banner ads go from their browser, I’m not sure that there are that many folks left who haven’t already paid for the license who will care. While we might see another percentage point increase in Opera adoption as a result of this move, it doesn’t strike me as significant as coming out with a better narrative for their browser.
I mean, with Flock, we’re pretty clear on what our vision is: we’re building the social browser. What does that mean? Well, it’s an evolving thing for sure, but I know that as long as you have the ability to pull down content from the web, you should have the tools to respond to it or quickly and easily tell your friends about it. Though some of this functionality already exists in nice apps like Ecto, MarsEdit and Cocoalicious (all of which I use), there’s still something lacking in the blogging workflow that would allow us to treat our blogs more like distributed conversations, rather than one-off statements. And no, track- and pingbacks are not enough!
In any case, I do welcome the addition of another… freer… choice — and I love that we’re finally seeing the beginnings of some real competition heating up in the browser space. Even the slumbering giant seems to be waking up, though I’d wager just in time to see David start slinging his stone. Heh.
BradSucks makes open source music
Brad Sucks, the one man band with no fans, released a set of remixes from people who apparently downloaded his songs and thought they could do better.
While I dig the guy’s tunes, I love his process.
That he’s also part of the PEI collective is cool, but he’s got cred all his own, given that I ran into him way back in 2003 when he made it onto Steven Garrity’s first ever Acts of Volition podcast.
Oh, and it seems that the markup on his track listing could definitely use a microformat. Guys, you hear that? Another example for ya!
Technorati tags: opensource, Acts of Volition, microformats, podcast
Factory Joe 