NotesPerhaps you won't believe me since it's my job to spread the gospel of curation as the Chief Evangelist of Pearltrees, but I think curation is here to stay. These are the reasons why I believe this is the case. This year there has been a tremendous amount of buzz in Silicon Valley about curation. Magnify.net CEO Steven Rosenbaum recently…Unfurl
NotesMiami University's Augmented Reality Research Group developed an Android app that helps librarians find mis-shelved books and determine where they should go. It's a simple idea, and one that could save librarians hours of drudgery (or cost many temps their jobs, but that's another story). Sounds a lot more useful than virtual mirrors for trying…Unfurl
NotesGoogle has quietly moved the link to access Google Reader, its online RSS reader service, below the top level navigation fold for Gmail users. Some Google Reader users are complaining about the move as an inconvenience, but the biggest loss will be to those users who have yet to start using Reader. The Picasa photo service has replaced Reader…Unfurl
NotesFinding strong programming team members is really hard. Unless you've already worked with someone, it's tough to assess how strong a contributor they'll be. Technical tests only show technical ability, and good people can often pick up those skills on the job, whereas jerks can have encyclopedic knowledge but destroy productivity. At Apple they…Unfurl
Notes"If you host your own WordPress blog, it’s probably on Apache. That all fine and good. For most sites Apache works wonderfully, especially as it’s so easy to find information on it, on mod_rewrite and everything else that everyone else uses.
One of the alternatives is Nginx, a really fast webserver that streaks ahead of Apache in terms of performance, but isn’t quite as easy to use. That’s partly because Apache is the default webserver on most Linux distributions and hosts. Want to try Nginx? Here’s how."Unfurl
Notes"pasted code is dead code - real living code changes, and short of going back and repasting, the code on the web quickly becomes out of date.
So this is a little snippet I whipped up to dynamically (by the wonders of cross-site ajax) load code from a github branch. This means, when you update the git branch and repush, the code will update."Unfurl
Notes"Dreamwidth Studios is an Open Source social networking, content management, and personal publishing platform. Our mission in life is to make it easy for you to share the things you make, and easy to find the people who are making the things you want to enjoy. ... Dreamwidth Studios is based upon the LiveJournal codebase offered by LiveJournal, Inc. We've taken the LiveJournal server code and updated, modernized, and streamlined it -- and we make all of our changes available under an Open Source license."Unfurl
Notes"In 1999, when I left a staff job at a newspaper to start my own copywriting business, I never even thought about writing for the web. A decade later, most of my work consists of web projects. It struck me recently that this medium has led me to develop a different way of writing—tighter, simpler, more transparent. The results, I believe, are greater clarity and persuasiveness, and a speedier, more user-friendly read."Unfurl
Notes"This morning at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Jyri Engeström, co-founder of Jaiku and now Google employee, spoke about building sites around social objects. What this means is that the social sites we visit today are not just friend networks - they're also built around objects that connect people with shared interests. These social objects could be anything from a photo on flickr to a video on YouTube or a track on Last.fm. This concept may not be new information to some of you - Jyri has been talking "social objects" for years now. What is interesting, though, is how well this information has held up over time. "Unfurl
Notes"At Berkman we're studying weblogs, how they're used, and what they are. Rather than saying "I know it when I see it" I wanted to list all the known features of weblog software, but more important, get to the heart of what a weblog is, and how a weblog is different from a Wiki, or a news site managed with software like Vignette or Interwoven. I draw from my experience developing and using weblog software (Manila, Radio UserLand) and using competitive products such as Blogger and Movable Type."Unfurl
Notes"Pay attention to what Craig says, and don't store anything on anyone else's server unless you know how you're going to get it off when you need to. Even better, don't store the original on someone else's server, keep that in your space and share a pointer to the data."Unfurl
Notes"Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site."Unfurl
Notes"Comments are a wonderful thing to receive on your blog, adding the dofollow plugin is one way to reward but why not place a link to their last post under their comment, with CommentLuv, you can do that automatically! This is an excellent way to promote comments from your readers."Unfurl
Notes"Larry Hosken: Someone made a comment in response to my website. Specifically, they commented that I was a dickhead. I left that comment up on my site. And thus, for a while, I was the top Google hit for [dickhead]. I felt honored, like the whole internet had gathered together and given me a shiny trophy." Best comment of the day.Unfurl
Notes"I killed one TypePad today. I'm ready and willing to do it again if I need to. Six Apart, set this TypePad free." Umm... so he wants Six Apart to give him a free TypePad ride because he hardly ever posts to it? This ain't the meaning of "Information wants to be free"Unfurl
Notes"Start changing one single line of code in an application build on top of Drupal or ezPublish, to name only the two major ones, and you are in trouble. The moment you need something that is not natively supported, you enter the Dark Zone of CMS hell. You are going to spend a lot of money on development. You will never see the end of the tunnel. That is, until someone says, a few years from now, “Do we need all that crap? Let’s build something that fits our needs and that actually works”.Given number of available open-source CMS solutions, building one on your own sounds like a stupid idea. But if your website is 50% content management and 50% something else, you probably need to start with a web application framework like symfony or Django, rather than a CMS. These frameworks provide plugins that do part of the Content Management job already, so creating a CMS today is like assembling Lego bricks to build something that exactly fits your needs."Unfurl
Notes"Developing a theme for public release isn’t an easy task. When you’re the only one using your theme you don’t have to worry about expanding it, but put it into the hands of other users and it better be ready for any content they throw at it. Blockquotes, lists, and floating images - there are plenty of elements that are common to blogs that need to be supported in every theme you release. Cue our new sample WordPress content. "Unfurl
Notes"Pistachio Consulting delivers microsharing and social media strategies to improve both your company’s operations and customer engagement. We provide the insight and know-how into the latest tools and technologies that are applicable to your business and your message, along with soup-to-nuts program development and advisement. Drop us a line and let us help you ratchet up your business."FeedUnfurl
Notes"As I wrote this blog engine, the need for a commenting system arose and I reflected about a small and simple commenting system with just a flat file JSON store. This is my solution, which can be used on any static page on a server with PHP support."Unfurl
NotesI've had thoughts similar to this: "I’ve avoided having an automated bookmark posting plugin here, but now that Delicious allows 1000 character comments, it makes a good micro-blogging tool. So some Delicious posts should appear here and I’m going to take them out of the sidebar."Unfurl
NotesHey, Delicious should finally do something like this: "When a MyBlogLog visitor visits a site with the plug-in running, the system looks at the tags that user provided for their interests when they created their MyBlogLog account. It then finds blog posts with the same categories or tags and serves them up in a widget. "Unfurl
Notes"Leave it to people in the wiki market to know how to collaborate. Nearly 20 different wiki providers have teamed up to offer a new Firefox extension that will notify users whenever they are on a page that is publicly editable, using a standard icon that sits in the same place the RSS autodiscovery icon appears. Clicking on the icon (img. on the left) will take you to that page's editing interface."Unfurl
Notes"The Universal Edit Button is a green pencil icon wiki.png in the address bar that indicates a web page is editable. It is similar to the orange "broadcast" RSS icon ExampleRSS.png that indicates there is an RSS feed available." Here's another thing I've been using for awhile that I can't believe I hadn't already bookmarked.FeedUnfurl
Notes"I am in no way saying that AtomPub is the solution. What I am pointing out is that if you want federation then you need to design your protocols and APIs RESTfully. In this example it is hypertext, link following, in the AtomPub spec that allows these two separate services to be linked together."Unfurl
Notes"What we need is for Microblogging to shift from being a closed world owned by one company to an open, standards based medium that does not risk dying if a single entity dies, either technically or financially."Unfurl
Notes"It's all part of one cosmos (not a mere sphere), and there will come a day (I hope) when it all is unified, otherwise we're forever going to be chasing our news from place to place as it gets replicated in ever more awkward ways."Unfurl
Notes"Here's a simple WordPress plugin. Save the following as universal-edit-button.php and place it in the /plugins/ folder, then activate it in admin. "FeedUnfurl
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