A Day in Paradise

This one is at least a little more coherent. I agree with what they say, the problem, is that what they say doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you think my website is ugly and because of all the ugly sites the internet sucks. What matters is that despite (and in some cases, because) of all the crap on the internet people still use it and enjoy it.

Another case of the elitest “there-goes-the-neighbourhood” syndrom.

Having said that, the original list is quite interesting. Notice how YouTube and Del.icio.us are on both lists. Where is Craigs list? Is that just another one of those ugly sites that millions of “uncool people” use?

On the heels of last night’s rant, here’s a list of the 50 Coolest Websites of 2006. Some of my favorites are among them including:

Podcast Pickle
The 9
YouTube (just uploaded a test video I made last week today, I’m starting a series of street musicians in frankfurt)
Kevin Sites
Human Clock
and of course MySpace

PCWorld Author Dan Tynan, starts off his “25 Worst Website” list, with what I imagine he thinks is an insightful comment: “When it comes to the Web, hindsight is more like X-ray vision”. I’m not sure if Dan is ignorant, elitist or just suffering from radiation poisoning from over-exposure to X-ray vision, but this article suffers from a severe disconnect from how the real world views and uses the internet.

The technical world is quickly heading into another bubble, call it web2.0 if you like. Articles like these show that we haven’t learned our lessons. The question that I have to ask, is after the boom bursts, who will be left standing, MySpace or YouTube?

The rest is a rant.
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Please create a search function, so that I can search my 150 writeboards to see where I mention a specific company. Even simple tagging mechanism would work for me. Right now it sorta sucks.

One of the Zend conference sessions that I’m pretty excited about is Don Samisa Abeysinghe’s “Fully Fletched Web Services with PHP”.

WSO2 was recently listed as one of the top 10 Open Source companies to watch. Among their open source products is Tungsten which is an “Application Server for Web Services.” Essentially a stack of open source packages which offers web service middleware which can either run as a stand-alone application or on top of Tomcat or a J2EE server. It would be great to see how PHP can work together with platforms like Tungsten.

I’ll be presenting a session on “Moving to PHP5 with Style.” This tutorial/case study will be based on experience in transitioning several codebases from PHP4 to PHP5, creating unit tests & started a move towards a service based architecture without a complete platform rewrite.

Lig on IRC pointed me to the phpcommunity site on ning.

It’s been a while since I’ve bothered to look at ning, but this time around I was VERY impressed. The interface is slick! Kudos to Elizabeth and Ben for setting this up, and of course all the people at ning for the cool platform.

What started out as a simple google maps hack has turned into a full featured social networking site with some really nice features.

Since the maps are the main reason why people are at frappr, they have used this in some cool ways, for example the chat applet is integrated with the maps, so the map will zoom over to the location of the person who last entered a message. There is also a nice “Cool people near you” feature, which pulls up people in your general area.

There is also the ability to customize your page, add pictures/music, blog, add images, and of course embed so much javascript and flash that your profile will crash all but the strongest of browsers.

More than just the nice features, it’s good to see this small application maturing to something that could at some point have a business built around it.

Are you finding yourself sleeping too much at night? Are you making all of your deadlines and have time to spare? Are you spending a lot of time with your girlfriend but don’t have the cash to buy her that awesome Swarovski accessory. Do you do a lot of window shopping at thinkgeek? Are you wondering how you’re going to afford the next generation iPod? Did you participate in the recent “lets-make-slashdot-look-like-digg” contest, and are mourning the hours of CSS code that you wasted twiddling pixels and writing CSS only to be superceeded by the ugly ass css that is slashdot now? Do you spend hours tweaking the CSS on your beautiful blog, and then ruin your work of art by dropping in adsense ads to make some cash? Are you working in a boring day job and were just diagnosed with a terminal brain cloud?

If you answered yes to any of these questions and can handle some good old fashion no-nonsense CSS work (purely design implementation) email me at aaron-at-wormus.com.

A couple other important requirements:

• basic PHP knowledge required
• basic Smarty Templating knowledge required
• able to use subversion (it ain’t rocket science)
• strong CSS knowledge
• knowledge of YUI library a plus
• and dependable

Finally, we’re a small team and not in the position to pay “industry standard” prices, but the compensation is negotiable.

Adam Curry and his team at Podshow.com have been working around the clock to launch the new and improved version of the podshow system.

Slated for a July 4th “Liberate your Entertainment” release, the site has been replaced with several humorous “Please be Patient” flash videos.

I’m currently working on relaunching a major site, which has been in an “almost-ready” state for the last 3 months, so I totally understand the painful process of relaunching a site, and making sure all your bases are covered before you flip the switch. However, two days of downtime is a sign that you are nowhere near ready to launch and a lot of hacking is being done in the background which may get the site up, but will not benefit the product in the long run.

I was part of the beta testing team and ran some audits of the code (much of which is available as an opensource project on sourceforge), so I have no doubt that when podshow plus has made it through these growth pains it will rock big time.

Good luck with getting it up guys!

In other “is it up yet” news, I noticed that Ookles.com was up at Ookles.net, and is looking pretty slick, good luck with that launch as well!

This is pretty interesting, BBC is using Digg to advertise their article and provide extra content.

1. Write article
2. Create podcast
3. Digg your article and put the link to the podcast in the digg comment
4. Require your readers to digg the article to get to the podcast
5. Get the article slashdotted

And who was saying that BBC is lagging behind technology?

I’m checking my email this morning and I see the invoice for my Backpackit subscription! Nothing was charged! Somebody signed up through my affilitate link and that paid for a month of my premium usage!

This means that if I can get a signup every month, then I won’t have to pay for my premium membership. If you signup under me, and then you convince someone to sign up every month then you won’t have to pay either! Using this logic we can take down the evil thing that is Backpackit without any cost to ourselves (not like these signups cost them anything).

Anyway, I’m jazzed, even though I’ll be the first to say that Backpackit isn’t as awesome as it’s made out to be, it’s still working for me and I’m psyched about getting my first affiliate sale!

Is that blog whoring or what?

Collaborative writing software online with Writeboard. Write, share, revise, compare.

Writeboard needs a “Save and continue Editing” button.

It’s quite easy to work with, that extra click just sucks every time you want to save a document.

Flash Video Player

I was just listening to TWiT and heard that YouTube go through (are you sitting down) 1 MILLION Dollars worth of bandwidth a month! Pretty awesome!

They just got $8 million of venture capital, so they’ll be needing to get a bit more of that pretty soon

One of the things that I want to get going is a collaborative journalism platform. The system will have a couple of primary features.

Article Collaboration

1. You create a “Article Stub”
2. You add reference material
3. You collaborate on the article
4. You maintain a workflow (data gathering, writing, draft, published, revision1, revision2)

RSS Aggregator

1. You can add however many RSS feeds to the Aggregator
2. You can tag specific articles in the aggregator with keywords which could pertain to upcoming stories.
3. You can select a specific quote from the article and tag it for future use in an article

In a previous post I made a list of a bunch of “getting organized” tools, I’ve looked through most of them, but none of them really do what I want.

However, the best I could find was backpackit. The things I like the best are writeboards and price ($5/month). I could have just used a regular wiki, but since I was colaborating with a couple other people the inteface is VERY easy to understand and use.

This is how I’m using backpackit.

1. Create a page for the project
2. Share the page with people who will be collaborating on the project
3. For each article we’re going to write I create a writeboard and add it to that page.
4. Everyone colaborates on the article by adding data, wikipedia style.

Obviously this doesn’t really work the way I need it to, and there are always “stop editing I’ve got an update” messages flying around IM, but for now it seems to work.

If anyone has the time/energy/skills to create my collaborative journalism platform PLEASE let me know. I’d be VERY interested in working with you or sponsoring your work.

Yes, and I’ve got referral links so if you decide to sign up with the paid for version I get 3 free weeks of service!!! Woot!