Umbraco 2.0 is about to be released.
The Content Management Platform that I have been working on for over three years; umbraco 2.0 WILL be released as a public beta on Friday the 2nd under an open source license (GPL/LGPL).
I’ve used the first version on a couple of projects and it really is rather nice! Looking forward to the new version; I’ve sent a couple of clients on holiday — when they come back I think they wanna play ;-)
Congrats to mr. Hartvig.
Isn’t that interweb just great. You realize that since this is 2004 and you pride yourself with being all digital and modern, the need to fax an agreement concerning a domain name end up being a challenge. Blog to the rescue. A single Google search and this w-a-s-a-b-i comes up. Someone’s been kind enough to provide a brief walk-through on how to get OS X to fax through a bluetooth-enabled cellphone — three minutes later, the fax is leaving my laptop.
Which reminded me (again) to post more tips and tricks. This little blog might not contain extremely innovative thoughts on anything important, but if one should end up with succeeding in connecting some hardware, building a useful script or something like that, one should spend those extra two minutes writing it up. I certainly enjoy when people with Google-friendly blog-markup link up handy links to hardware or write little how-tos on how to get those tools and gadgets to become even more useful.
Good points over at bestkungfu on accessability.
There are millions of Web users who don’t even consider themselves disabled: you might know one as “Dad” or “Grandpa,” who can’t quite see as well as they used to, or never quite got the hang of mousing around. Users like these wouldn’t know an “accessible” from a crucible. They’re going to use your site, and they’re going to get stuck. And they’re going to get angry, especially if you hard-coded the font size below their ability to read it. How, praytell, will that little disability ghetto you coded save you now?
Bestkungfu on “Seperate but equal” design
Var til Blog’N’Rundbold i går. Ret beset var der nok mere mad og øl, end der var sportsbetonet fysisk aktivitet, men der blev talt lidt om blogging i krogene — og hyggeligt var det i hvert fald. Jeg lærte flere ting. Bl.a. at hvis man vitterlig vil have læsere og kommentarer og sjov og spas — så skal der mere lir på bloggen. Pat-ter og sådan. Sproglige finesser skulle heller ikke være værst.
Så uden yderligere omsvøb: Tok penis-bilder med duskedamernes kamera. Der er unge piger på samme soveværelse, brutal og sær teknologisk understøttet mandlig seksualitet — og et sjovt norsk ord for cheerleader. Hvad mere vil I dog have?!
David Trads forlader den mindst ringe … kan man læse pÃ¥ Politikens netavis. Informations egen side har noget med skæv kønsfordeling i fodboldverdenen som tophistorie — nyheden om Trads’ afgang er ingen steder at finde.
Blot et eksempel — det er dÃ¥rlig stil ikke selv at kunne levere nyheder om sig selv først. Det gælder corporate kæmper, politikere og i særdeleshed medievirksomheder, der burde vide bedre… Husk det nu. This.is.2004.
I’ve been feeling bad about the look of my company site (heck, it doesn’t even really qualify as a site) for quite some time (you can probably guess how long by taking a look). But I want to do it right, not just replacing the ‘under construction’ picture…you know the drill..
However, now I’m feeling even more motivated than ever before — I’ve just been offered to hand in design proposals for a christmas card package running this christmas — the guy I know thought I had the design ideas going already.… hmmm.…
Yes, yes oh yeah:
In response to all the requests: there WILL be a Skype version for Mac OS X. No info is publicly available about when exactly it will be out, but it’s already in the works.
They are looking for beta testers… [from the Skype forum]
Ok, so I’ve switched (I can’t be arsed to link that up — you know what I mean). And apart from having to install every single piece of software I need (and finding quite a lot of new ones — yummy) , I’m oh-so-pleased.
But I’m not just finding OS X versions of my old favourites. I’m trying out some new stuff as well. And being an RSS-fanatic, I thought I’d give the different aggregators a test spin. I love Bloglines, but still. However, it’s not so damn easy. I’ve sort of been here before, though. I’ve tried out different aggregators on my PC — same thing. OPML is so simple! Or at least, that’s how it should be. But every aggregator seem to add their own little quirk — and there isn’t a standard for folders, groups or whatever aggregator x choose to call it. That sucks.
So, with my limited BBedit skills (which no doubt is a fine little piece of software), I had to cut the Bloglines export into chuncks corresponding to my different groups. But:
Shrook imported without hassle. It keeps crashing on me, though.
NetNewsWire doesn’t understand the exported file.
PulpFiction sort of understands it, but though being a Mail.app like application, I find the interface a bit confusing. Too yellow, and thinking about my feeds in quite a different way than I do…
So, I’m back with Bloglines — at least until I find the energy to either convert my feeds into a NNW-readable format, or Shrook (which I think is my interface favourite) starts running stable.
This is posted with ecto btw. Pretty slick, but I’m missing my Zempt-like bookmarklet that allowed me to launch the app from the page I wanted to blog.
But to sum up: How hard can it be to agree on an OPML standard? Bloody hell…
Ikke et ondt ord om midaldrende jyder i halvtredserne på Københavner-tur, men man samler alligevel lidt ggodbidder op, når man sidder og stener morgenkaffe på den lokale cafe. 20 stk. af førnævnte type er netop trådt larmende ind, hvilket harmonerer dårligt med et regneark jeg havde håbet at få lidt styr på. Men, altså, Jørgen var vist blevet væk. “Jøøøørgen, hvor blev du af?” Jørgen: “Nå, ja — jeg skulle lige ud og hive Peter Belli i ørerne”. WTF?
Update: Bubber fra k9k gør venligst pr. mail opmærksom pÃ¥, at dels var kommentarer for denne post slÃ¥et fra (pga. min manglende erfaring med ecto, viser det sig), dels er “Peter Bellis ører” fra den sÃ¥ vidt jeg ved ganske fine teenage-terror-tegnefilm “Terkel i knibe”. Ak, ak — sÃ¥ uoplyst jeg er…
For those of you without your own Mac SE, take a look at this flash piece — you can play around with the 7.0.
I’m busy with OS X at the moment… oh joy…
This is just.a.test…
Today is a special day. Today the Danish people will cheer on as yet another foreign person (I thought we didn’t like those?) will get to by-pass laws, will get unlimited funding in order to be able to fake interest in ancient Danish history, tacky castles, the horrible Danish cuisine and pick up a hobby; I hear water colour painting is very popular. In return, she will be asked to give up her democratic rights and expected to accept everyone treating her like a monkey in a cage. Congratulations. Love is a beautiful thing, but I’d like to see it in a republic, please.
TV’s off, pollas.dk has gone black.
You-know-who is having a party, so now the whole street is blocked. That’s just dandy. What’s more of a problem are the 100+ people who think it’s a great idea standing for hours in the rain to maybe catch a glimpse of someone royal. WTF?‘
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Ok, so you’re not directly against monarchy, you think the royal family are good representatives for our little country and “in Asia, a monarchy is a great way to make contacts — and we all want more export, right?” Besides, who says a president would do any better? And the new prinsess is really pretty and bright.
So? Pretty, smart people who would gladly give away both their arms to save the world? I know lots of them. What bugs me is the total lack of responsibility on the yes men’s part for what’s really important here: Nowhere in a civilized part of the world, people should be born to power. Nowhere in a civilized part of the world should we expect anyone to give away their right to vote, to live a normal life, to follow any form of guidelines other than their own. These poor (pretty and smart, I know) people have just been given a life sentence; if they enjoy that, fine — if not, please don’t make their life harder by STANDING IN THE FUCKING RAIN LIKE A BUNCH OF IDIOTS STARING LIKE YOU WERE AT THE ZOO.
“But if we can’t look up to them and stare at them and read about them in white trash magazines, what are they there for then?” Well, that’s really the point here, isn’t it.…
Apart from the obvious need for a visual overhaul (somewhere down the line the design just sort of self destructed), I’m thinking of going through all my code once again, as I’m not quite happy with the lack of leanness. It almost validates so that’s not the goal — it’s more of an experiment to see if I can make some real improvements while testing a few new tricks here and there.
First of all I’d like to rethink the structure of the content — too much going on at the front page, not enough attention to the goal of the blog, which, by the way, need some more thinking…I even promised a mission statement on the future of my digital home after last year’s blogforum. About time to blog the content of that document…
But it’s time to drag out the good ol’ IA and UI skills while keeping focus on the content — this is a weblog. What are best practice weblog wise? How to respect content, serve it in various ways, providing thoughts on the ideas behind etc.?
So far, I’m thinking of (in no particular order):
And so on and so on…
What do you like to be on a blog? Any special features you love at some blogs and miss at others? Any particular structure that works for you? I’ll update this list as progress is made. Comments greatly appreciated.
As soon as you want to serve your site as application/xhtml+xml (as it should be), visitor comments become a constant risk, threatening to crash your site. IT seems that you either have to serve your site the old way or become a info nazi, closing comments. There is no other way. Or…? Simon Willison on Staying valid:
There is: I’m doing it. Next Thursday will mark the one year anniversary of my switching to application/xhtml+xml as the content-type header for this site, for user agents that support it.
[via dionidium] He’s running comments through a PHP XML validator and his own postings are made with a bookmarklet checking input. Definately something I’ll look into when going through the code for this site.
Good writeup on switching to Mac (which I’m just about to do): Spending a Year with Mac.
I do have one Fleetwood Mac CD which iTunes is convinced is a Chris de Burgh CD, I have both so that can be a bit weird.
Not really a problem in my book…
I read about semacode, real-world hyperlinks some time ago but was under the impression that software didn’t exist for my phone, a Nokia 3650. Luckily it turns out I was wrong, everything is working fine now.
Small pixely images represent an URL, allowing people with camphones to snap a picture of the ‘link’ which launches the browser with the relevant website. Quite similar to barcodes, but the beauty of this technology is, that quite a bit of the image can be missing while it still works. Japanese magszines are already full of these and they make a nice little business card feature I guess.
But. What if we sprayed or sticked a bunch of these all over town, made cheeky little websites only to be announced through this medium? A little urban game feeding the contestants with directions, routes etc.? Obvious signs to the in-crowd, meaningless pixels to passer-bys. Loads of possibilities; secret passwords to various events, stange interactive games and so on and so on…
Any ideas? Who’s in?
Update: I’ve been playing with the recognition of homemade semacodes. Apart from various trouble because of my phone’s desperate need of a firmware upgrade and/or ar proper bashing, you need pretty good lighting conditions to get a proper shot. Which rules out quite a bit of the seedy places I imagine this stuff could have been put to interesting use. There’s also a lower size limit of the codes due to the distance you have to be at to take the picture. If you’re to close, you often block to much of the light with the phone itself.
Spamblogging on using CSS Pencils as a way to avoid getting your email address harvested: Proof of concept to throw off the bots.
Various scripts already exist that can generate non-harvestable mailto-links, but the dynamic bit is nice. However, it appears to be a bit complicated, so I’m thinking that maybe Shaun Inman’s IFR can be put to even better use?
In short, it’s a flash alternative to the well-known Fahrner Image Replacement (FIR), using CSS to replace various bits with graphics while preserving decent markup. Downside: You need to generate a lot of images, most of them probably just different words using the same non-websafe font. IFR to the rescue; one single flash file and a bit of javascript to do the replacement. I’m thinking of playing with it in the upcoming blog redesign. But couldn’t you do a mailto-flash piece? I’m not really sure how bots interact with flash, but hopefully they’ll give up…
Of course, you’d have to twist the semantic bit, but that’s part of the point…
Set pÃ¥ TV: Snoop Doggy Dogg = Vif Vaf Vuf. Not even close…
Hørte pludselig uhyggelige toner fra TV 2 Sporten, der af uvisse årsager var på mit tv:
Det danske fodboldlandshold har vanen tro lavet en slagsang op til en slutÂrunde, og denne gang er det sket i samarbejde med Safri Duo, Birthe Kjær samt MGP-stjernerne B-Boys.
Og hvis ikke det var fordi det ikke er 1. april, og jeg netop har tjekket historien pÃ¥ TV2’s website, sÃ¥ ville jeg tro det var løgn. Imdrømmet, jeg er hverken pjattet med sport eller fællessange med “vi”-stemning ifm. danske bonderøve med bolde i andre lande, men det her tager prisen. Noget mere pinagtigt har jeg ikke hørt længe. Lidt mystisk stemme, Jokerens “Hvor du fra” som melodi (I gætter nok, hvor “vi” er fra) — og sÃ¥ lige lidt børnerap til sidst. Ak, ak… Lyt, hvis I tør…
Insightful comment to a post at Jeremy Zawodny
The obvious difference between a domestic cat and a tiger is one of size, but if you keep the latter as a pet you might notice a qualitative difference around other pets and small children.
[via Internet Alchemy]
This Boxes and Arrows article, Card sorting: a definitive guide, is being heavily linked these days. It’s a fine read, . giving an overview of a classic. But I’m thinking, while card sorting is excellent when having access to the actual participants, individuals or a group, the method proves difficult when working in a smaller group of people spread over a vast area, developing on stuff not quite ready to be showed to everyone else. But maybe you could do it online? How about Flickr, couldn’t you do an online session, getting your peers to sort images representing the cards?
I might be missing something here, but I’ll give it a think…
New Powerbooks — and about bloody time. It was pretty obvious they wouldn’t manage to go G5 this time, but though a nice little speed bump I think I had hoped for a bit more, backlit keyboard on the 12″ or something…
Update: The Danish store hadn’t updated at time of writing (and I couldn’t remember the US prices). Seems that the price dropped about DKK 1000,- with the wifi built in.…nice1.
I dette ejendommelige, korte forfatterskab finder man tekster, der i deres kunstneriske radikalitet foregriber den symbolistisk-modernistiske æstetik, hvis gennembrud normalt tidsbestemmes til slutningen af det 19. århundrede.
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
[via webmercial]
