Have You Upgraded to web 2.0? Tuesday 2006-09-05
I had a really good laugh, reading Lincoln Spector’s article in BYTE. At first I selfishly felt that I wanted to keep it to myself. But then Web 2.0 is all about social networking and syndication, and you are my readers, so I finally decided that I couldn’t withhold this important information.
Lincoln writes about web 2.0 and especially on the 0 in 2.0. Before I send you away, I cannot help but give you some citations, so you get a feeling for what it’s all about.
He writes about upgrading to version 2.0:
The questions are many. Is there a smooth upgrade, or do you have to uninstall Web 1.0 before installing the new version? What about backward compatibility? Should you wait for the bugs to be out in Web 2.1?
To give you some examples of the bright new world, he reviews some of the more significant new sites. On Oddcast, a site aimed at syndicating podcasts, he writes:
Oddcast is one of many sites that provides links to podcasts from all over the world, but this site distinguishes itself by sticking to one very important and unique criteria: It will not link to anything that might exhibit taste or talent. You need never worry about visiting Oddcast and hearing an intelligent argument with which you might disagree, as you will find no intelligent arguments.
Enough now! Go get the real stuff in “The 0 in 2.0” and prolong your mouth and your life 
Promote Your WordPress Plugins
A new and promising site, for presenting and getting WordPress plugins, has just been launched. Sean Hickey, aka Headzoo, author of such efficient WordPress plugins as aLinks, Edit N Place and Create N Place, has just launched WP Plugins, a friendly place for plugin authors and bloggers to meet.
WordPress plugins abound. Due to the relative ease, with which you can create plugins for the popular blogging tool, and the flexible framework WordPress offers, a lot of functionality can be added through plugins.
There are plugins that make the administration easier, or present all kinds of statistical information. And there are plugins to include any imaginable Multimedia, and plugins to build social networks, to include other bloggers’ feeds or to earn a buck on ads.
You name it, and there is a plugin. And if there isn’t, you can write one, or just wait a while, and someone else will.
The mere amount of plugins spread out on their authors sites, makes it difficult to find that very gadget, that gives you the functionality you dream of. There are a few repositories for plugins, as Lorelle on WordPress mentions in her latest excellent article on plugins.
Sean’s idea seems to be, that they lack some functionality, be peer reviews, a voting system or the possibility to search by tag. Or maybe just too dull. I don’t know, but this new repository has all this features, a friendly look and easy navigation.
So if you are a plugins author, head over and present your plugin at WP Plugins. You’ll be on the front page immediately. It’s very simple, you just register for an account, log in and fill in a form with a description of your plugin, and a link to the install package on your site.
That’s all there is to it.
If you are a blogger in pursuit of the ultimate plugin for your needs, you may already find what you want. The site is new however, so it will take a while to get the great variety, we all want to find in the grocery 
Graffiti for the Web
Among all wonderful things, that pops up on the web, as a result of new standards and standards compliance, my latest stumble find is amazing. Virtual Street Art - Graffiti for the Web presented by Draw Here, is an application, that allows you to draw images on top of any web page and save it in the Draw Here repository. Anyone can go to the Draw Here site to look at the graffiti comments of others. Look at my first attempt to draw on my own site, to get an idea of how it looks.[Edit: Someone killed my image :/]
The application, using javascript and the canvas has all you need to make beautiful graffiti. You can vary the pen size and chose and tune colors from a palette, and set color transparency. You can create and draw on stacked layer and even set the overall transparency of any layer. To easily work on one layer at a time, you can hide and show any layer.
You launch the Draw Here application directly from their site or using a bookmarklet sitting on bookmarks toolbar. You can even include a launch button on you web page, to let visitors draw on any page you want.
If you want to save your work at the Draw Here web site and get it rated, you have to sign up for an account. They have the fastest sign up form I’ve seen. Just type in the user name and password you want in a slick little login form. If accepted, you are already logged in and ready to paint and save your first graffiti comment on any web page on the Net. Ajaxian wise, the page doesn’t even reload.
Sign up/log in and paint my world!
A Flash Browser On the Horizon? Monday 2006-08-21
Is the next browser generation based on on a Flash platform. This article by Matthew David at InformIT, may lead you to think so.
Here is a slightly modified version of his “Lorem Ipsum” demo case for presenting HTML or rather any XML content markup, styled by CSS. Both the XML and CSS are external files, brought together by a short Actionscript in the Flash movie. Both can easily be changed, wihtout touching the SWF. Read the article and draw your own conclusions!
WordCamp 2006 Saturday 2006-08-05
Being a bit Swedish, I’m proud to discover that the 2006 WordCamp is run at the Swedish American Hall in San Fransisco in cooperation with Café Du Nord. The Hall was designed Swedish architect August Nordin, father of lots of buildings in that besung city.
You may want the tentative architecture of the Camp, just to know what to ( possibly ) expect. The meaning of “tentative” can be easily smelled at Podz place. The AfterParty was to be held, or is still going on at the time of writing, at Pier 38. We may be hearing from that too, as some few of the participants will probably throw some pixels at Flickr.
Matt at the event, credit: Scott Beale Laughing Squid. It’s a one day show, so I’m a bit late here - sorry about that.
Now, will the version 2.1 of the best blogging software on the planet be annonced at this WordCamp? The “What’s New in 2.1” feature list from Ryan Boren suggests something, don’t you think?
The near future will provide evidence from Matt and or Ryan, I’m sure. Just you wait and see, and may the blog be with you!
( Not to mention your plugins
Update Your WordPress Saturday 2006-07-29
WordPress version 2.04 is here in a stable release, and Matt is out on the WordPress blog to convince all WP blogger so update. Safe and sound as it is the new version contains important security updates, as well as some 50 bug fixes - who would believe that?
As you may have seen from recent Bug Hunts, there is also a major 2.1 upgrade under ways, but don’t hesitate to install the intermediate 2.04! The 2.1 version may linger in the clouds for yet some time.
The update is simple enough. Just download and copy the files of the new version over the old.
As usual don’t forget to make a backup of the old one first, and don’t overwrite the following files:
* wp-config.php file;
* wp-content folder; Special Exception: the wp-content/cache folder should be deleted.
* wp-images folder;
* wp-includes/languages/ folder–if you are using a language file do not delete that folder;
* .htaccess file–if you have added custom rules to your .htaccess, do not delete it;
* robots.txt file–if your blog lives in the root of your site and you have created such a file, do not delete it.
Here is the download and the detailed instructions for any upgrade in the all mighty Codex.
Go ahead and just do it!
Working Online Thursday 2006-07-20
Are you planning to through away your desktop tools and make the move to net based programs and storage. Byte’s David Em has the story for you. In “Gliding Into the future” he presents an effort by TransMedia to start doing just that. David writes
“Several of Glide’s components, such as device-independent online email and media sharing, are already in common use. Glide takes these capabilities, including storing images, photos, and videos, and adds simple image editing (cropping, inversion, and the like), slide shows, emailing, calendaring, and personal web site and blogging software.
A sophisticated multimedia-savvy word processor called Glide Write that exports Word, HTML, PDF, and ZIP files. A presentation tool called Glide Presenter is on the way. You can set Glide to automatically sync and back up your images, contacts, and calendar from your personal computer. It sends upcoming calendar date reminders to your email. I suspect the Microsoft Office team is following these developments with great interest.”
The company addresses the complexity of different stationary and mobile platforms in more than one way. The goal is that whatever device you use, you should be able to transparently load your documents and continue the work.
As David points out, there are great advantages in server based storage. For example if you want to send an image by email to someone, you just send the link. The reciever decides when and where to download the actual image. In my opinion though, the beautiful thing with online tools and storage, is that you can leave your office or home, and connect to your desktop from anywhere, even using a mobile device, and continue the work.
You get the service for free or for a small fee, depending on how much disk space you need.
Finally SUN’s slogan and vision “The Net Is The Computer” seems to start rolling out. Is that Web 2.0?
From their mission statement we read
“Our goal is to provide you with a place to design your life, where you can share unlimited media and information with unprecedented compatibility, flexibility and peace of mind. This is Glide Effortless.”
That may not sound completely new to me - say Flickr par example However, they have just launched a photo sharing system, and there is more to come, they promise.
I’ll get back to you as soon as have made some preliminary tests.
In the mean time go figure!
Hyperlinking Considered Harmful? Thursday 2006-07-13
Oh my gosh!
Lorelle of WordPress fame writes in her very much readable blog “Do I Need to Ask Permission to Put a Blog in My Blogroll?“. She says that she haven’t thought about the question before and writes
“Since a link in a blogroll is a compliment and recommendation, do you need to ask permission to include a blog in your blogroll? Good question.
I would think not. You are not linking to content, and you are not violating any rights. You are linking to the whole blog, not a single post. There is nothing to ask permission for, is there?”
Earlier in the week she pointed her audience to an article by Shel Holz entitled “When is a Link not a Link“, which questions your right to link to somebody else’s content.
This seems to to amount to something, I don’t know what. Don’t blame Lorelle, she is perfectly sane or I’m brain dead, but could it be that the summer over the western hemisphere is too hot , or maybe the web has matured to the point of being suicidal?
Is HTML, “Hypertext Markup Language” to be considered harmful? Oh, Goodbye.
Before we seriously enter the Web 2.0 world of fame an ridicule, let’s take a deep breath and a step back and look at what the web 0.1 - 1.0 is all about.
It all started as a possibility to link text based information to other relevant text based information. When the author of a ( usually scientific ) document referred to sources or or other texts of interest in the domain of his/her article, it would easily be reached by including a link to that material.
With the advent of HTML as a formalized way of accomplishing this, and the hypertext transfer protocol as a standardized communication protocol between the information servers and clients ( consumers ), the web was born. The rest is, as they say, history. And amazing as such.
This is what it’s all about, don’t you, dear reader, agree? Linking information to other relevant peaces of information. In the beginning very few used the web and decided what was relevant. Linking was done in rather closed domains and cross linking between domains sparse.
As the web has grown ( some under stating here :), the writers and readers on the web have very disparate opinions on what’s “relevant”, and as a consequence cross linking among “domains” abound.
Many links lead to ballooney, and link lists without human comments are useless. Human nature plays its part - and it should. It is to be expected.
For those of us who want the web to be a source of useful information, it may be frustrating to sift through ads we don’t want, sex we don’t like and thoughts we think could be offered by a piece of wood - or worse.
But it’s inevitable, and in some way the start of a new kind of democracy ( oh, how dared I ?), where everyone has his or her say. If you say something clever many will listen. Yes, hopefully, I know.
Am I spacing out? Right, I am. It’s my blog, so I can do that.
Back to the linking and blog roll business, or “can I link to any content on the web?”.
Yes I can, but with some exceptions.
- I can link to anything if I don’t pretend or imply it’s my own stuff.
- I cannot link in someone else’s images or media in my own page without permission.
- I cannot use someone else’s texts in my own pages, except for citations.
Citations should not be extensive and the should be attributed to the copyright owner, possibly linked to the original text.
This means for example that you should not link someones HTML or other document into a frame of your own document, as this could give the *impression* that it is part of your own site.
As for asking permission to include someones blog in my “blogroll” or linking to other recommended reading - give me a break!
If someone doesn’t want to be linked to, or recommended or read at all for that matter, there are lots of ways to avoid that. Here are a few.
- You may choose to send the info by email to a selected audience.
- You can publish your documents in a closed network behind firewalls.
- You can require authentication for individuals or groups that you allow to read your stuff.
- You can set up a robots.txt file to tell ( well behaved ) search bots not to collect all or certain parts of your web.
- Finally you can sell all your stuff and gadgets and hide under a rock.
I don’t think I’m being harsh here The web is all about hyperlinking and it is a social endeavour. It’s all about information and it’s all about people.
Link on, and happily so!
Google GWT for AJAXian Widgets Thursday 2006-06-29
The newly released Google Web Toolkit, or GWT for short uses a somewhat unexpected route to build GUI’s for the web. You write the components of your user interface using Java and then compile it with the GWT compiler. What you get is a mix of HTML, XML and Javascript.
A must read for programmers, who want to develop applications, is the an excellent article entitled “Exploring the Google Web Toolkit” by Philip McCarty of IBM DeveloperWorks.
In the article he describes how to build the GUI and set up the AJAXian RPC communication to use a weather service. It is instructive and detailed and it gives you a good feeling for what can be done with this new toolkit and API.
Go get the Google Web Toolkit SDK and read the article at IBM DeveloperWorks.
Building a Home on Earth Friday 2006-04-28
Finally it is possible to build your own cozy home in the virtual world. Quick Online Tips today publishes a tip for Google Earth habitués. Google releases a free 3D modeling tool called Google SketchUp. With the tool you can draw realistically looking buildings and other stuff.
You can than place your new home on Google Earth and at least fly around it. We will probably have to wait for the day, when we can enter our virtual home and sit down at the kitchen table with a nice cup of coffee.
Advanced buildings can be crafted with SketchUp, like Tai Mahal or The White House. Maybe you need the payed
pro version for more complex things.
But if you have Google Earth installed, and like to build things on the planet, go get Google SketchUp and hammer away. Show your new home to the real world.
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