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!
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.
WordPress Widget tutorial Friday 2006-04-14
If you use WordPress, and follow what happens at the WordPress dot Com blogger site or in the WordPress community, you haven’t missed the new web 2.0 Ajaxian way to treat Widgets. If you have, here’s a short resume to get you in touch.
A WordPress Widget is some facility you place on the sidebar, like a calender or a list of, say recent posts. We all have something like that in our blogs, so that’s nothing new per se. The news is that you can do all kinds of fancy things with a WP Widget widget from an admin interface, like switching them on and off, moving them around or change their behavior.
Now you know. But do you know you how to craft your own widget?
The always alert and helpful Kaf at guff szub.Net has written a short and readable tutorial “My Widget - Example WordPress Widget“
Google Calendar is Up Thursday 2006-04-13
Today Google Calendar is up and running, and you may centralize your events handling system. Over the years, many different solutions have been presented, to solve the problem of group and personal calendars, that you can reach from anywhere. The first networked calendars were for company internal use, so that work groups could note meetings and other important dates. Later calendars, from among others Microsoft and Netscape, used Internet based HTML calendars. More ore less sophisticated, they allowed for private calendars, that could be used also by groups. The private calendar is naturally used for private events, as visiting aunt Molly or the dentist, while group calendars knits together project groups.
Google’s new web based calendar takes the technique of earlier calendars a step further, by using an web 2.0 Ajax approach, which makes the user interface fast and easy to use. You can customize the calendar in a lot of ways. There are setting for the presentation, such as what days to show, on which day the week starts and what time format you want use. You can also choose what i kind of notifications you want from the calendar, and how long time before the event it should be sent to you. You can get notifications by email or by SMS. The latter can only be done via certain mobile service providers, that Google has an agreement with. Living in Sweden, I seem to be unable to get the SMS notifications.
You can invite your work group members, friends or family to view your calendar and/or send invitations to it.
If you let anyone see your calendar, you’re at risk for receiving unwanted spam invitations. So you better setup the calender for moderated invitations, which means you have to accept the invitation before it reaches the calendar.
To use the calendar, you will need a Google account, which is free.
Global Tag Clouds on WordPress Dot Com Sunday 2006-03-26
In the web 2.0 era tag clouds have become popular as a means of providing a semi semantic web. I say semi semantic, as we have humans rather than machines, making the relevant bridges between islands of information. The tag cloud or tag list is supposed to find connections between articles or posts, witin the same or neighboring domain of interest. Quite a few tagging services gather tags from blogs and web sites, to fasciltate this type of connections, and by visiting or subscribing to a service like Technorati or FeedBurner, you get freshly published information on your pet subjects.
There are some problems with this kind of syndication though. Do you really get relevant information links?
Well, as long as machines dont understand meaning, the only possible way to connect information in a meaningul way, is to use humans. The problem is that all connections that end up in a tag cloud are made blindly. That is, when you tag your article, you don’t know what other articles in cyberspace will get the same tag. Every contributing author adds tags, that he or she thinks are significant for the article or blog post. These tags are then automatically added to one or more centralized tag clouds. Not everyone will have the same idea on how to tag a certain piece of information.
I know this from my own experience. I’m farly good at creating categories for my own projects, but I often stumble when I add information to them. For a long time I had the distinct project types “Java” for Java programming and “XML” for my XML/XSL experiments. They resided in different directories on my hard disk. Then came the “Java and XML, a marriage made in heaven”, and I wrote every tiny XML handling software in Java. Where to place a new project? Is it about Java or about XML? Here tags comes to resque.
Tags are not categories, but have the advantage of connecting information over category boundaries.
That works for me, but how about sharing my tags with the world. First of all I have to specify by adding more tags to my projects, such as “java”, “xml”, “xsl”, “soap”, “web service”, “http”. If this covers my story, anyone searching for a “web service” will get a link from the tag cloud to my story, together with articles on certain wheater services, stock services, mapping services and so forth.
As there is no human supervision of the relevance of the interlinking, I’m sure the signal to noise ration will be very low on this centalized tag clouds. Contributing to this low ratio is the fact that the ranking of tags is based on popularity. Probably the most prominent tags are meaningless and yields the the longest lists of results.
So what’s the alternative?
A Google search does’nt give you the latest and hottest articles at the top, but the relevance of the results are normally high, because the ranking depends on popularity of the sites rather than the search terms ( comparable to tags ).
A search or a tag cloud within a domain/sub domain or directory/category would be more effective than a world popular tags cloud. If you are like Lorelle, read “The Problems With Tags and Tagging“, you don’t want to encourage people to leave your site, by presenting a Technorati or FeedBurner link to a central cloud of which you are part, but rather drill your own site local cloud. If you do this in a clever way, the relevance is inherent, as you have now added the missing survaillanse of interlinking.
Yesterday Doncha in “More WordPress Feeds” at WordPress Planet plugs for the new WordPress Dot Com new global tag cloud.
“When you write a post on WordPress.com it’s categorised in the usual way but it’s also added to a site-wide pool of posts and identified by a global category. Matt’s announcement this morning means that I can track what people are talking about photography, photos, gimp and even wordpress all from the comfort of my aggregator!”
The new cloud in the WordPress.COM sky, was annonced by the “Unlucky in cards” chief developer of WordPress, aka PhotoMatt in “Tag Feeds and Paging” at the companies blog.
( My spell checker died, sorry about that! )
Nice to have Gravatars Monday 2006-02-20
After long hesitation, as I upgraded my theme, I have finally come to the point of installing Skippys Gravatars plugin. This WordPress plugin makes it an easy task to add a more personal touch to the comments of your blog. Every commenter gets his or her personal global avatar next to the comment. It makes the readers feel a little more like a society and make the returning commenter feel welcome and at home. Let’s say it gives the comments area a more life like and less dry area. The images lighten up the place no doubt.
What must be done, except the download and installation of the plugin? It has an easily understood admin panel, where you can set different options for the plugin, such as the size of the image you want to integrate and whether you want to cache the Gravatas on your own site for faster downloading. You have to decide on where to place the image, normally in or beside the comment. This means you have to add some code, readily provided in the accompanying readme file, into your comment template. In your stylesheet you should add styling rules for the gravatar, likewise included in the readme.
But then your commenters have to do some work too! They have to go to gravatar.com and add their email address and upload a carefully selected image, that will be used on any blog where they comment. If one of your commenters doesn’t have a Gravatar, there image box will contain a default image at the bloggers discretion.
The standard default image is a question mark and if most Gravatars look like that on you pages, it may not look all that good.
I may change this to just a plain nice colored square, or not publish any image at all if no
Gravatar is associated with that persons email address.
It may sound careless to throw around email addresses like that, but have no fear it’s encrypted and only acts as an identifier for the image at gravatar.com.
So sign up with gravatar.com, upload your image and if you are a blogger, go get the Gravatars plugin and live happily thereafter.
Flickry Flash on WordPress, part 1 Tuesday 2006-02-14
Oh gee am I tired!
In my effort to redesign the Regulus theme I decided to have all sorts of syndication bunched together in the upper left corner of my site. In other words, I want my feeds, Technorati, del.icio.us and Flickr in my newly built left sidebar. To that end I was googling for a suitable icon to represent my Flickr stream.
For hours I scanned the lots of sites with tips and widgets for using Fickr, and search and behold - it’s everywhere. And it’s exciting!
I couldn’t sleep, so this day will be at least 36 hours long. My eyelids are taped to the bone and my eyes emits a faint glow, as I stumble on.
I’ll be back with some more details on my findings, as soon as I recover from this ordeal. For now I can only offer a demo page showing my hastily mocked up family show or banner.
It is composed by the ticker service at Slide from my Flickr stream, and presents a image set called “family”.
You can study the rather incomplete result on my demo page.
It’s breakfast or sleep now.
Catch you later!
Web 2.0 Best Software, 2005 Thursday 2006-01-26
Dion Hinchcliffe has made a selection of “The best Web 2.0 Software of 2005“, wich transforms the hype of the O’Reilly versioning system into reality. Urgent matter! This post will be the 581′th blog post pointing to his article. There are also 751 other links pointing in his direction, all according to the Page tools in the Performancing editor ( Technocrati.
[ Will possibly be edited after reading ]
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