Category: design-and-ideas

A couple of manifestos which I've been reading recently…

From the gaping void blog

[The ChangeThis blurb:] “You've read the Cluetrain, now Hugh MacLeod brings you The Hughtrain. A manifesto on brands, blogs, and the now of advertising and marketing.”

P2P manifesto Via Howard Rheingold's Smartmobs.com

P2P is unstoppable
P2P is positive for companies
P2P is positive for the market
P2P is good for users

All the readers can create their own P2P Manifesto, free to edit this original P2P manifesto.

The idea is to then collect on the blog all the different P2P Manifesto's releases, to create a good knowledge base point about P2P issues.

Howard Rheingold's own Mobile and Open: A Manifesto

Only a cockeyed optimist would forecast an open, user-driven, entrepreneurial future for the mobile Internet. This should not prevent us from trying, however. Sometimes, envisioning the way things ought to be can inspire people to work at making it that way. That's what manifestos are for.

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Just recently I've been thinking of changing the design of cubicgarden.com. The design your use to has gone throught many tweaks but the main thrust was at a time when blojsom's default template had tables still. Looking Asual for example the default template actually looks and feels better than mine. So I'm going to use it as a base and tweak on top of that. So if you notice things changing each time you refresh, you now know why…

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I'm hearing on the Daily Source code from Adam Curry that the BBC are doing a feature on Podcasting with him in his Amsterdam castle. Its meant to appear on a show called the culture show. But I cant see anything about it on the site. Oh well at least theres a real stream for watching if I miss it on the TV. Thinking of writing a email to the person producing the show and asking for more details… The abuse of being of a BBC employee.

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S5 is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well. The markup used for the slides is very simple, highly semantic, and completely accessible. Anyone with even a smidgen of familiarity with HTML or XHTML can look at the markup and figure out how to adapt it to their particular needs. Anyone familiar with CSS can create their own slide show theme. It's totally simple, and it's totally standards-driven.

At long last a way to do presentations without using powerpoint, keynote or openoffice formats. Meyers work is great and well thought out specially for a opera user like me. Its not that I dont like using open office (what i prefer out of the three), its just I usually have to outline it some application like Java outline editor then convert it into something open office will read. Then I end up creating a powerpoint version, pdf version and open office version. i never use the html convert because its usually really nasty and non standard based.

Anyway, i'm going to use it for a presentation to BBC Learning English about RSS and Enclosures. And at the same time write a xsl to convert opml to this xhtml S5. I thought about other transformations but I dont have the time no more, plus it would be alot easier to just do a opml to pdf rather than xhtml S5 to pdf or open office (wouldnt even attept to do keynote). If all goes well i will adopt it for all my presentations. As someone mentioned it would be great if this was the default option in open office or keynote.

More resources. The slashdot discussion, Opera's thoughts from a while ago, Opera's slideshow generator, Information about Citydesk software

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Sarahs a regular at http://hollyoaks.com and noticed during the show today that the stylesheet was missing for a couple of minutes. Then the new style came into effect. I had to natrually check it out. There using Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 2.0. Theres a bit of Javascript mainly to control the multiple stylesheets which is pretty nice as the default yellow is not great on top of white and the open and close elements which work on all the browsers I've tested it on (opera, firefox, ie and mozilla). Two other things which impressed me. Decent print stylesheet and RSS versions 1.0 and 2.0. Shame the RSS feeds dont contain more than a single paragraph, but its pretty much what everyone else is doing anyway. What I find also really interesting is the link to Mezzoblue about what is RSS and the Accessability statement which is pretty good. On the bad side, its a really shame there not using more semantic elements instead of divs with multiple ids and classes but its all a huge change from the old website.

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Been talking to Yoojin about the possibilies of setting up lectures at Ravensbourne again. Then I started thinking, why not use the internet to broadcast the lectures? I mean, I've been meaning to do something interesting with jabber and the icecast streaming server.

So what I'm thinking is, I do a live lecture as such via my connection over audio while in a chat space of somekind? (maybe using the rave jabber conference rooms?). Or shall i forget the audio aspect and just go for a conference room style chat through out? I think I would prefer that as I could do it from anywhere – allowing me to keep a regular timeline, while not affectig anything at home.

I've also been thinking about using meetup more. My previous experiences have been pretty bad, but maybe there will be a chance to hijack one or create my own which consists of lectures and idea throwing around a pub/cafe environment? I mean do people still go to the london meetups?

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I don’t think the site http://browsehappy.com is the best or most original idea in the world but it does once again highlight issues with IE and maybe why we should warn/advise the public about other IE. And empower there browsing experience with better browsers.
I for one never use IE unless I have to in work (Legacy systems, I hate them too). I mainly use Opera and Mozilla if there are issues with cookies. But I've installed Firefox on my linux box and may start using it more and more in replacement for Mozilla. Specially because I love Thunderbird and Mozilla calendar. Yet to try sunbird yet…

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I'm making some long awaited changes to the garden this week. You should start to notice more images creaping into my design at long last. If you reading this now, you should see the sky or grass backdrop on the cubicgarden banner. I'm getting rid of all the tables except the one which makes up the calendar for now, so the blog will be run using pure css. Going to sort out the VM templates so they churn out XHTML 1.1 or at least XHTML 1.0 strict.

I have hopefully fixed the comment feeds. RSS 0.92 Comments and RSS 2.0 Comments. Some of the changes to structure may take a little longer, as I'm going to use blojsom alot more and maybe use some kind of Wiki for other sections of my garden. The first to change will be the mixes, which will have a simular blojsom style interface and this my main blog will pull in parts from my bookmarks (already a blog) and the mixes. My feeds is also up for a change and sort out but maybe in about 2 or 3 weeks.

So if you notice something odd, dont worry it could be me just messing with stuff. But be warned, I'm working to the W3c standards, if your browser does not support XHTML + CSS2 then it might be time to change it… I recommend Opera 7.5, Mozilla or Firefox.

I'm also on the search for a good quality wiki which has these features.
Editing with preview (live preview would be a bonus)
Editing input options (the topcat type buttons)
Real categories
Hierarchy view
GPL or BSD licence (opensource)
XHTML and CSS support
Multiuser
Search (jakarta lucene would be cool)
Recently changed
CSS themes
Metadata and Diff support
Bookmarking
Calendar
Snipsnap support (Textism would be ideal too)
Rss output (input would be awesome)
XMLRPC or Soap interface
Blog support
Comments

Choices so far.
XWiki – http://www.xwiki.org | Forrest – http://forrest.apache.org | JSPWiki – http://www.jspwiki.org | SnipSnap – http://snipsnap.org | Confluence – http://www.atlassian.com. Confluence is the best wiki i've ever seen shame its not open source. Snipsnap is cool but the blog and wiki combined together makes things confusing, dumping Blojsom is simply not a option. I find JSPWiki too plain and too simplex for what I want. I'm really warming to Xwiki as the author is pretty honest about it and where it sits in the sea of wikis. Shame its only alpha and I think it requires a SQL database. Useful page highlighting alot of the Java Wikis also very useful and upto date.

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Sometimes the blunderbuss works…

> Dear ##########

> Given the vociferousness of your argument and clarity we shan't again build a site in flash – if we use flash it would be sited in an HTML based site and we shall always as we did with the main site have a large font no graphics page available. I thank you for your forthrightness and your knowledge of LIFT as an organisation that cares very deeply about accessibility.

> With many thanks for the care and time you have taken

###########

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