My old bookmarks havent been updated for ages, why is that i hear you ask? Well its not dynamic enough, I feel…
It needs to be like blogging I feel. Which got me thinking, why cant it be like blogging?
It can be, and it now is…A blog of bookmarks. Just need to convert all the old entries into blogs.
Category: social-hardware
The london designer events calender
Its bizarre how these things happen or better still how they start happening.
I while ago I wanted to create some kind of ical service which would allow a small community of designers to share calender dates. And it kind of work except for one thing. You need more than just a webdav server to allow multiple people to change one ical file. Damm I thought, oh well move on.
But its been bugging me still, and when I met Louise Fergonson at this AIGA event. The memories started coming back.
See Louise actually manually keeps a kind of blog of upcoming events in London which designers would be interested in going to. I personally found it great and attended the Spiked gone to the blogs event because of her.
So whats the problem then? Well the problems are these.
I can not sydicate the events, which may sound pretty pettie but it means I have to return to her events page everytime I want to check.
I still have to manually copy and paste events into outlook or any other calender program I'm using.
So yes these may sound pettie, and I dont want to put down the seriously hard work Louise has put into the events page. But with a bit of xml magic, it shouldnt be a problem to create a rss feed and a icalendar.
How is this possible? Well this is in theory and quickly,
Louise's Html seems pretty messed up, it doesnt validate as xhtml as there is no doctype or things like that. So I will run it thought Cocoon's html tidy pipeline then start using xsl to filter out all the navigation and stuff, at which I should be left with only the content. Another xsl pipeline (or the same?) will turn the content into structured xml (may use ical or invent my own for now). Once its in that format I can turn it into anything I like. I am going to create rss feed to start off with then go about creating icals.
Will expalin better later, if that made no sense.
Blojsom2 installed and ready to go
Ok Blojsom2 is installed and ready to go, except one thing. I cant for the life of me get xmlrpc working from any blogging app I use. Combine this with the problems I'm having with Clite and suddenly blogging has become a lot more difficult.
Anyway got some nice snippits I found around the net which I'll drop into posts soon as I can. I cant believe its been 5 days since I last posted. Whats going on!
Slashdotters meetup updated
Ok, I cant count this meetup, the unexpected happened. I left to go to the slashdotters meetup and got to east croydon by 1800. Great I thought, what I'll do is go via New cross gate and pop up to brick lane via the east london line. Got to New cross gate, boarded the tube and the train suddely stopped. Why? The tube driver said it was down to a signal failure. Nothing new. But no it was more serious than we all thought, and while i sat there between new cross gate and surrey queys. The choas unfolded.
I only found out later when I finally got out of the tube and got a text message from my wife. Did you get to the meetup with the power cuts? What power cut, I was thinking? Everything seemed fine, only realised now I was sitting on a tube while most of the national grid in London had gone down.
The funny thing is I was having a go at my wife about americas power outage last week. Well at least it was only 30mins here not days!
The interesting thing I found thinking about Zeldman's blog, was that the mobile phone transmitters never went down once as I was able to get a gprs connection while sitting there on the tube. I never looked at my 3g phone, but I'm sure it was all fine too.
Anyway back to the meetup as such, I was lucky because the east london line power was quickly restored and I was away, while the other lines were all down. But it was pointless because no one else made it I dont think, plus the fact I got there 1 hour late. What kinda of host am I? But come on the there was bloddy power failure! in London!
Slashdotters meetup
Ok, this is it I believe. If the slashdotters meetup this Thursday doesnt pull people in, then I'm gonna start slagging off meetup and start rethinking going to them. You know what to give this the full go, I'm gonna be the host this time!
My profile: If sunny, will be sitting outside on a bench sporting a ipaq in one hand a redbull in the other 
Yellow trainers and something bright for a tshirt. If cold, look for the meetup sign or ask the bar people.
Good stuff, should do the trick.
Syndicating learning objects with RSS and Trackback
On the back of my wonder about what exactly is track back. Comes this. Comes in multiple formats including Quicktime for some unknown reason?
abstract reads like this,
Customized collections of learning objects from multiple repositories are achieved with simple, existing RSS protocols, creating access to a wider range of objects than a single source. This provides discipline-specific windows into collections, contextual wrappers via blogging tools, and a system for connecting objects and implementations via TrackBack
Presentation by Alan Levine, Maricopa Community Colleges.
Amazon sydicates
Its official now, no dirty work arounds needed. Amazon goes RSS
Amazon now provides RSS feeds embedded inside the HTML pages. To actually subscribe to the RSS you will need to take a look at the source of the page and then find the link to manually add it to your RSS newsreader
Now if only others could do the same…
What the heck is TrackBack?
I'm still to this day unsure of what trackbacks are, and even more confused after reading the moveabletype documatation about it.
I'm not the only one, Bob DuCharme is having issues. And he tries to explain in his post about the same issue.
Meeting up
Ok so this is something I've been meaning to blog for a while now.
I've been going to the meetups in London, and I've got mixed feelings about the whole thing. First up its very american rather than european as we bump into people all the time.
I went to 3 different meetups over last week, graphic designers in vibe bar, wifi in the media club and webdesigners which was in the best venue to date. So, quickly because its getting late…
_Graphic designers_ – no one else turned up and spent all the time asking people if they were part of the graphic designers meetup with friend dave. Left one hour later.
_Wifi_ – meet a interesting guy from india, who runs a business from there where he gets uk businesses coding done over there for a cheap. Specialises in tradional webservices. Needs designers, meeting up at college tuesday to talk about students working for him. Could be good for both parties.
Meetup was crap otherwise, left one hour later. What a silly place to have a public meetup? A private bar! Well done. Spent 10mins outside thinking of ways around the security guard.
Odd police presence afterwards though, wonder what that was all about. Will need to check bbc site later. About 3 police cars 2 bikes and a unmarked police car surrounding the media club block.
_webdesigners_ – Odd location down and around Angel station. Up 2 flights of stairs. Nice venue shame about the guys toilet, very cute bar lady. Anyway, no wireless in the area which was a shame and were going to leave about 1947, when Lucas turns up and sees the laptops on the table and I must have though, "Yep those two must be webdesigners".
Anyway, yeah we had a good old natter about everything web related and swapped email addresses 2 hours later. Cool guy from Argentina just moved over from Miami, sure I'll be seeing more of him soon, which would be good.
Theres a bloggers meetup this wednesday in Waterstones – Picadilly of all the places to have a meetup. Well at least its public and wont shut till 10pm.
I'm undecided if I'm gonna go or not.
Aggregation webservice – Bloglines
Bloglines is a server-based RSS aggregation system. Many blogs and newsfeed services publish RSS feeds, special files containing the content of the site formatted for easy parsing. Bloglines allows people to subscribe to these feeds. Once subscribed, Bloglines periodically checks the feed for changes or additions.
My first thoughts are this is good for those without access to a server of there own or no broadband connection. And its looks very simular to flock, but it says there using a combination of things. On the minus side it doesnt allow you to collect the aggeration outputs like flock does. So no sharing onwards which is a bad idea. I will need to sign up to check it out for sure.
It does however let you use opml to inport and export feeds, which makes me wonder what they would make of my many feeds
I wonder what there revenue model will be? email marketing or feed in advertising into there listed feeds? The easy subscription bookmarklet sounds dodgy as heck.
How Much Does Bloglines Cost?
Bloglines is completely free to use. Text advertising and additional fee-based services will be launched in the near future.
Using mailinator for the first time then it would seem. Using the email address testuser@mailinator.com with the password testuser.
Got my validated email a sec ago
Hello,
Your email address has been validated and your Bloglines membership has
been confirmed.
Now that you have a Bloglines account, you can subscribe to blogs
easily. Go to http://www.bloglines.com/topblogs to see a list of the
most popular blogs on Bloglines. Also see http://www.bloglines.com/newblogs
for a list of new blogs, updated daily. If you already have a list of
subscriptions in OPML format, you can import them automatically. Go to http://www.bloglines.com/manage for more information. For an easy way
to subscribe to new blogs that you find, see http://www.bloglines.com/help/easysub
How can we improve Bloglines? We would appreciate your feedback. Go
to http://www.bloglines.com/contact to send us comments.
Thank you for using Bloglines.
The Bloglines Team
Uploaded my opml file from flock and it worked!
So its now, my own flock server vs bloglines. We shall see what happens, you know I'll blog the results.
Open source really pays
So where did it all start?
Well we needed a blogger app for staff and students to blog from anywhere in the college. And our college has the additional problems of using mac as well as pcs and laptops not only desktops.
So how would we do this? Well I evaluated many blogger apps but they were either too complex or not cross platform. But yes there was one which was simple and cross platform. Chronicle lite
Anyway theres major problems with the graphics display on mac osx, so much of a problem I sent Paul a screenshot of the problem.
Paul replied that he had no mac to test on and that he wouldnt support the mac because of that. Oh, were a little stuck then?
Not if we send him a mac complete with osx! Yes thats right, we are going to send Paul a mac so he can fix the problem and maybe do some of the things we want to include into clite. Obviously because clite is opensource, everything we suggest for development will be open to everyone. Its a odd sitution because everyone wins. Paul gets a new mac, we get unlimited licences of software which does what we want and everyone else can use the same software with or without modifications. Yep the only people loosing out are those who charge for software. It really does pay to go opensource…
And in the spirit of opensource, I will now be plugging clite and its development when ever i can. lol.
Oh and here's Pauls wishlist if anyone else feels the need to help him out.
Mailinator
Got this email from Dave today
If you are tired up creating mail accounts anonymously only to have an
access to a website, here's a nice solution. Just give a mail address
of the form “something@mailinator.com” and you'll get the access codes
easily at http://www.mailinator.com 
That address is only for
receiving and it's up for three days. Everybody else can read mails
sent to that address. Go there and see what kind of mail
bob@mailinator.com has got
And boy oh boy was I impressed by the simple solution to junk email this is. My only hope is that it wont get flooded with use that they will have to take it down or charge for it. Also had a good read of the authors thoughts on mailinator at his own blog.
Also the FAQ blog cover everything you ntk about the service.
Been reading through his other blogs too and they seem kinda interesting. Might add him to my feeds, if i can find his rss link.
Participatory Journalism
Battle of the blog
The Rss issue spelt out, with some interesting views from some of the most inflentual people on the net, well worth a read.Dispute exposes bitter power struggle behind Web logs
I wont comment too much, because I havent yet made my mind up. I like RSS2 because its really simple. But prefer RSS 1.0 because its using a standard (rdf) which makes alot of sense. How Pie, Echo and others come into this, I dont know but this is going to go on and on and on. Thank god we can just write xsl which will convert between whatever format is prefered.
The end of email marketing?
I spied this. It basicly goes on about the use of html emails and how outlook 2003 doesnt display them in html. But the interesting part comes later about other revenue models such as rss?
Its a interesting one, because yes outlook 2003 actually does a pretty good job at showing html emails as text, and its default now. Plus simple rules like if your not in my address book your email goes in my junk box. Which works super well by the way. Doesnt mean email marketing is totally dead yet.
I can see a change back to the text based email marketing where the only rich feature was the mail client replacing http://blah.com with a real link. And honestly, I can wait to go back to that, as I will then beable to read such emails on my ipaq once again.
Also wanted to add, this post is typical example of a post which should exist in more than one category. David's example of multiple category plugin coming in the next blojsom, hoooray!