Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
There’s are two winners from yesterday’s coverage of the ipad.
live.twit.tv and live.gdgt.com. Between the two of them, you could hear and see what was going on live on stage but also get a real feel for the presentation details with the whole host of screenshots from live.gdgt.com. Credit is due to these guys for making this all happen, shame on Apple for not just streaming the whole event. You can’t stop the signal…
The first one was converting Blojsom to WordPress, but this wasn’t too bad because both work around the RSS 2.0 format. Getting the comments, tags, metadata out and into the rss 2.0 feed was a real pain and I’m convinced I dropped a load of trackbacks and pingbacks in the process. This is another reason why I started using Disqus for all my comments.
The harder task was moving blog entries from WordPress to MoveableType. Yes I expect most of you are wondering why I would move from a far superior system to something which most people left in the dirt ages ago. Well unfortunately we still use MT on the bbc.co.uk/blogs platform and that means as backstage moves to the official blog platform, some mug had to find a way to down convert to MT 4.1 which only imports/exports in this crazy text only format.
So after lots of looking around, I finally found a XSL which I modified to do the job from a stripped down WordPress WXR file (RSS2.0 with lots of WP namespaces stuff). Its important that you strip down the WXR file as it might not be valid XML, so no XSL transform is going to work. I also took a bit of time to write a XSL to remove most of the namespaces elements or convert them into a more valid RSS 2.0 element. You can do the same with lots of finds and replaces, so I won’t post the simple XSL.
Hopefully this will save others a lot of time in the future, if your faced with the same problem.
Not perfect but I like the general idea. Been trying to get HR involved in using Linked-In.com for quite a while. Not so good to think the cluetrain has been watered down to this however…
Twitter is down and people are somewhat freaking out. This is a really good time to install a microblogging application which supports not only twitter an maybe facebook like the popular tweetdeck. But instead go for one which supports one of the la.conica servers. Identi.ca is the most popular of the lot but support for the open microblogging service is a good idea. If Twitter does go down for long periods, its maybe time to consider switching over.
You got to hand it to Novell, they are quick off the mark. Rather that trying to fight Wave they have embraced it (something I suggested big collaboration corps should do). Novell have a nice clean enterprise product/service called Pulse, which looks and feels like a very cleaned up Wave system. But here's the kicker, it interoperates with the Wave protocol. smooth move Novell and I'll certainly keep an eye on Pulse for our future plans.
Novell Pulse Demo from ReadWriteWeb on Vimeo.
Been thinking about changing my identity a lot recently and even got talking with FactoryJoe I mean Chris Messina about this at Next09. The video sums up the debate pretty well, but I still can't decide if I should use ianforrester instead of cubicgarden.
As Facebook continues dragging the world online using their real names and photos, Chris Messina, David Recordon and John McCrea grab a few minutes to chat with Josh Elman (Facebook) and Kaliya Hamlin (Identity Woman) out on Lake Austin about their philosophical differences when it comes to using your real name versus a pseudonym on the social web.
I like what Stowe's proposing here. I specially like the fact I can now say I'm in /Manchester UK/, which should make pin pointing me much easier that just /Manchester/ alone. It also means you can be more descriptive if there the system or application supports it, such as /Bar TV21 on corner of the northern quarter, Manchester/. This certainly beats L:Manchester.
Guys I live twitter, its been amazing. Most of the people I know are on it and in time we may look back at it like the start of email. But thats the problem, its not email its one network email, its like texting way back in 1996, when you and your friends all had to be on the same network to be sure you would get the text message (sms). I'm sure others older that me will tell stories of when email use to be the same, but luckily I've never known that restriction.
Identi,ca is microblogging done correct, its Affero GPL licence, as API friendly as Twitter (same API really) and supports federation remarkable well. Now this isn't the 1st time I've talked about this service, you may have heard me talk about la.conica and identi.ca many times. But whats interesting about identi.ca is I'm starting to see it being put in next to Twitter in clients. So for example I use Twhirl most of the time and now identi.ca support is there and its not just a add on, its all there. I've started noticing that Identi.ca's clients list is also growing. But whats also getting me really excited is seeing la.conica being put into Drupal and other places. So not only can you have your community blog but you can also have communal microblogging.
I'm personally starting to actively use identi.ca more and more. I'm sure at some point i'll start looking up friends on identi.ca and other systems and add them. Hey I may even start saying different things on them. I can certainly see one day when my default is identi.ca and it posts on to twitter via some bot or service like ping.fm. Unless of course Jaiku gets going again.
