Avast, Ye.

Yes, it is that time of year again, International Talk Like A Pirate Day, and in celebration here is the desktop I made last year to celebrate.  Download and enjoy.

I apologize for the lack of updates lately, but things have been hectic at work, at home and at work #2 (my social software company, currently in stealth mode).  I am prepping a new tutorial on abusing the object system in PHP 5 for wealth and glory as well as polishing up an update to CJD Notepad that among other shiny things, integrates your notes with the Write Post screen, so you can access those notes from everywhere.

Until next time then.

Apple opening up

How about that!  Apple has thrown a curve ball to the community today by launching Mac OS Forge, and populating it with a number of pieces of software released under the apache license.

This is an exciting move by Apple.  Currently the server houses the following projects:

• Intel Kernel Source — link
• CalDav Server Source — link
• Bonjour Source — link
• Launchd Source — link
• WebKit — link

For me the biggest bit of this is the CalDav server source.  Read more about it here.

Oh, and Mac OS Forge runs on WordPress.. :)

Hiveminder: A first look

Another service that was announced at this years OSCON was Hiveminder.  Hiveminder has been described as "RT for your life" by some of its users... and I gotta say I agree.  It is currently in a private beta phase, but I was lucky enough to get an account so lets briefly look over some of the high points.

For a more in-depth look at Hiveminder, surf on over to ani ruhama.

RT for your life

If you are not familiar with RT, the site describes it this way:

RT is an enterprise-grade ticketing system which enables a group of people to intelligently and efficiently manage tasks, issues, and requests submitted by a community of users.

Hiveminder takes the best parts of RT, slaps on some AJAX and more intuitive terminology, delivering a fun and useful experience for the most part.

Read the rest »

Unfortunately

The money I was counting on to get me to SF for WordCamp isn't going to make it to me in time, so I am going to be a no show.

I was really looking forward to meeting so many of you, and cornering Matt to have a little chat about current events in our community.  Looks like that will have to wait as well.

Have a good time for me people, and give Bryan a proper congrats for joining Automattic.

Google Announcement

There is a comparison of features between SF and Google Code over at Engtech.  There is also an article on Newsforge.  I have already set up an account and checked in the code for K2 so that I can play a bit... I am currently underwhelmed.

Google announced their Google Code Project hosting service today at the O'reilly Open Source convention.  Greg Stein of Apache, SVN and WebDAV fame announced in his session the new service from Google that is targeted at the Open Source Community.

The new service is set up to be a 'sourceforge' like offering, hosted on Google's servers.  The new service will integrate subversion, issue tracking, mailing lists, etc into one Google-fied package.  This being Google there is a heavy smattering of search technology throughout.  The new system will allow you to search your issue tracker and svn for instance.

This new service will be running out of Google Code Hosting.

More to come as time permits.

Don't ask me why

And as you can see I have decided to go back to my normal theme.  I hope you enjoyed this little stroll down spanish lane as much as I did.

But I felt like having half of my site in Spanish, so I activated this very interesting theme.

In more serious matters, I have been swamped at work, as well as on a sideproject of mine I will be unveiling soon.  Should be interesting when I launch my new venture... to say the least.

Until then, stay sharp and stay lean.

User Tagging: Some Results

It has been roughly one month since I started my little end user tagging experiment, so let's take a look at the results.

Mostly Harmless

Surprisingly, to me anyway, I have much less 'tag spam' than expected.  I think I have blown away maybe 40 tags that were spammy (profanity, single letters and gibberish mostly).  On the upside every post I have written since quietly going live has been tagged by end users.

My next step is to look at augmenting the built-in WordPress search with the tags that I am gathering.  I might just write a replacement search for the site that uses tags and content indexing... who knows.

In case you were wondering

Yes, I am planning on releasing my customized version of UTW as soon as I can. My apologies to Chris Pirillo, things have been crazy yo.

Right now I am using a 3 tier classification structure for my content: categories, author tags and user submitted tags.  After a year of collecting this could be very interesting.

More AJAX hotness

If you haven't yet noticed, there is a new version of the Flickr website.

There are some things that I think are a step down visually, like removing the box around individual images, but for the most part I am impressed with the changes that have been made.

My favorite change so far has been the new 'Organizer' which is now completely powered by AJAXy goodness.   No more flash... feels good.

When redesigns == torture

You know it is time to just launch the thing, and take a breather.

I started out this particular design full of hope and energy; after about 3 days the energy was gone and hope was on a south bound train out of Chicago.  I think I am honestly losing my ability to design for the web.

I am planning on writing up an analysis of this design and the thoughts behind it once it is in a better state, but until then go look at some really good design, courtesy of Veloso the wonderboy and Matt the rough, smudgy... scratchy guy.

Anyway go, look at good design, and hope Mike gets his act together and launches a site sometime today.

Oh and for those of you out there not blessed with large screens and high res fear not; I am prepping an alternate version of the site that will be much kinder to your constrained proportions.

Rebooted, almost

Well comments are now working again, but they are kinda ugly still.  I should have them 'not fugly' in the next hour or so, bear with me.  Oh and let the commenting begin!

I am in the middle of things with the reboot; alas a child and eleventy-billion projects means less time for this site as I would like.

I hope to have the complete rebooted Sillyness ready by the end of the day, but for right now, I need to be off to bed.  And yeah, the first thing I will be updating tomorrow is the comments form, so for right now, no commenting.

It's so lonely looking now, isn't it?