I have been absorbed watching the Katrina news the past couple of days. I fear that New Orleans may be gone forever, at least in its current incarnation.
The Katrina Wikipedia page is a great resource that is updated live (about every 3 minutes today) by many people sorting through hundreds of news sources. Check it out if you haven’t already.
I had several conversations about RSS at the ASAE meeting. Often discussed was Microsoft’s upcoming new operating system Vista (nee Longhorn) that will have RSS support built into it at a very low level. My hope is that they will do it in such a seamless way that most users will have no idea they are even using something called RSS (or Atom or whatever) to track sites, headlines, what have you.
Right now, you have to spend a significant amount of time when introducing the concept to give all the background necessary for it to make sense. I remember giving presentations in the early/mid 90s where I had to explain what a web site was. No one tells you today that they like to get their information via HTTP. RSS will have made it when no one has to talk about it anymore to make use of it.
Given MS’s track record, transparent RSS support will probably really well in Vista2.0: The Next Horizon.
If you sent me an e-mail last Friday and I haven’t responded, please send it again. My web host had an extended outage that had the site down for about half the day. I’m caught up on messages I received late last week, so if you haven’t heard from me I didn’t get it.
I’ve been a member of The Well for about 6 years (whoa, time flies). I was a bit surprised to see that Salon is going to sell it off. Here is the stated reason for the sale:
Hambrecht said that Salon intends to shift from something akin to a print magazine with articles posted online to a more interactive Web site. “Salon would like to focus on our base brand rather than divert our attention,” she said.
So, they want to be more interactive and their first step is to sell off their community service. Interesting move. Not logical, but interesting. I would guess the real reason is that they are tired of dealing with all the cranky members who have been starved for any attention from the corporate parent. I haven’t checked in to the Well for a few days since I was traveling. I’m sure there are about 5,000 posts to catch up on this already.
Love this shot of Jeff doing the intrepid podcaster routine. That’s me in the background chugging some coffee before the morning keynote started.
I’m on my way home from the ASAE Annual meeting in Nashville after a busy week. Overall, I think the conference was a big success for ASAE and the Center and was pretty good for me as well.
I’ll post a bit more about it once I’m home and have slept for 12 hours. In the mean time, check out the conference blog that I and a bunch of other volunteers contributed to.
David Bartholomew has released a Knowledge Sharing Toolkit that he has developed over the past 2 years.
The ‘Knowledge Sharing Toolkit’ is the result of a two-year DTI-funded project carried out by innovation consultancy David Bartholomew Associates (DBA) and nine of the UK’s leading architectural and engineering practices – Aedas, Arup, Broadway Malyan, Buro Happold, Edward Cullinan Architects, Feilden Clegg Bradley, Penoyre & Prasad, Whitby Bird and WSP.
A concise 49 page how-to manual accompanied by nine detailed case studies, the Toolkit shows building design practices how to develop a knowledge strategy to support their business objectives, and explains the main tools and techniques for learning and sharing knowledge, and how to use them.
I haven’t had a chance to read it yet (just spotted it today) but thought I would go ahead and share the link for those of you interested in facilitating knowledge sharing.
(Via James Robertson.)
Here is a nifty web app: tRuTag
I’ve created tRuTag with Ruby because I wanted to explore tagging. What it does is create an html page of your tags on various sites and then allows you to explore them on other sites.
I use it as my homepage and have just implemented some of it’s functionlity on my Ruby on Rails site. Below is a sample page. Please view the readme or download tRuTag and enjoy!
It requires Ruby on Rails to run. I’ll probably try to get this set up on my laptop this weekend.
(Via O’Reilly Radar.)
Paul Purdue is blogging the end of his business as he closes up shop.
I am doing everything I can to keep the merchant zone up 24/7. I know that a few times it has gone down, and the server has needed to be reset. I’m trying to do that as quickly as I can every time it happens. Of course, the 3 IT staff that used to take care of these issues are no longer here. I’m working to get the alarms that they used to receive diverted to my cell phone.
Pretty intense reading when you imagine yourself in his shoes. It sounds like he is trying to do as much as he can for his customers as he closes down.
(Via Rex Hammond.)
Here is a nice article in Digital Web Magazine on Architecting CSS.
With nearly ubiquitous standards support among modern browsers, we’re turning to CSS to handle presentational heavy lifting more than ever. The more we rely upon CSS, the larger and more complex CSS files become. These files bring with them a few maintenance and organizational challenges.
Gone are the days of creating a single CSS file and dropping in rules as needed. As we build new sites, it is necessary to spend time planning how to organize and structure CSS.
Following the tips in this article should save you quite a bit of time during initial design and when going back to revise later.
C. David Gammel, CAE 