Posts from a work on process...
The victory of version control
It’s always fascinating to see how applying good practice in one area can lead to unforeseen benefits. The article on version control with subversion in the latest issue of A List Apart is a fine example of just that. Not only is the use of version control a good way to manage your own projects, [...]Tags: commentary, notes, adoption, cornerstone, cvs, git, revision_control, subversion, tools, version_control, versions
links for 2008-06-15
Meerkat | Code Sorcery Workshop "Meerkat is an easy to use SSH tunnel manager built specifically for the Mac." (tags: mac software ssh tunnel) bkkeepr | Track your reading and bookmark on the go A nice little reading tracker service. You send them a message on twitter with the ISBN number of the book you’re reading, and they do [...]Tags: notes
How to use twitter?
I was pleased a few months back to see Calvin College sign up for twiter. A small college in the Michigan town where I lived for three years up until last summer, the college is my wife’s former employer, a previous client of mine, and a place that dominated quite a bit of our social [...]Don’t imply privacy
Conversations about privacy are an increasingly vital part of any planning process for a membership-driven website. Having been engaged in such a conversation for a new project and fielding support emails for an existing one, it’s been on my mind quite a bit lately. We’re all managing a lot of personal data, whether we’re running sites [...]Twitter timeline proof-of-concept
Reading Stowe Boyd’s thoughts on plurk and writing my own post on the topic I began to wonder how much work it would really be to add a timeline view using something like the Simile Timeline library. As a quick proof of concept I saved my twitter homepage to my laptop and added a little javascript. [...]A few thoughts on plurk and twitter
Along with many others I’ve been responding to the recent unreliability of twitter by checking out a few of the alternatives that are out there, particularly the dreadfully named but fairly cute plurk. Plurk has quickly gained quite a few users but didn’t make a good first impression with me. The first thing that I was [...]links for 2008-05-24
mad.ly – Rails 2.1 Time Zone Support: An Overview Helpful overview of one of a number of great improvements coming up in the next version of rails (tags: rubyonrails timezone) Mapping Xenophobic Attacks in South Africa | White African More great work being undertaken using the Ushahidi engine (tags: africa ict4d nptech ushahidi) Recommend this post: [...]Tags: notes
Book Review: Refactoring HTML
Despite years of progress by web standards advocates, and a significant improvement in the quality of the HTML on the web, many of us still end up grappling with outmoded, broken HTML on a regular basis. When confronted with a large site filled with broken pages it can be hard to know where to start. [...]Tags: notes
geekYoto: Fixing The Broken World
I’m getting my event blogging a little out of order but a few words on last weekend’s excellent geeKyoto seemed in order. Put together by Ben Hammersley and Mark Simpkins to see what a group of self-identified geeks would say in response to the question “We broke the world, how are we going to fix [...]Project Launch: Debtonation
With all the talk of credit crunches, sub-prime mortgage crises, and all that follows from them it can be difficult to know how to make sense of it all. When you add in the fact that money is a far more complicated beast than most of us realise it’s pretty bewildering. Ann Pettifor is an expert [...]Thoughts on Innovation Edge 2008
In trying to get to grips with the NESTA Innovation Edge conference I’ve kept returning to Tim Berners-Lee’s appearance early on in proceedings. Berners-Lee himself didn’t offer anything groundbreaking, but made a series of sensible comments on innovation, the potential of the web, and providing space for creative people to get on with exploring their [...]More on “Are Online Social Networks the new Cities?”
I promised a few of my own thoughts after liveblogging the “Are online social networks the new cities” at yesterday’s Innovation Edge conference. I’ve not had much time to reflect on the session, which is a shame as it’s a question that touches on a lot of areas of interest for me, but being so [...]Innovation Edge: Are online social networks the new cities?
Today I’m at NESTA’s Innovation Edge conference and did a little live blogging. These notes are largely unedited, so they’re likely to be a bit sketchy and may be missing bits and pieces as my attention shifted. For context, feel free to post a comment and I’ll catch up with them when I can. The panel: Michael [...]Book Review: Learning Website Development with Django
Reviewing The Definitive Guide To Django a few months ago I noted that the key place that book lacked was in examples. As befits the work of the creators of a framework, it did very well at explaining the underlying philosophies and working through all manner of implementation details, but it wasn’t the book for [...]Book Review: Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6
An update to David Mercer’s now two year old Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites, this version has been updated for the CMS’ latest revision and guides the user through from setting up a development environment and installing drupal through to building custom themes and deploying a fully built site. The book is designed [...]Tags: notes
Project Launch: New Generous website
Four years ago, give or take, a small group keen to see how their individual steps towards a more generous way of living added up, came up with the idea of A Year Of Living Generously. Through the web a group of people could signal their commitment to various steps that might help their communities [...]Project Launch: New Greenbelt website
One of the numerous projects I’ve been juggling over the past few months has been a redesign of the Greenbelt Festival website. That redesign went live late last night. Working from Wilf’s designs I initially built new HTML and CSS templates and began to establish some rules for how we’d handle the new image management requirements [...]Tags: notes, capistrano, cms, css, greenbelt, html, jquery, paul_northup, php, relaunch, rspec, wilf_whitty
Ecampaigning Forum: Notes on Open Space sessions
While my live blogging efforts focussed on the more formal sessions at ecampaigning forum, most of the event’s time and content was spent in groups following the Open Space methodology. The gatherings for people to suggest sessions were instructive in themselves as they gave considerable hints as to the key concerns of ecampaigning practitioners. How to [...]Tags: notes, api, civicactions, drupal, ecampaigning, ecf, ecf08, google, nptech, open_space, openstreetmap, peak_attention, summits, theyworkforyou, twitter
Ecampaigning forum case study: myactionaid
For the next couple of days I’m at the ecampaigning forum in Oxford and am going to attempt to live blog the main sessions as far as possible. These notes are largely unedited, so they’re likely to be a bit sketchy. For context, feel free to post a comment and I’ll catch up with them [...]Tags: notes, action_aid, ecampaigning, ecampaigning_forum, ecf, ecf08, myactionaid, nptech, social_networking