Heliopod: A Great Looking Drupal Site

Wow.  HelioPod rocks.  This is a cool community site / blog site for the Solaris platform.  Best of all (well from my perspective at least) it's built with one of my favorite open source projects, Drupal (yes, Drupal is php based). [ Go ]

They're even very generously offering to host blogs for Solaris folk:

Just wanted to remind everyone that if you create an account (over there on the right) you can then keep a personal weblog on our server. It's a great place to post your daily Solaris experiences, or really anything you want.

If you are a vendor, we encourage you to create a weblog and post your specials and deals. If enough people vote +1 in the submission queue, we'll promote it up to the front page for all to see. But even if it isn't on the front page, it's still visible on the User Blogs page. You can't complain about a little free advertising.

So sign up, and tell the Heliopod community about your Solaris adventures.

I'm not a big Sun guy but if I was I'd be spending a lot of time there.

Oh and for more information on Drupal go here.  [ Go ]

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Interesting: XPTK for Mozilla

Andy sent this to me:

Welcome to XPTK. This project is in support of a larger effort to bring development tools and infrastructure to application builders who choose to use Mozilla technologies as a sloution for building cross platform client and remote applications. XPTK stands for Cross Platform Tool Kit. This toolkit will start out by providing a simple set of widgets for application developers to use for their XP applications. By having a standard GUI toolkit as part of the infrastructure for Mozilla cross platform application development, the job of the application author will be greatly simplified.  [ Go ]

I also ran across NeedleSearch which looks pretty neat.  [ Go ]. 

For all the issues that the Mozilla project had getting started, they really are doing a good job in pushing the frontiers forward.  Mozilla really is a much better browser than IE and even though you'd think there couldn't be any more innovation in the browser, Mozilla, Galeon and Phoenix have done it.  Kudos.

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PHPCON Presentations

I promised to blog the PHP CON Presentations beyond my own that were on line.  Unfortunately I only have two urls:

• Jeremy's (I missed it but I saw a related presentation by Jeremy at OSCON and that was great). [ Go ]
• Rasmus's (I was there; I saw; It was excellent). [ Go ]

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Just When I Promised Short Entries ... NOT ! or How Many Days Should Be on a Blog ?

It's turning out that today is almost an homage to Scoble.  Since this was the first blog I looked at today, I'm reacting to it and I see that Robert has moved to one day on his blog home page.  One day.  Ack Freaking Foo.  Here's what he says as to why:

So, I've switched my site to only show today's thoughts and no other. Why do I think that's better?

Because I'm not penalizing 90% of my audience to please the 10% who came here to read yesterday's crap. I look at this like a newspaper. I print today's news and nothing more. If you wanna see yesterday's news, go to Google and do some searches.

Now it's your turn. Tell me why I'm wrong.  [ Go ]

Sorry man.  But you're wrong here.  Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.  And wrong.  Or at least I'd view it as a "Readership limiting tactic."  Here's why:

1. I'm busy.  I don't know about anyone else but I read my Wall Street Journal often a week at a time.  Why are you making reading your blog harder for me?
   
   
2. Reading a blog is an act of committment.  I have to
• Have the time
• Know that Scoble is interesting to me
• Find a link to Scoble
• Go to Scoble
• Read Scoble
  
  I just don't do that every day.  I wish I could but I have a job, a life and I'm busy.  What happens with me is I grab 10 minutes here and there and say "Damn.  I need to be Scobleized and then I visit".  What you're trying to do is make yourself into a habit and I don't want that.  Sorry.  I've got enough habits already.
  
  
3. Yes I can use the calendar but I don't want to.  This blog fascination with a calendar bothers me.  For novices, the metaphor isn't at all clear.  So many blogs have 7 days on the home page that the metaphor isn't fully understood.  When you can just scroll down why do you want to use the calendar ?  Also it's very hard in Radio to navigate between calendar entries.  You have to mouse to a little spot, constantly changing the mouse position.  If you're going to do this then at least implement Previous and Next buttons.
   
   
4. What's the focus on bandwidth here?  Ok so you are penalizing people that visit every day.  Have you ever done a real traffic analysis?  I'll bet that 90% of your readers aren't visiting every day.  I know I'm not and I honestly love your blog.
   
   
5. If you're going to tell me to use Google to do some searches on your blog then move it to it's own domain and off the UserLand servers.  You can't use Google's site:DOMAIN syntax to search specific Radio blogs since Google doesn't support limiting searches to directory hierarchies below your site.  [ Example ]   Don't tell me to go somewhere else to access your site, at least give me a listing of recent entries. 

Sorry for the violent reaction but you're wrong. 

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I see over on Adam that Ebay is preventing musicians from selling their work on CD-Rs.  While I don't agree with the conspiracy RIAA theory, I do think that Ebay is being stupid here.  There are lots of data centric products that you'd want to sell on Ebay -- music, test data sets, image collections and all of those would be delivered on CD-R.  And all that's going to happen is people will stop labeling their stuff "Shipped on CD-R" since that's how Ebay is (I think) blocking them.  [ Go ] 

5:32:56 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Nicely Said: Scoble on Flash and using it for blogging.  After checking out the wedding stuff, I see that Robert has good comments on Flash.  Here's a selection:

What's so glorious about plain text? Easy: Google can index it.

Photos, videos, and such are nice, but wake me up when Google can look inside, OK?

What else? Easy. Bandwidth. I'm often on bad bandwidth. Video and audio just plain suck when you're in some hotel room somewhere trying to partake of all the Web goodness.

I definitely have to agree with him on the advantages of plain text.  Still Macromedia does publish an API for indexing Flash which at least one site level search engine, Atomz, supports.  A much bigger issue for me is that Flash is both proprietary and binary.  I've been too burned by vendors when binary data corrupts.  HTML doesn't corrupt and that just plain rocks.  I've been in situations where the only way to update my blog was to use VI.  So have others like Iluminent.  If we were purely flash based this wouldn't be possible.  [ Go ]

5:24:29 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Very cool.  Scoble's getting married.  Having met Robert and his bride, I can only say "Congratulations !!!".  You guys make a lovely couple.  I hear that Buzz and Dave are actually making the wedding.  Good for them.  [ Go ]
5:19:00 AM        comment []    IM Me About This   

It's looking like today will be a series of short entries.  And this is the first.
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