One challenge any community site faces is how to let users express themselves. It is hard to express the sum total of any individual on a web page, but in the virtual world that interface is the one chance a user has to connect with another human being. The challenge for designers is making the…
Category: Projects
It’s Your Head Not Your Butt That Matters
I’ve been writing code all day, again. Luckily I enjoy writing software. There are moments when I and the computer don’t get along. On those days I consider becoming a garbage man or maybe a bulldozer driver. Just keep me off the bull dozer on the days I don’t agree with my code. Anyway I’ve…
Open Any Document in Google Docs Via a Url
We are looking at ways to integrate the new Teachers Without Borders site with Google docs. Turns out that you can open: documents – .pdf, .doc, .txt, .html, .rtf and .odt spreadsheets – .xls, .csv, .ods presentations – .ppt By feeding the file url to this google url: http://docs.google.com/?DocAction=updoc&formsubmitted=true&uploadURL=DOCUMENT_URL Here’s an example if you needed…
Elastic Cloud Computing
One of the most difficult tasks when putting up a new site is picking the right host. Moving hosts later on is terribly difficult so choosing the correct hosting company is as important as selecting a business partner. I’ve collected about 30 hosting companies in my delicious bookmarks. Some are specific to a platform others…
Note to Facebook, Myspace and Other Social Silos: DIE
I wrote three Facebook apps and I have ideas for several more. The most successful was the House Plans application I did for ThePlanCollection.com, but in the Facebook world you can’t count a couple thousand users as especially successful. When Open Social started up I felt like I needed to go sign up for a…
How to manage 60,000 digital photos
QUICK UPDATE: If you want reliable backups for you photos check out my post on using S3. A friend of mine was surprised that I don’t have a Flickr account. I am try to keep up with the cool kids and keep accounts on many of the so called web 2.0 services. So why don’t…
So ya I am like busy
I haven’t posted a lot lately. A lot of people with blogs say that and they suck because of it so I guess I suck too. Instead of being a radical nut job I am moving back into being a developer nut job. In addition to working on eduCommons at work I have been focusing…