If you’re in the vicinity of Vancouver Island on August 22nd, come along to the web posse meeting at 6:30pm at Swans in Victoria.
This month Jim Rutherford will be presenting on Adobe Flex and the surrounding technologies.
I had the chance to grab a beer with Jim last week and he gave me an insight into the world of Flex, very interesting stuff.
Here’s the skinny from betterwebposse.com.
See you there!
The new iMac is looking very tempting.
According to the official specs however, it isn’t thinner. Take a look at the old dimensions compared with the new.
Just saying… everyone is going on about how thin they’re supposed to be. Even Steve Jobs said:
“[The new iMac is] Really thin. You’ll get your hands on it in a minute, but they’re appreciably thinner.”
What gives?
What is wrong with Ebay these days? I’ve tried to sell two items more than three times now, and every time the auction has been cancelled because of fraudulent bidding.
I’m at a loss, and for me it’s time to find something different. Six auctions and six fraud cancellations means there is something seriously wrong.
To top it off, if Ebay finds that someone has bid on your item with a stolen account - they will just delete the auction, so you lose the entire thing. There is no hope of you getting the content back, so you have to re-write it from scratch. That’s enough to put anyone off re-posting it.
I even make sure it’s perfectly clear that I would never ship to Africa or Asia, in the hope that it would stop some fraudsters. Of course that never works out.
Why don’t they just entirely block countries like Nigeria? It’s not like they have an “Ebay Nigeria” anyway. Perhaps that would be too harsh, but that seems the source for most fraud right now.
How has your experience been? If anyone can gladly point me in the direction of an auctioning site that isn’t riddled with fraud, I’d be happy to put my items up there.
I recently completed my biggest project yet; a fully fledged social network aimed at female college students. The difference? It’s built on Wordpress MU.
Wordpress MU (WPMU) is basically the multi-user version of Wordpress, the popular blog/cms tool. The aim of WPMU is to allow for one installation to spawn multiple Wordpress blog instances. Basically, you can install WPMU on your server and run as many individual Wordpress instances as your box can handle.
Wordpress MU has the basics of a social network right out of the box - individual member blogs, member profiles and the ability to scale well.
Wordpress also has an excellent plugin API, as well as a whole host of quality pre-built plugins ready to download and activate. The key here is that I didn’t have to hack the core - I could just achieve the additional functionality needed by building dedicated plugins.
Plugins were built and used for private messaging, advanced profile management, online polls, photo management, multi-blog search and user credential management.
The crucial part to the whole project was morphing Wordpress MU to stop it from generating new blog instances and instead generating new member home pages.
A member home page includes a users own personal profile front and center, their own personal “journal” as a feature of their home page, as well as private messaging functionality.
To achieve the desired change it was down to making a new Wordpress theme. The theme would have exactly the same look and feel as the core site - making it look like the new member home page was still part of the core site itself.
Within the theme, I removed the code that usually makes the blog posts front and center, and changed it to the code that outputs the users profile. The blog code was moved to the sidebar so it could still be accessed as the members “journal” feature.
Finally, the code to output the users new private messages was added to the sidebar, as well as some code to output polls, photos and other smaller bits and bobs.
A nice feature of Wordpress MU is it places member pages on a subdomain, so any members home page can be found at http://membername.chickspeak.com. A nice touch, as it’s then easy to remember the to link to your profile.
The project also called for a fully featured discussion forum. The forum needed to work seamlessly with the site, using the same login credentials and the same look and feel. Another project called BBPress fit the bill perfectly. BBPress is a no-frills forum/bulletin board application built by the same guys (Automattic) as Wordpress. It has the same style, plugin architecture and most importantly can share the credentials data and cookie information. Perfect.
The final step was to limit the administration functionality that a member has on their own blog. This stops them from signing up new users, deleting content they shouldn’t be, or changing the theme of their member page. I created a simple plugin that disabled the menus for these settings in the Wordpress admin interface. The pages could only be accessed by site-wide administrators if needed.
I’ve only really glazed on what I did with Wordpress MU to turn it into a fully fledged social network engine - but you get the overall idea. I’d be happy to answer anyones specific questions if you have them.
ChickSpeak is up and running over at ChickSpeak.com. Feel free to take a look when you get a chance, I’d welcome any feedback. You can also click the image thumbnails in the article to get full screenshots.
Thankfully it turns out the Leopard Finder mockup I produced a couple of months ago wasn’t too far away from the real deal. I’m pretty happy with the additions Apple have made, it should make for a much better overall experience.
I’m happy with the new look, although I personally think it feels a little unfinished (aqua scrollbars still? Hmm). Unifying the look across core applications was the right decision, especially when Apple are picking up new users in droves.
Better smart filters are very welcome. Although they didn’t use them in exactly the same way I expected, the fact that they are providing pre-created filters is sure to let users actually know filtering exists - and is useful in everyday situations.
Cover Flow was a given, I’m not sure why I didn’t pick up on that one. Apple loves it, although I’m still unsure whether this will be any more than an added whistle. Perhaps for folders of pictures or videos I can see it being helpful, but for viewing the applications folder? I doubt it.
Quick view is excellent. I think it could be the best feature announced. I hate opening up apps just to check to see if I have the right document. Hopefully this will be easily extensible, so 3rd party developers can add support for their own document types.
I wish Apple would add tabs. Perhaps this breaks too many interface guidelines to be considered. I still think it would be extremely useful - providing I can drop files onto a tab and have it spring open in the same way folders do.
One thing that did find its way in to the new Finder was a bread crumb. I thought this had very little chance to be honest, but it’s a very welcome addition. We see bread crumbs on websites all the time, and they are a critical component to the iTunes store. Users know what they mean, so the Finder seems the perfect place to use them.
Overall a great (and needed) upgrade. I’m looking forward to using it.