Monthly Archives: September 2005

26th Sep, 2005

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Another Connection Success Story

Jason Wong is an awesome entrepeneur. Back in 1997, I’d worked on his startup idea to take advantage of cheap storage (Zip drives) to do programatic recording of television (Tivo!). Or something like that. There were definitely zip drives. And at this late date we should probably pretend we were an early version of some other company that made it. Afterwards I lost touch with him, until today, when I ran into him on Connection.

He’s CEO of Ionami, an 8-person web consultancy. He’s still an entrepeneur and doing big things with Rails. I’m so happy to run into old friends who are doing well.

26th Sep, 2005

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Webzine2005 Sounded Awesome

Web Genius, Justin Watt, had a great time at Webzine2005.

Rather than cooking up your own XML DTD/Schema, the microformats guys are advising using a combination of XHTML (which is XML afterall) and class attributes to create structured data for things like blogrolls (XFN), contact information (hCard), and calendaring (hCalendar).

One of the principles Tantek stressed (at FOO Camp) was that “invisible metadata deteriorates.” I wonder what my librarian friends would say about that? The benefit of XHTML is that browsers already exist on every platform to display whatever you markup. Using a combination of tags and CSS, create a format the benefits the user first, and the machine second.

25th Sep, 2005

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Make Magazine Needs a Programmer

Reposted the job req for Make magazine on Connection. My top two choices bailed for even bigger jobs. This is a sweet job! First off, it’s Make magazine. Everyone who works on the magazine plays with lasers and 3d printers constantly. Second, O’Reilly introduces you to a ton of smart people and has a tendency to launch programmers into much bigger things like fame and successful startups.

So on to the job, Make needs a part-time, long-term contractor to do programming (no HTML at all) for their website. Cool stuff, like single sign-on integration or ajax/rails applications. Would be exposed to PHP and Perl, but talent is a lot more important than specific experience.

You don’t need to actually join Connection to apply, although you should anyway. Just email me: tonys@oreilly.com

14th Sep, 2005

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Podcast Text Search

Maybe I missed this, or maybe it didn’t get as much attention as it deserved. Podscope lets you search for words within podcasts based on their speech to text conversions. That’s so cool!

14th Sep, 2005

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My Mom Should Subscribe to Feeds

RSS and Atom are specifications that I use to produce blog feeds. They’re implementation decisions. The functionality that I’m offering is a feed, so when I talk to users I should call the functionality “feeds.” It seems so simple now.

Marc Hedlund broached this topic on O’Reilly Radar twice (first | second) without getting any agreement. It took a post from Evan Henshaw-Plath about the strength of podcasting as a name vs. RSS as a name to clear up the issue for me. From now on I resolve to only refer to RSS feeds as “feeds” unless I am talking about implementation issues.

7th Sep, 2005

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How Single Sign-On Saved Me from Gathering Requirements

Quinn just announced that I’m speaking at San Francisco Perl Mongers this month, Sept 27th at 8:00pm.

The current talk is titled “Pizza and Single Sign-On.” I’d like to rename it “How Single Sign-On Saved Me from Gathering Requirements” but I think pizza is a bigger draw.

The talk will range from big multi-domain website-spanning Single Sign-Ons to simple shared authentication schemes that let you integrate somebody’s premanufactured wiki with your existing site. Before settling on integration of existing social software we’d dabbled in writing the software ourselves. The result was best summed up by Make publisher Dale Dougherty, “We don’t want to be blog developers.”

It’s a question of focus, not of expertise. Although we seemed capable of writing our own blog (or wiki or forum) software, doing so would mean focusing on the latest features and fads of said software. Keeping up with user’s expectations means a lot of requirements gathering. And we’d rather be focused on our real job, which is finding and publishing on new technologies.

6th Sep, 2005

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Connecting to New Authors

I’m testing out an in-development Connection feature which may or may not be called Leaderboard. One of the leader lists is most active authors, and the most important test is checking if any of the active authors are at all interesting. So far yes! And my two favorites are people I’d never heard of.

Check out this sample from Lisa McMillan:
Best of. Web apps for web developers edition.

Also check out Ian Blenke and his fantastic blog.