Ryan Price and the Media

BarCampOrlando Downtown April 5th and 6th, 10AM - 6PM April 1, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Podcasts, Orlando, SEO, Music, Links, Events, Video, Coworking, Trends, Standards, floridacreatives, mashups, Graphics, OrlandoScene, Teaching, open source, BarCamp, PodCamp, Storytelling, phone, Web Services, Social Media Events, Social Networking, Programming , add a comment

BarCamp Orlando is a weekend for all types of creative folks to come together and share with each other. The event is dubbed an “unconference”, a format which derives power from the people instead of the event organizers or the presenters. Everyone has an equal opportunity to get on stage and speak, teach or lead a discussion, playing off of the idea that at any given conference, the people in the audience have more knowledge collectively than the presenter(s) on stage.

This second installment of BarCamp will be held over 2 days, Saturday and Sunday, April 5th and 6th, in downtown Orlando at the Wall Street complex, from 10AM - 6PM each day. Registration is free, and a registration promises a shirt and lunch on the sponsors of BarCamp, businesses who are passionate about the technology and media communities of Central Florida.

Saturday is the designated “Dev Day”, playing host to everything from web programming to robot building and video game development and everything in between. iPhone hackers, guys with soldering irons, the latest technologies, and plenty that haven’t been realized yet. Every 30 minutes, both venues will have a different talk going on, so if you’re feeling lost in the jargon, apply the “rule of 2 feet” and check out what’s happening in the other room!

Sunday is dubbed “Media Day”, and is the place for storytellers, journalists, writers, designers, filmmakers, musicians, 2D and 3D artists, podcasters, bloggers and social networkers to show off their work, share their tricks or talk about the state of the industry. From 12 to 1 we will be talking about the “Past, Present and Future of Media in Central Florida”, hoping to give our community a sense of our story, and where we’re headed.

Registration is free, and the event runs from 10AM - 6PM both days with a lunch break at 1PM. The event will be housed in Slingapour’s and One-Eyed-Jack’s, with Wall St Cantina acting as our “hallway”. There will be projectors and microphones, chairs and a space to speak. All you have to do is write your name on the whiteboard and you get 20-25 minutes to share your passions with a group of energetic, engaged geeks and creatives. I would not use the words “captive audience” to describe the BarCamp crowd, because they all want to get involved.

Visit www.barcamporlando.org today and register for Dev Day, Media Day or both days. Wall Street Plaza is at 18 Wall Street Plaza, Orlando, FL 32801 - barcamporlando.org/where has a map to the venue and information about parking.

5 Essential Firefox Plugins for Web Developers March 13, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Links, Drupal, Reviews, Browsers, Standards, Web Sites, PopSci, Programming , add a comment

Since I have a new job, I had to sit down at a fresh installation of Windows today and get my machine developer-ready. I already miss the Dock and Transmit and the Terminal, but I’ll deal.

One thing I noticed was my reflex-like action to go download 4 plugins no web developer should be without. They are, in no particular order:

Measure It! How wide is that sidebar? Don’t pull out the DOM inspector or Firebug, just MeasureIt! I also like that once you drag the box it persists on the screen and you can drag it around to compare measurements.
ColorZilla Sample any color in your browser - don’t open Photoshop, just hover over a color you like and voila! Also generates Photoshop pelletes, but I don’t open Photoshop, so I don’t use that feature.
FireBug I can’t actually tell you how awesome this is. Being able to see the http response of every file that was loaded and how long each file took to load is already a killer app, not to mention dead-simple editing of any markup, CSS or JavaScript on your page, and being able to execute JavaScript on a live website without having to open any windows.
Web Developer Toolbar My #1 used feature is the Resize menu. So many pages break my window from being exactly 1024 wide, and I also want to check things out at 800 wide as well. This just feeds the my OCD streak and lets me get on without worrying.
Honorable mention: FasterFox This wasn’t on my list, but it is now, if only for the nifty little timer in the bottom-right-hand corner of the browser that tells you how long it took for the page to load.

These don’t include any of my plugins for personal productivity, web browsing, media sharing, or Search Engine Optimization. Instead, these are 5 plugins I think should come pre-installed on every developer’s machine.

Also, if you’re doing Drupal development, I hear very good things about this Theme Developer Module for Drupal 6. I’m not using 6 on any production sites yet, but I think it will prevent you from having to open up TextMate and do a “Find in Project”.

Leave your favorite development plugins, or other kinds below.

What’s your interest in distributed social networking? February 23, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Links, Trends, Standards, Web Sites, Petentials, Social Networking, OpenID, microformats , add a comment

After watching Chris Messina’s existential DiSo Interview, I decided to go check out a bit more about the distributed social networking stuff Chris and Steve Ivy have been working on - there are 160+ people on the mailing list now, and hundreds of threads.

Here’s a little bit about the DiSo Project:

Social networks are becoming more open, more interconnected, and more distributed. Many of us in the web creation world are embracing and promoting web standards - both client-side and server-side. Microformats, standard apis, and open-source software are key building blocks of these technologies. This model can be described as having three sides/legs/arms/spokes - pick your connection: Information, Identity, and Interaction.

DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris puts it: “to build a social network with its skin inside out”.

Our first target is Wordpress, bootstrapping on existing work and building out from there.
So what does that mean?

We’re building Wordpress plugins that implement or build on:

* Microformats like XFN, hCard, XOXO — wp-contactlist, wp-profiles
* OpenID — wp-contactlist, wp-openid-server
* OAuth
* …and others

They also ask you to state a reason for wanting to join the mailing list, which I’ve copied here:

I am a big fan of microformats and distributed, semantic applications. I work for a social network that’s a little bit different because we’re mapping the relationships between animals. It gets even more interesting there, because some animals live together, some animals play together, some share parents, and then they all have one or more people who take care of them. It’s been difficult for us to take open source software and shoehorn the relationships into it, and what that means as far as a user experience goes.

One funny thing is the idea of your “active pet” or active profile - if a person can create multiple resumes, one for film jobs and one for programming jobs, for example, then maybe this idea of having multiple profiles is important. The people you play poker with on the weekends might not want to be notified when you update the work blog - others will.

So there’s another layer. If someone subscribes to your updates, can they subscribe to a subset of those, so as not to get loads of BACN in their activity stream reader?

I think about these things.

If you haven’t seen it, check out that weird animal social network.

Lijit Wijit makes a useful Search Landing Page November 21, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Site News, Podcasts, TV, Netvibes, Trends, Standards, Wordpress, Virb, phone , add a comment

A nice follow-up to my last post about SEO and Landing Pages, Lijit!

Lijit is a Google Personalized Search wrapper that helps you add all your sites and content to one search box. People can also search your MyBlogLog and LinkedIn networks, Ma.gnolia bookmarks and Twitter updates. Someone searching for “Jenny K Surrounded by Wolves” on my blog will see a search results page, but then when they return to my blog, Lijit picks up on the referrer and tries to suggest other stuff. Cool!

This page is a video I made about a local band, but if you look in the sidebar, you also see that we’ve referred to them on OrlandoScene.TV, so the person who came here looking for Jenny K might find what they were looking for on another one of my sites.

Mark Baratelli and I have talked about this problem before - we both blog in 23 places, so how can someone search all of our stuff? Do any of you fair readers use personalized search engines? I’m interested to see what else is out there.

Open Handset Alliance November 7, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Video, Trends, Standards, open source, phone , 1 comment so far

It’s not exactly the same as Bug Labs, but Google posted it on their YouTube channel… is that why they’re calling this a G-phone?

Open Handset Alliance

What would it take to build a better mobile phone?

A commitment to openness, a shared vision for the future, and concrete plans to make the vision a reality.

Welcome to the Open Handset Alliance™, a group of more than 30 technology and mobile companies who have come together to accelerate innovation in mobile and offer consumers a richer, less expensive, and better mobile experience. Together we have developed Android™, the first complete, open, and free mobile platform.

We are committed to commercially deploy handsets and services using the Android Platform in the second half of 2008. An early look at the Android Software Development Kit (SDK) will be available on November 12th.

More OpenLaszlo August 28, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Links, Video, Browsers, Trends, Standards, OpenLaszlo , add a comment

“Some conference that wants to sell me stuff” has a webcasted talk by David Temkin, Founder and CTO of the Laszlo corporation. For a majority of the time, he talks about why they chose to develop the Laszlo Webtop. It is a philosophy, and like all great arguments in computing, it comes down to philosophy, not technology.

I found said webcast after reading about it on Antun’s Blog, and he found me after my “really positive post” last week.

All this webtop vs. desktop is actually really interesting. I think some remarkable points from David’s talk are:

Desktop makes it really hard to share data between more than one machine. I would add especially if they’re not on the same LAN/WAN.
The fundamental GUI for desktops hasn’t changed at all in 20 years. This point is so much a part of the fabric of the desktop experience that it will take years to turn over.
Downloadable and local apps with web enablement are something cool, but phishers and virus makers have forced us to be untrusting of anything we have to download. Even Apollo has warnings for installing 3rd party apps.
There are still certain apps we need a full-fledged desktop for, like CD/DVD playing, ripping, burning. If we gave that functionality to the browser (with proper permisssion, of course), desktop apps could be replaced by web apps.
Some enterprises are installing full-fledged versions of their intranet/portal/CRM on every employees laptop so they always have a full working copy of the app. This happens because business logic is not currently transportable in downloadable apps. Yes, not even with Apollo.

I guess I just summarized the whole thing for you, and you don’t really need to watch it any longer, but he says a lot more that I felt like I knew, and maybe you guys don’t know. Check out Antun’s Blog for info about how to access the webcast (you need to give them your name/email), then watch and learn.

Dries Buytaert on Drupal | on the luck of seven August 27, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Blogging, Podcasts, Links, Drupal, Video, Coworking, Trends, Standards, Earth, Travel, Web Sites, Charity , 1 comment so far

Noel Hidalgo is running around the world sleeping on couches, twittering, docu-vlogging and digging up a layer of the new open-source Earth bedrock. By the way, he’s accepting donations (I’ve donated), in the spirit of the movement, just to help him get where he’s going. His most recent video introduces us to the accidental general of a powerful army of Drupal fanboys - and I’m one of them. (link)

Click To Play

Recoded: 26 July 2007

Locations: Antwerp, Belgium

Tags: drupal, open source, linus torvalds, angela byron, history of drupal, kernel trap, inspiration, empowerment

Music: ana (captain planet remix), vieux farka touré and captainplanet

About: after much wrangling and rescheduling, dries and i finally caught up to talk about the history of drupal, his inspiration, and most importantly the empowerment of community.

important links to note…

- drupal.org

- groups.drupal.org

- buytaert.net

- kernaltrap.org

- slashdot.com

- amnesty.org

- greenpeace.org

on a side note, thank you OpenCraft for giving me a home to edit this video!

also, i’d like to thank dries and karlijn on their new boy and omar for his hospitality in cairo.

Forget Flex, Go OpenLaszlo August 24, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Links, Video, Wikipedia, Reviews, Browsers, Trends, Standards, interface, OpenLaszlo, flash , 3 comments

Note: Mike G. from Central Florida PHP is giving a talk about Flex this Saturday at DeVry @ Millenia.

A good friend of mine, Jake, recently visited Orlando raving about Adobe’s Flex, and how it was going to make Flash development for people who think in HTML and Object-Oriented programming much simpler and faster. I went looking into Flex and discovered OpenLaszlo. Laszlo used to be a Flash-only framework, but it can now publish DHTML just as easily, and with a few added bonuses you don’t get with Flash, like including an iFrame.

After watching the OpenLaszlo 4 Programming Tutorial Screencast, I’m convinced that Laszlo is more capable than Flex, and there is less proprietary code to learn since you use Javascript instead of Actionscript. It’s all ECMA, XML and xPath, so I guess at some point it becomes 6 vs. a half dozen, but I will mention one small caveat: iPhone compatible. Oh yes, I’ve seen the first iPhone app in Laszlo, and it’s pretty and touch-screen happy. (I think it goes without saying that if it works on iPhone, it can work with all major browsers)

Am I raving? I’m not allowed to rave, because I haven’t tried both systems, but from where I’m sitting this is another situation where an equal amount of training and no expensive development tools are going to get your job done in the same amount of time, and end up being more flexible, easily extended and powerful. You can convince any boss of that if you’ve got all the information.

Under the hood from Wikipedia:

Laszlo applications can be deployed as traditional Java servlets, which are compiled and returned to the browser dynamically. This method requires that the web server be running the OpenLaszlo server.

Alternatively, Laszlo applications can be compiled from LZX into a binary SWF file, and loaded statically into an existing web page. This method is known as SOLO deployment. Applications deployed in the manner lack some functionality of servlet-contained files, such as the ability to consume SOAP web services and XML remote procedure calls.

Hear that? Static! One score for Flex is the ability to run as a desktop app (using AIR/Apollo), but that requires a download, and that’s a no-no on the internet.

Do you know Pandora uses Laszlo? That’s a pretty app, and yes it runs in Flash, but I bet it doesn’t have to. The Behr ColorSmart app is pretty nice too, and no hand-keyframed Flash? Love it. Wikipedia says Yahoo!, Earthlink and the Internet Archive are known to use Laszlo as well. I like those websites too.

Last but not least, it’s open source! Published under IBM’s Common Public License, which is a less-lawsuit inspiring type of GPL. Flex is supposed to be published under the Mozilla licensing, but that version is still in beta. Laszlo has been open source for 3 years now. Eat it, Adobe. I’m not giving you guys another penny.

I’ll be very proud to integrate some Laszlo apps into Petentials, which is built entirely on open source software - Drupal, PHP, MySQL, Apache and Linux.

Bug Labs, Chumby, Neuros, Netvibes, Facebook July 31, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, News, Blogging, Podcasts, Netvibes, Trends, Standards, Facebook , add a comment

Bug Labs, Chumby, Neuros, Netvibes, Facebook — what do they all have in common? Open platforms.

Bug Labs is developing BUG, an open, modular, consumer electronics web services hardware platform. Designed for the general audience, not just the technically inclined, BUG is intended to bring to the world of hardware gadgets what the Internet, open source, XML and web services have brought to the world of software and media.

(blank) is developing (blank), an open, modular, web services platform. (Insert name of company here)

I was saying today that a possible future step for Facebook will be to release the FBML interpereter as a platform you can install on your web server and integrate into your app. Now they have a dead-simple web services framework. Will they do it? Is it smart? Can they make money? Keep hold of their audience? Achieve “Web OS” status?

BUG is supposed to have Wi-Fi, a GPS, a screen, USB, and the processor. Dave Winer had the first mention I saw of the device. He was one of the guys pushing the open-source podcast device a while back, so I’ll bet he’s pretty excited about this.

More thoughts on this later, for now I have to get back to work.