August 2007 Posts

"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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

We have our own Wiki. It looks just like wikipedia (for now). It has 4 5 pages (for now).

http://wiki.floridacreatives.com/

1. Main page
2. Orlando networking
3. Orlando resources
4. Orlando wifi
5. Orlando companies

If you're going to add a new page, please preface it with Orlando or Jacksonville or Tampa, etc. if it is geo-specific, and almost every page should be.

I'm trying to keep the names extremely relevant and short and semantic, hence Orlando_networking, Orlando_resources, Orlando_wifi

If you don't understand editing wiki pages, here are some not-so-nice guides that are way too nerdy.
Filling the page
Starting a new page

Please thank Geoff (SomaCow) and Larry (ORUG) for making me set this up. It's a long time overdue.

Ideas for pages: schools, colleges, tutors, bands, galleries, theatres, radio shows on WPRK, cowking-ish spaces, neighborhoods friendly to creatives, sections of town, restaurants we want to support, things to blog about, blogrolls, skill directories, stuff...

I was so glad to see so many of you come out this month. If you haven't brought anyone new in a while, please consider inviting 5 friends to September/October, about 20% of them should be able to show up! :)

Had some great talks with Mike G (CFPHP) and Larry about brown-bag lunch group discussions (tutoring) to start downtown once a week (or when we have something to discuss). Alex (Emurse) and Josh (BlogOrlando, Hyku) were I think the ones to mention this last week.

I am also definitely planning to go to Stardust next Saturday to make plans for a PHP/whatever mash-up and hack day sometime in the fall. The basic idea would be to set up a simple Linux server in someone's living room and hack for several hours/days - we must launch the project at the end of the hack session, and we must document it and present it to people who weren't at the weekend. Everything will get Creative Commons / GPL and version controlled so the next group of people can build on it or re-use resources as needed.

Ideas for hacks: downtown parking map, theme park attraction ratings/map/photos, wifi hotspots, things not involving maps.

Thanks for reading this long post. I've been awake for 21 hours today and going non-stop. Hope to catch up with all of you soon.

Lighter Footstep is a community site to learn about reducing your impact on the planet, and I recently noticed on their Twitter feed that they’re considering switching to Movable Type from Joomla. This was the email I wrote back to Chris after his query about Drupal:

I don’t know much bout Movable Type, but I’ve watched some screencasts and heard lots of good things. As a blogging platform goes, they have one of the tightest and richest experiences you’re going to find anywhere. Six Apart does a great job on user experience. One downside is finding Perl programmers to do any custom stuff for you if you don’t already know any.

Drupal is fantastic for, but not limited to, publishing a community site with multiple user accounts, forums, rich media, and just about anything you can think of. Drupal is designed to be 100% extensible, so there is nothing on the web today you can’t do with drupal, it’s more a question of whether you have the vision, resources and expertise to pull it off.

Admittedly, I’d want a lot of customizations to make Drupal into a great day-to-day blogging platform - I’m currently using Wordpress almost everywhere I blog or podcast because it is just so streamlined - I imagine Movable Type is a similar experience. Using Drupal is like graduating from middle school to your first full-time job, where you are now responsible for lots of things you didn’t know you needed to manage, because someone was glossing over the grim details before. However, that also means you get more control. Still, once you get set up, the experience is very similar to any CMS platform.

As a personal plug for myself, I’d like to say I’m an extremely competent Drupal developer and theme guru. I’ve been working with drupal 25+ hours a week since January.

I hope this helps you in making your decision.

Addendum: Movable Type is not free for more than one user, or for commercial purposes. I see this as a very big issue, as there is an ongoing cost associated with your otherwise free-to-maintain website. Anyone considering getting into web publishing should consider the cost of “going pro” should the opportunity present itself.

So says Dan Rua in his recent post on Florida Venture Blog:

Demonstrating customer interest jumps an entrepreneur ahead of all the idea-on-a-napkin entrepreneurs who just assume customers will flock to their big idea. However, when institutional investors ask questions about the size of the opportunity, including market size and scalability, referring to current customer interest really doesn't address the question.

This is very interesting, because while I agree with this idea (as far as raising capital, making a great business), I think that building the community around your product is equally as important as the business plan, the branding and the viability of the idea. I've seen the power of communities to let the powers that be know what they're doing wrong, in content consumption and creation both.

I'd like to write more, but I've got to get back to my content creating.