Posts from April 2003

PHPetal is pretty cool

I think (can’t remember already – it’s been a long day!) I found this one care of a lead from the blosxom mailing list, but here’s a cool, web-based application which operates very similarly to the “PortaBlosx” idea that I am still thinking of working on. It’s called PHPetal and basically just provides a one-page interface to posting to your blosxom-powered blog. It looks pretty funky, although it’s a bit “heavy” for converting to a Palm version I reckon, so I will keep thinking about my own, simple version.

And Then It Was Live!

Yes, I finally got my new site live, and it all appears to be working, including the new and fancy, blosxom-driven “Notes” section.

This has taken quite a bit of work to get live, but I am quite happy with the way that things have turned out. The main addition(s) that I want to make at this stage are writebacks on my Notes section, so that I can hear what you guys out there have to say about things, rather than this being a 1-way only information device 🙂

Keep an eye out for the ability to comment on my postings here in the nearish future (hopefully!). When I get it working, it should also allow for trackbacks, so you can register comments on my posts on your own blogs if you like

Praise Be To Matt

Wow – I wasn’t expecting that. Unless it was a typo of some sort, this is what Matt had to say about my enrollment in the BArts(Net Studies);

I am the person who assesses these 🙂 – basically, I’d be looking at 8 units (out of 24) advanced standing – how does that sound?

and I was thinking – “bugger, that’s less than I was hoping for, so I trudged along to read the next message which said…

Just remembered – since you have units at Curtin already…12 units (which is the maximum I can give)…

and now, funnily enough, I have a very large smile on my face! This is excellent! With only 12 units remaining, I might still be able to finish by the end of 2004!

She Wants The World… And a Search Log Analyser!

Just kidding, but I got some details back from Lisa C, and she appears to have some very specialised requirements for her system. I have suggested that it might be better if we work together to develop a “base system” which would include the complete logging functionality, and then she can customise and/or extend the reporting/analysis interface as required.

I think this approach should work quite well, allowing me to collaborate on a logging module, and to refine the database schema, then develop a generic, “useful-across-the-board” analysis interface, which should be capable of being extended easily. Metabase, here I come.

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox

Fortnightly articles/reports posted by Monsieur Guru Nielsen himself. Some of these are pretty good, personally I think some of them are just plain stupid.

An example of taking things too far: in the most recent alertbox, Nielsen extrapolates his calculated statement that the companies he studied which would “spend $3,042 per employee annually to cover time spent on the sixteen tasks we measured” to mean that if we improved intranets to the best ones they saw in their tests, we would “save the world economy $1.3 trillion per year”… come on dude, seriously. You so can’t make that assumption.

Calendar Added to RESTxom features

I have added a simple calendar which will be displayed in the place of a @ CALENDAR@ tag in your RESTxom templates (head or foot preferably!)

The calendar will include links to any days which contain posts, and those links will go directly to the archives, where that day will be shown, and you can locate whichever post interests you. I’d like to add support for allowing the browsing of months, but the handling of the 403 errors doesn’t seem to allow that…?

blosxom rocks!

blosxom is the amazingly simple, yet endlessly powerful blogging application written by Rael Dornfest which is now running most of the DentedReality website.

I have made some pretty schmick “helper” scripts (even if I do say so myself), which allow me to manage a blog using directories, and you can link straight to a directory, and it will show you the blog entries via blosxom in that dir.

The Silence of the Asilomarians

After joining the AIfIA (and paying the membership fee), I have been somewhat disappointed with the response I received from the CELIA idea.

I signed up for the IA Library project with AIfIA, and have suggested that perhaps CELIA could be done as a part of that project, but have received no response. Zero. Nada. Zip.

I think Karl and I are going to start planning it out a little, hopefully I will be able to knock together a simple-ish system which can handle the stuff we would be working with, and that would allow us to get started. I think it’s a really valuable thing, and something that perhaps isn’t as important is the US, because IA is more established, but it sure is important here, where I have met all of about 3 people who even took a punt on what Information Architecture is!