Archive for January, 2008

A month ago, I switched not only the theme and title of this blog, but also the software underneath from Joomla! to WordPress. I always intended to expand my Joomla! based blog into something more substantial; a new way of presenting and sorting information, opinions, reviews, and recommendations. However, I didn’t get very far in achieving this.

Meanwhile, blogs have become so prevalent that people will assume you website is actually a blog if it feels somewhat like one. With this in mind, visitors have a certain expectation of how your “blog” will behave; if it doesn’t, people can get confused and possibly frustrated. So now I’m using blogging software instead of content management software.

Here are my impressions of WordPress. The user interface gets all the points for KISS principle. Writing posts, seeing new comments, scanning incoming links, and adding images are all a pure joy! It’s also nice to see the autodraft saves so that you don’t accidentally lose your work. WordPress also has enough functionality for building a very basic non-blog website if you need one. Finally, I’m happy to see the WordPress folks following a web software convention I feel is crucial: the backend has an interface distinctly separate from the one seen in public. (Not going to mention the names of any offenders here.)

However, not all is rosy with WordPress. Within hours of putting up my blog, dozens of spam comments were pouring in, making me wonder whether I should turn back before it was too late. Fortunately, they died down after a couple of days and a few keyword filters. I have comments set to be displayed only after the email and name have been approved. (If you use your OpenID, your comment will appear automatically.)

The other gripe I have about WordPress is the templating. I took a peek to see if I could quickly throw together a basic theme to match my main website. Unfortunately, I was in for a rude surprise. While this isn’t the worst system I’ve seen, WordPress themes are broken into too many pieces in the wrong places, with poor internationalization to boot. It’s very irritating to work in a world where an HTML tag opens in one file and closes in another; this is just begging for mistakes to be made.

Despite these speed bumps, I’m definitely enjoying WordPress and will change the theme to something else once I find one that suits my tastes (or have time to build a new one).

Quick highlights from Widget DevCamp DC this past weekend:

• Zvi Band did a presentation on creating Facebook Applications. When he was finished with his presentation, he created a Facebook App from scratch in PHP and FBML! It gave me a few ideas that I probably won’t get around to doing for a few months.
• We had a roundtable discussion on making money with widgets. Some people proposed including Google ads, but others mentioned that this strategy tends not to work so well for such a small content set. It seems that the most viable route for “business widgets” is to use them for brand reinforcement.
• Alex Eagle demoed an application (based on Metro’s website) he wrote for Google’s Android project during DevCamp. While there aren’t any Andriod capable phones out yet, Google has the dev environment available with a phone emulator. There’s built in support for GPS, if you have a capable device. Looks very promising, but what will Apple’s iPhone kit offer? We shall see…

Overall, Widget DevCamp was much more relaxed and open ended than last summer’s BarCamp. We had a smaller crowd and more flexible schedule. I personally think we could have done the session planning on the same day: we did this during a Friday evening happy hour instead. The time constraints of doing everything on the same day keep things moving and prevent talks from dragging too long. However, I definitely enjoyed it and I’m looking forward to the next camp hitting DC: eDemocracyCamp.

From a Washington Post article last week:

The outcome also would scuttle years of effort by local officials and developers to transform Tysons Corner, Virginia’s most concentrated jobs center, from a sprawling suburban office park to a Metro-accessible downtown.

I’ve only been in the DC area for three years now. Can someone point me to physical evidence of these “years of effort” to turn Tysons into a “downtown?” Is there any at all? The physical design of Tysons could be changed to improve walking safety and shorten blocks. This wouldn’t be cheap or trivial, but it would certainly be less expensive than five billion dollars. Regardless of whether the area gets Metro service, the design of the area could be redone now without federal money. Throwing a Metro line down Route 7 will not automagically transform Tysons into an urban core.

Disturbingly, the artist rendering in the article depicts a station that would be too far of a walk from most of the current office buildings.

After 2.5 years of development, Joomla! 1.5 is now available for download! Here are some of the new features:

• Beautiful SEF links based on your menu structure.
• FTP layer for installing third-party extensions: leave your directory permissions alone.
• Advanced Javascript-driven interfaces that clean up the administrator workflow.
• Better caching and lazy loading for better performance.
• Compatibility layer for older Joomla! extensions.

Joomla! Doc Camp is going well so far. I copied over my JUser tutorial (original with component download is available here) and created some JTable documentation from scratch. We still need people to document not only the code, but also the admin interface. Come on over and join in, we’re going through Monday!

For those of you who are thinking of upgrading to the coming release of Joomla! 1.5 but are deterred due to the absence of the Solarflare template, your excuse is now bunk. HarryB has ported the infamous template for native use in Joomla! 1.5 (no legacy mode). Here’s the live demo. And in contrast to other modifications to Solarflare that attempt to hide the fact that they’re really just Solarflare with a different banner, this one proudly proclaims it:

(Thanks to OpenSourceCommunity for the tip!)

Tech events in DC for 2008 are getting off to a fast start. First, there’s Widget DevCamp DC on January 25th (Friday evening) and 26th (all day Saturday). BarCamp DC was a great time last Fall where lots of web/programming techniques were shared. Widget DevCamp hints that there may be some actual coding going on! (of course, this depends on who shows up and what ideas are kicked around).

The regular DC PHP Developer’s group is scheduled to meet on February 13th. This will blow away all other tech events for the year, because we will be having a face-to-face text editor war! I’m so psyched! Go Textmate!

Finally, Web Content Mavens will be having an Open Source Content Management System discussion on February 27th. I’ll be representing Joomla!, Keith Casey will talk about Drupal, and other people will talk about Alfresco, WordPress, and Textpattern.

See you at all of these events!

While reading a Washington Post article about the debut of Tata Motors $2,500 car, I ran across this boilerplate quote about the “problem” with electric cars:

Others tout plug-in-and-go electric cars. True, they produce no carbon, but if the source of the electricity used to power the car is coal — the most common source of electricity in the United States and the preferred fuel for the scores of new plants being built in China and India — then the electric car won’t save us.

I find this line of thinking to be irritating. The whole advantage of an electric car is that you can change the ultimate fuel source with no modifications to the car itself. I can put up a wind turbine in the backyard and charge it off that. Same with solar panels. Or cow poop. When we find better fuel sources, drivers won’t have to throw out their old cars to take advantage of them. Moving to electric cars means we’re trying to solve an energy problem instead of both a car problem and an energy problem.

The rest of the article drones on about how Detroit is in trouble and how these $2,500 cars will only be affordable for a tiny sliver of India; never mind that at the end of the day, more Indians will have cars, meaning access to more opportunities.

Flot – Want to build dynamic graphs without using Flash? Flot is ready. It’s lightweight and pretty quick to pick up. I’m using it for a project where people can add and remove as many data series as they wish. Throw in some JSON calls and the results are pretty impressive. Although I can’t show off that project here, take a look at some of the posted examples. It’s based on jQuery and produced by a Danish firm.

MacFUSE and SSHFS – One of the biggest problems I’ve run into with using Macs is that Finder cannot mount FTP and SFTP sites as writable volumes. While you can get clients like CyberDuck that will allow you to do transfers, editing the files for an entire website this way can be tedious. Using MacFUSE and SSHFS together can get around this limitation. SSHFS is still in a very early release and I did run into some stability issues when mounted all day long, but the core functionality is there.

Selenium IDE – Testing and debugging web interfaces has always been a bit of a pain, but Selenium IDE can make the process much, much faster. Open up the IDE, click record, then start filling out forms and clicking on elements. Then you can save your test and reopen it later to run it whenever you wish. I did run into a few issues where Javascript generated DOM elements confused the debugger (might be a timing issue), but overall it is a very powerful and easy to use Firefox extension. You can also use Selenium Core on other browsers. I haven’t tried this, but it appears that you can record the test using the IDE in Firefox, then use that same test with Core with the other browsers. Thanks to Laura Thomson for mentioning this one at the DC PHP Conference this past fall.

A different kind of social networking site was released yesterday: WhyGoSolo. Most social networking sites are focused on building an online community out of your friends. In contrast, WhyGoSolo is designed to help you find people with similar interests so that you can do things offline. Sign up for an invite and take a look around!