Gadgetopia

Macromedia - Contribute: Macromedia just announced "Contribute 2." Changes are very small: better connection functionality, secure FTP, online store plug-in, etc.

Macromedia - Contribute: Contribute 3 is out. Macromedia claims "300 enhancements," but I can't find a list. There's an impressive list of features here, but it doesn't break out what's new in this version. I did see some neat stuff that I hadn't seen before, like FrontPage Extension compatibility, WEBDAV ...

There's a class of product that fits into a crappy pricing slot. It's a slot where a purchaser isn't going to make a purchase right away, because they're going to have a lot of questions. But at the same time, individual sales of the product aren't expensive enough for the ...

Some very interesting news out of Macromedia this morning. They plan to release a lightweight Web editing tool called Contribute that's geared for non-Web developers that need to make changes to Web pages. I'm interested in the possibilities this could open up for the workplace. I'm involved in using content ...

New York Times opens up code: This is kind of cool. It s good to see an organization like the New York Times contribute some stuff to open source. The New York Times likes open source so much so that, as it gradually moves more of its print operations online, ...

(No, this isn't a duplicate of the previous story different sort of Jobs). The KDE project has come up with a neat way to get new developers interested in contributing to KDE: Junior Jobs. The problem with starting to contribute to a big project like KDE is that the ...

Does the graphic content (or lack thereof) of a site contribute to a feeling of dynamism by site visitors? When I visit a site heavy on the graphics and Flash, I get a feeling that the site is stagnant, because, as a Web developer, I know how much inertia is ...

Bye-bye, FrontPage in New Office, Says Microsoft: Could it be? I hope so. Long live Contribute. Microsoft will close the book on its FrontPage Web-design program with the release of Office 2007, formerly known as Office 12, late this year.

I'm interested in finding a nice, lightweight, WYSIWYG HTML editor for use by non-developers. In this scenario, as I'm sure you know, is not havig too little functionality, but having too much. I haven't found one yet that I'm comfortable unleashing on non-developer content editors. How about FrontPage or Dreamweaver, ...

OpenUsability:Welcome: This is good to see, since usability has always been the big problem with open source stuff. Usability always plays second fiddle to writing code. OpenUsability.org is a project that brings open source developers and usability experts together. The idea behind is simple: There are many Usability Experts who ...

Macromedia FlashPaper: A very cool use of Flash. With FlashPaper, you can "print" a document to SWF format, retaining all the formatting (just like PDF). However, unlike PDF, you can embed it in a Web page in its own little frame, instead of having it be its own document and ...

LifeAt | A unique private social network for your residential building: This is obviously more suited to urban environments where lots of people share the same building. LifeAt is a private social network for your building which allows you, the resident, to actively contribute and improve upon your residential experience. ...

CMS Watch Job Openings: While I love owning my company and I have no plans to leave, here's a job I'd jump all over. CMS Watch seeks a Research Analyst to contribute to the firm's product evaluation research, training programs, and strategic advisory services. Responsibilities will include [...] Aggregating/synthesizing CMS ...

A Distributed Product Review Data Standard: Good ideas here for an Epinions-like framework for product reviews. "I think we could all profit from a decentralized way of standardized product reviewing, something like a standard for product review metadata. The data would be created by individuals decentrally on their own sites ...

Apple - Education - iTunes U: This is the audio version of OpenCourseWare, I suppose. Apple has gotten a bunch of high-end schools to contribute lectures to iTunes, which are available for download, and appear to be free (I didn t find any with prices attached, at any rate). iTunes U ...

March 11, 2004 Madrid attacks: I don't mean to keep harping on about Wikipedia, but this article will demonstrate what a fantastic resource this is. Someone has been meticulously tracking the terrorist attacks in Madrid and fleshing out the corresponding Wikipedia page. This page has more detail than I've seen ...

The official U.S. time: This site came in handy today. This public service is cooperatively provided by the two time agencies of United States: a Department of Commerce agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and its military counterpart, the U. S. Naval Observatory (USNO). Readings from the ...

Encouraging people to contribute knowledge: I m a little confused about this, I guess. Is Google trying to take on Wikipedia? The challenge posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. This is our main goal. Earlier this week, we ...

Here's an obvious point: all content is not created equal. When you implement content management, it becomes obvious pretty quickly that content comes in vastly different levels of structure. Structured content is easy -- anything that you can input into an Excel spreadsheet is nicely structured. A list of products, ...

The GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program has just released version 2.0, which cleans up the interface a great deal. The GIMP has always been very feature rich, but Photoshop users considered it difficult to use (although many GIMPers would say the same of Photoshop). Started in 1995 by ...

The case of Wikipedia: I'm actually linking to a section of a larger article. The complete article is a little slow, but there's a nice section here on the Wikipedia the awesome online encyclopedia that's often a first-stop reference for me. Another secret of the success of Wikipedia is ...

5 Years of Distributed Proofreaders: Some good information from Teleread on the fifth anniverysary of Distributed Proofreading over at Gutenberg, Project Gutenberg now hosts more than 16,000 ebooks, but until recently that amount numbered in the hundreds. Part of the enormous growth was caused by a web application written by ...

Trends: Cloud Computing and Content Management: Fascinating commentary of how environmentalism and cloud computing relate. It discusses how cloud computing and the you never have to throw anything away mentality contribute to what seems to be an ecological disaster. Bytes on disk, it turns out, are not free, either in ...

mozile: index: I installed this, and at first glance, it looks as cool as it sounds. "Mozile or Mozilla Inline Editor is an in-browser, context-sensitive, XHTML editor that allows a user to edit all or just specific editable sections of any XHTML page from the comfort of his own browser. ...

I just bought some really cheap software: it's $199 retail, and I got it through an Amazon reseller for $17.90 plus tax. The seller had a great feedback rating. I was still a little wary, so I emailed him before buying and asked what the catch was. No catch, he ...

On the heels of my post about downloading TV shows, one of the editors of Gadgetopia has received a letter from his ISP and the MPAA advising him that this is bad. I've looked over the letter carefully, and they're really saying the same thing I said. My words were: ...

Is it time to put the P tag to rest? It does the exact same thing as a DIV, but it adds spacing below the tag by default. Essentially, you could have a DIV and a style rule of DIV { margin-bottom: 10px; } and it would do the exact ...

I've always been a big believer in legible URLs. There's nothing more annoying than a URL that stretches into hundreds of characters ever tried to email one of those to a mail client that wraps at 76 characters? Additionally, I've written before about the need to support URL hacking. ...

I've participated in a lot of online forums. The value of the information you get from them varies. Some of it is good, but you get a lot of cruft, especially from hit-and-runners -- people who are there to ask a single question based on an acute need, who will ...

A Plan for Spam: In the last few months, we've talked about Bayesian-this and Bayesian-that quite a bit, but what does "Bayesian" mean? Here's a great article that explains the concepts behind Bayesian filtering for spam. It's long, but a worthwhile read. The Achilles heel of the spammers is their ...

I was having a conversation with a client the other day, and I articulated something I've felt for a long time, but have never really written down. There are three types of intranets. They're very different, and when someone thinks "intranet," they're no doubt thinking of one of the three ...

What effect does RSS have on the commenting and discussion of blog entries? Take Mr. Foo and Mr. Bar. They are identical in every way, except Mr. Foo visits Gadgetopia.com a couple of times a day, while Mr. Bar just monitors the site via RSS. Who's more likely to comment ...

Here are two things that cut so many good ideas off at the knees. These two factors are the two biggest things that stop good ideas from getting implemented and make programmers pause when they should forge ahead. 1. The Urge to Generalize Say you come up with an idea ...

Here's something not that shocking: the same amount of time spent on different Web development activities can yield vastly different productive results. Put another way: you can spend two hours on Activity A or the same amount of time on Activity B. Does this mean they will both contribute equally ...

Can we finally admit that the FrontPage experiment has failed? You know -- the promise that FrontPage will allow novice Web authors to create and maintain (especially maintain) good, solid Web sites? Can we finally admit that this just isn't going to happen? How many people know someone that is ...