Somewhat Tuned

frequent mistakes of freelancers.

written by msouden

A page for bookmarking

Just want this at home in the bookmarks for reference. I want to get better/faster/quicker at coding - especially if I’m going to be building WordPress sites in my ’spare’ time.

written by msouden

The CSBS is a small consulting business for social/helping professions. From their web site: “Our goal is to increase a Strengths approach across all of the helping professions for work with individuals and families.”I was asked to build a basic web site for the company which they could maintain themselves. We installed the Joomla content management system, and customized a very basic open source template. A company employee attended a Joomla training to administer the site, but it became clear that the needs of the company were fairly basic and required a minimal investment of ramp-up time and money.

We were invested in Joomla at this point already, so I compensated for Joomla’s complexity with good information architecture. I placed the content which required editing and changing so that it could be revised and added to by logging into the front end. This eliminated the need for anybody at the company to “learn Joomla”. Instead, they simply logged in and click edit.I remain available to this client for more invasive site changes as needed. This was a great learning experience, and one of the reasons I’ve elected to move into building WordPress-based sites for myself and for smaller clients. Joomla is an enormous and enormously powerful tool that can do essentially anything a company needs. Unfortunately this can also be a stumbling block for non-developers and the mass of companies who have a need for a web presence but not a ton of resources to invest in properly using a CMS of this magnitute.

written by msouden

The original post uses the “W** 2.0″ buzzword, but I’ll just call it a lengthy (not complete, although complete is probably impossible) list of APIs for interesting/innovative use. If you don’t know what an API is, here is the wikipedia page.

Here’s the link to the list of APIs. I know of a few they’ve left off including SugarCRM and Asterisk among others.

written by msouden

http://www.tzunami.com/No-More-Harddrive.php

written by msouden

We’ve started using Google docs and calendar for weekly household budgeting. The privacy issues I guess don’t really bother me. About all anyone would see is that we drop $130 frequently at Trader Joe’s were someone to take the trouble to find out. The important stuff is all offline.

That said I found this kind of cool little bit of added security for Google applications:

“Create bookmarks (or modify them if you already have them) for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, and iGoogle (your Google homepage) using https instead of http, like so: https://mail.google.com/mail/”

This encrypts data as it is transferred between you and Google - whereas when you log in to the “http” address all that is encrypted is your login. Once logged in, everything sent (email, calendar events, notes, IM, etc. is sent in plain text, which can be easily captured and read by 3rd parties. Encrypting this data makes it much harder to eavesdrop on.

A more in-depth explanation and why you might want to do this is at the link above. The only catch I saw was that using the links between different applications on the Google sites themselves will always still take you back to the unencrypted pages.

written by msouden

written by msouden

written by msouden

Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni died last week. This story tells a little about their work, offers viewing suggestions, and explains their impact on Scorsese, Spielberg, and the rest of the ’70s “Whiz Kids”.

Take-away nugget of trivia:
Coppola’s incredible “The Conversation” and DePalma’s “Blow Out” were both remakes of Antonioni’s “Blow Up”.

Trivia bonus:
The role that Gene Hackman played in “The Conversation” he reprised with a slightly different name much later on in “Enemy of the State” with Will Smith.

written by msouden

I found this article that features several different forms of data visualization that might be of interest to a colleague (or it might be on the basic side for her). Some of these are just funny little web 2.0 “mashups” (wincing as I use that word). A few I’ve actually seen before, but one I actually might look at from time-to-time.

Newsmap is a site that matches the font and space used by an article on the page to it’s popularity on Google News. The bigger the rectangle and size of the font, the more popular that article is. This would be incredibly cool as a widget. Also cool would be keyword filters to then be able to visualize which stories on a certain topic get the most traffic.

Seeing this reminded me that I should get the appropriate tool that displays the contents of my hard drive like this. (Which comes native with the Linux KDE desktop.) Lifehacker wrote a great post reviewing several of these a while back.

written by msouden