Just a short post since I am at work, but my goodness, look at this! Fully browserbased database design! Awesome!
Just a short post since I am at work, but my goodness, look at this! Fully browserbased database design! Awesome!
I just heard about the new Google RSS Reader. Being a big fan of Google’s software, I decided to check it out.
My first impression is unexpectedly a bit negative. Though everything looks mighty fancy with all the AJAX work, some things are not as userfriendly as they could be. The default post list is not categorized but just a huge list of weblogs. You can view them by category on the ‘Your Subscriptions’ page, but if you’re working with categories in the first place, what’s the use of not immediately showing them?
Another downside is the fact that when you’re in your ‘reading list’ and you click on a weblog, it jumps to a seperate page with a list of posts for that weblog. Now that would be fine, except that when I ‘return to my reading list’, it starts at the top of the list again. With over 100 weblogs in my list, that is quite annoying, especially since you can only jump at intervals of 4 weblogs at a time.
The OPML import worked fine, it immediately showed me my nice list of subscriptions I had on BlogLines.
All in all: it’s a nice effort but not fully developed if you ask me. Google, usually the master of great user interfaces, has lacked in it’s attention to a useful interface if you ask me. There’s definately some things missing that they should have a good look at. For now, I’ll just continue to use Bloglines, as I’m still a happy Bloglines user.
Well, it’s final. After looking for a job for not even two little weeks, I’ve been hired by GPS navigation company TomTom. Things have gone unbelievably fast since I published by CV online.
I am looking forward a lot to starting my work at TomTom, next monday. I think I’ll have a wonderful job there, with lots of learning ahead. A big challenge, which is what I like.
I am not even halfway the article, but I’m already quite impressed with it. This article gives a really good overview of things you can do to secure your linux computers from those evil crackers (not hackers!) that try to get into your system to use it for all kinds of malicious stuff.
Everyone who works with web techniques (specifically markup) and their grandma of course knows about and probably also reads A List Apart. I am definately one of those. Yesterday, a very interesting article was published on splitting up ordered or unordered lists in a semantically correct way using XHTML and CSS. In CSS Swag: Multi-Column Lists, Paul Novitski gives 6 different methods of accomplishing this. Though, in my very humble opinion, only the first one would be most usable in terms of technique (especially from an automated/php point of view), all of them definately look good and will work fine. In all but the first one, though, if this list is generated automatically by for instance php, the php would need to be written specifically for the chosen solution, which in my opinion should be done as little as possible. Logic, content and markup should be split up as much as possible. For now, I guess I won’t be splitting up lists yet.
Over at the Dutch BookCrossing forum, there was the idea that anyone interested could join the ‘MusicRing’, where every participant would compile a cd (either mixed or with seperate tracks) and those cd’s would, once a month, be passed on to the next participant. This is a perfect way to learn about new music you’d normally not find out about.
My cd is now finished. It’s mixed (well, tracks flow into each other, not beatmixed), and contains 16 tracks:
1. Beefcake – Untitled 1
2. Eboman – Sample Jazz
3. Suki Takahasi – The Public School
4. Eminem – Lose Yourself
5. Carl, Tomas Danko, Eminem – I’m sorry Eminem
6. Tobiah – I love your music
7. Daft Punk – One More Time
8. Girls On Top – I wanna dance with numbers
9. Bitcrush – Have you lost your way
10. Mercurial – March of the Lemmings
11. Metaxu – 01091939 Warsaw
12. Urawa – Assembly
13. Somatic Responses – Spatial Awareness
14. Deceptikon – Bossanovastyles
15. New Order – Blue Monday
16. Liquid – Liquid is Liquid (remix)
I’m very happy with the end result. It’s a shame there’s copyrighted tracks in there, because now I can’t publish it on the web…
Buck Rogers: On TV
Buck Rogers: Not on TV anymore
Last week I made a hard and important decision: I would start looking again for a regular employment. Even though I love running my own business, now that our son is born, the incertainty, especially the financial risk, is harder to handle. I want to have some financial security again. That, combined with the fact that right now I’m working on two projects that have become a financial disaster for me, have made me make this decision.
So far though, I have not really had any regrets. After publishing my Curriculum Vitae on Monsterboard, I’ve already been contacted by several people, mostly headhunters, to see if I was interested in one job or another. Some really interesting jobs as well. Of course, I haven’t been hired yet so I’ll have to wait with really positive remarks until something comes from it, but I’m definately optimistic about this.
Earlier on, I posted about the Firefox 1.5 beta, and my main problem being that most of my extensions didn’t work with this beta. Luckily, thanks to Dominik, I now know about the Nightly Tester Tools, an extension which will re-enable all your extensions. Works like a charm! I’m now happily surfing with Firefox 1.5 beta 1! 🙂
Over at 43Things, someone asked where to start if you want to start weblogging. I wrote a short answer which I thought might be nice to also post here, in a slightly different way.
The first thing to do is to consider what kind of weblog you want to start. What will the topic be? What is your target audience? What do you want your weblog to add to the numerous weblogs outthere?
When you’ve thought of that, you need to consider some things. There are, simply spoken, two types of weblog-systems. The community-based weblogs, think of Livejournal, Xanga, and such. On these sites you need little to no technical knowledge and your weblog is up and running the minute you register. It also features a huge community of people. This brings in positive and negative sides. You’ll have an immediate audience, however, these are not always the types of people you’ll want to attract. You’ll need little to no technical knowledge, but there is less flexibility in customizing your weblog.
The other type is an individual weblog. You will need to have your own hosting account (possibly with domain name) for that. And you will need to install the weblogging software yourself. Software you could consider are: WordPress, Textpattern, Pivotlog, NucleusCMS or one of the many others. This also has positive and negative sides. You’ll need at least some basic technical knowledge, but the weblog can be customized to your liking. It’ll be harder to find your audience, however you won’t “automatically” attract the “bad guys”.
I myself started out on livejournal, and then moved away. I now have a dutch weblog running using NucleusCMS and an english weblog using Textpattern. The audience for these are probably smaller than when I was on livejournal, but the people who read my weblogs now are probably people who are sincerely interested in what I’m writing.