Monthly Archives: August 2008

Recommended Read: Dreaming in Code

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I stayed up rather late last night early this morning finishing Scott Rosenberg’s book “Dreaming in Code.” If you’re involved with open-source software (or software at all), you really owe it to yourself to go get a copy.

It’s a great look into the real-world challenges of writing software, told through the still-ongoing story of Mitch Kapor’s Chandler project, an ambitious attempt to create a new breed of personal information manager. (Chandler, interestingly, shipped a 1.0 version earlier this month after 6 years of gestation!)

links for 2008-08-29

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links for 2008-08-21

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Congratulations, Web Collective

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Congratulations to Brian, Eric, Justin, Derek, Mike, Sherry, Alex and Bryan, collectively known as the Web Collective, on their first year in business. They’re an amazing group of people that I’m proud to call neighbors, colleagues and friends. In their first year out of the gate, they’ve done some impressive, innovative, pioneering work, both technically and in how they are running their cooperative business. I can’t wait to see what the next year brings!

WalkScore hits the New York Times

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Congrats to the WalkScore team for being featured in today’s Sunday New York Times!

Founded in July 2007 by Mike Mathieu, the chairman of Front Seat Management in Seattle, WalkScore works with Google Maps and census data. Type in a street address on the site, and within seconds a list and map appear showing the nearest grocery stores, restaurants, gyms, schools and more — all for free. The site works for any address within the United States, Canada, and even Britain. It also uses a formula to assign point values to locations within a mile of the given address. These points yield a final score from 1 to 100 for the address’s overall “walkability.”

Plone Conference 2008 Sessions Announced

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Matt Bowen, Alex Clark and the amazing Plone Conference 2008 team have announced the 50+ talks that they’ve chosen for Plone Conference 2008.

It’s a pretty amazing batch of talks, chosen from over 100 community-submitted proposals, and aimed at the full range of Plone experience levels. I got a chance to read all the proposals as a reviewer, and I can promise you this: when you show up at the conference you’re going to have a hard time choosing which talks to attend.

Some talks I’m looking forward to not missing include:

  • Alexander Limi: The Future of Plone’s User Experience
  • Rob Porter: Theming a Plone 3.1 site from start to finish
  • Chris Calloway: What You Need To Know About Python
  • Katie Cunningham: NASAScience: the Science Mission Directorate’s Makeover
  • Matt Lee: Plone as a campaigns management platform

I’m also especially pleased that all of my Plone-developing colleagues at ONE/Northwest had their talk proposals accepted, so keep an eye out for:

  • Andrew Burkhalter:  Hybrid Vigor: Plone + Salesforce Integration
  • Jon Baldivieso: Collective Good: Best Practices for Creating, Releasing and Maintaining Add-on Products for Plone
  • David Glick: When Good Code Goes Bad: Tools and Techniques for Troubleshooting Plone
  • Veda Williams: Cat-Herding for Plone: Organizing and Executing a Successful Remote Sprint

If you’ve been waiting to see the talk list before registering, you’re out of excuses!  And, early bird registration ends August 8th, so register this week to save $50!

See you in DC!

ATImageEditor: Image editing for Plone

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I’ve been checking out a pre-release version of ATImageEditor, a new Plone add-on product from Nathan Van Gheem of UW Oshkosh that lets you perform basic image editing tasks (crop, resize, etc.) directly inside of Plone.

This is one of the more impressive, immediately-useful-to-real-people add-on products I’ve seen in a while. I’ve lost count of the number of our Plone site administrators who don’t really know how to use image editing software like Photoshop, GIMP, etc. to crop and resize photos for use on the web. They’ve long been a bit frustrated by the fact that Plone doesn’t provide image-editing tools (it is, after all, content management software, not image editing software).

But, now, thanks to Nathan (and the power of JQuery & KSS, Plone’s built-in javascript UI framework!) Plone can serve as a basic image editor, and that’s all that many folks need.

(Here’s a quick 1-minute screencast of ATImageEditor in action.)

Overall, this an extremely impressive product, one that is sure to be a smash hit amongst everyday Plone users and integrators. It’s a tremendous boost to Plone’s “approachability,” which is one of the major strategic foci of the Plone platform development this year. I hope Nathan will continue to polish & refine it, and possibly propose it for inclusion in a future release of Plone (it’s non-invasive and won’t cause any backwards compatibility issues, which means it’d be a great shiny new feature for Plone 3.2!).

ATImageEditor is a “0.1rc2″ release right now, which means it’s still under active development, and probably not quite suitable for high-intensity production use. However, it’s not very invasive, and thus not very risky to install.

After testing it out a bit, I do have a short laundry list of comments and suggestions. I’m posting them here in order to shine a bit of light on this promising new product and to encourage you to give it a whirl and offer Nathan some feedback of your own.

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