Dented Reality Notes

As you may know, I've been working on a project for a while now, which has finally gone live, with open registrations. That project is My Baby Our Baby.

The idea of the site is to give parents and families a secure place online where they can compile a journal of memories for their children. We're focusing primarily on photos right now, but hope to include video and audio as we progress. Here's a couple of the things that I think make MyBaby unique or worth a look:

• Unlimited uploads (backed by Amazon S3)
• You choose to have your book open to the public (for reading), or completely invite-only.
• Once they join your book via invitation, other people can add their own photos and stories to your book as well
• We have some really beautiful book themes (and more coming) care of Ray Hernandez/Stoodio
• We've created a forum on the site as well to allow people to interact across books (anyone who's a member can post) and ask each other questions etc.
• You can try it out for free!

Right now, people get 3 weeks to try it out for free, after that, if they like it, it's $8 a month to continue using the service. This covers you for as much as you (and all the members of your book) want to upload. You can pay for more than a month at a time and get a discount as well. We're trying out a slightly different method of payment where subscriptions aren't actually available in a traditional set-your-details-and-forget way. What we're doing is allowing anyone who's a member of the book to contribute by paying for as much (or as little) as they like. We're hoping that rather than the parent having to pay every month, other people in the family will chip in and cover the cost of keeping the book running if they see value in it.

Ray and I are really excited now that it's live, and very nervous to see where it goes. We've spent a lot of time working on this and refining things, so it's great to finally have some other people using it.

Now for the real work -- keeping it up and running and constantly improving it for our new users!

My brother recently emailed me with the relatively simple question, "what exactly is Web 2.0?" I know a lot of other people out there have taken a stab at defining the damn thing, but I thought I'd take a shot as well. Here's what I replied with:

It's kind of a "catch-all" expression for a lot of the things that are going on online now. It generally refers to things like blogs and wikis and sites where the user is actually doing all the work (thus the common term "User-Generated Content" or UCG).

Just to confuse things, a lot of people have started referring to a specific design style and set of technologies as being "Web 2.0" as well. This tends to include:

• anything mobile
• anything including mapping/geo
• AJAX (a JavaScript technique to avoid page-refreshes and make things more responsive)
• widgets (which are a whole other confusing mess of their own)
• anything that uses RSS/Atom feeds

So yeah... it's not easy to give a simple one-line answer, because it's kinda all of those things and more. Some people argue that it's a "revolution" of the way the web works, because "Web 1.0" was all about companies or bigger groups publishing information online, whereas 2.0 is more about "the little guy" out there (users) controlling and publishing their own content (think YouTube, Flickr, etc). To me, it's actually just an evolution though, a logical progression that just took a while because we had to figure out and refine the technologies to allow things to be easy enough for everyone to be involved.

That's my take on it anyway :)

I haven't posted actively here about it, but FeedBlendr is the first of a series of "feed power-tools" that I'm developing and will eventually tie together. There is a version live and actively being used already, and I've just put out a beta version for testing with some major upgrades to the core feed engine. People are really loving this sort of thing, and I've got some great plans for more additions to the family soon.

Keep an eye out for more here and also over at the Blendr Blog.

Well-known and respected Carson Workshops are putting on a summit titled The Future of Web Apps. I'll be there!

I got an email from someone in relation to FeedBlendr, asking me what RSS really is, and what you're supposed to do with it. He liked my reply so much that I thought I'd share it here for anyone else who's having a bit of a tough time understanding all these acronyms (although admittedly I did use another one in my definition, but what the hey?);

"So basically RSS is a way for websites to make their content (normally time-based stuff like blog posts or news) available to people in a machine-readable format (a dialect of XML)"

Hope that helps someone (else) out there!

I've just released a project I've been working on, called FeedBlendr. Basically it allows you to create custom feeds by combining any number of existing RSS or Atom files into a single one. It's got some funky AJAX-checking on URLs, and soon it will have some slick integration with FeedBurner which should allow me to do some very cool things with it.

Check it out and see if it's useful - hopefully when combined with some other things I'm working on it'll allow you to mash feeds up just the way you want them.

Don't know if this has dawned on anyone else yet...

PHP was the new Perl, written for the web

Ruby (+ Rails) is the new PHP, written for web 2.0

I guess that means I'd better get on the bandwagon and figure it out!

Their keyboard navigation sucks. I mean certain programs have great keyboard shortcuts and all, but I'm talking standard stuff, like tab between buttons in a window and hit enter/space to do something. Launch a file from Finder. There are some basic things that they're missing here, and it's killing me.

Having said that, I did just buy my second Mac laptop (15" PowerBook G4), which I totally love; except for this horrendous shortcoming. And if it's possible, it actually got worse between my iBook and this PowerBook. A bunch of the programs which got updates have now stopped offering the alternative default outlined buttons in dialogs which I could hit space to activate - which was pretty much the only thing that was better than Windows' keyboard nav.

Maybe I'm missing something.

UPDATE 2005-12-13: So I figured out how to 'launch' an item that's highlighted in Finder, and it's almost worse knowing than it was not. Apple-down-arrow. WTF???

So here's an annoying one - I wanted to resize my browser window automatically, after the page had loaded (in a dynamic pop-up), to meet certain size requirements (namely to match a background image). The problem that I had was that all the different browsers support different methods and properties in relation to the 'viewport' (visible area of the browser), so I was having trouble finding a reliable way to do this.

I found a great breakdown over at quirksmode.org, but it didn't actually work in Safari (2.0.2), so I found that out pretty quickly, because that's what I'm working in. After a little playing around, I came up with the following modifications, which calculates the amount of chrome visible in the currrent window, and then takes that into account when resizing the entire window size.

I haven't tested this on too much other than Safari and Firefox on a Mac, but I think it should be reasonably compatible with others.

// Viewable size you want once resized
x = 600;
y = 400;

// Now set the window size for different browser types
 // all except Explorer
if (self.innerHeight) {
	// Figure out the measurements
	iX = self.innerWidth;
	iY = self.innerHeight;
	oX = self.outerWidth;
	oY = self.outerHeight;
	
	// And resize to match the desired target
	gX = oX - iX;
	gY = oY - iY;
	window.resizeTo(x + gX, y + gY)
}
// Explorer 6 Strict Mode
else if (document.documentElement && document.documentElement.clientHeight) {
	document.documentElement.clientWidth  = x;
	document.documentElement.clientHeight = y;
}
// other Explorers
else if (document.body) {
	document.body.clientWidth  = x;
	document.body.clientHeight = y;
}

I'm sick of Cmd-T, maps.google.com, Enter, 'address' + ', sf, ca' so I made this quick little bookmarklet to speed up the process a little.

Drag it to your bookmark toolbar, then click it, enter a street address (eg. '2000 Bush St') and hit 'Ok' to get an instant Google Map to that location in San Francisco (my current hometown).

map

Obviously editing this to work for different cities in the US would be trivial - knock yourselves out.