MeyerBros

Check out openID: the open (i.e. not-vendor-locked-in — hello MS Passport) single-sign-on web identity standard. Pretty cool. I just got myself a free identity page at myopenid.com. I thought about setting up an openID server at meyerbros.org, which doesn’t look hard, but then I ran across these instructions on using openID delegation. So I let myopenid.com handle the details of running the server and I can still use carl.meyerbros.org as my openID login URI. Nice.

Next step - setting up blog.meyerbros.org as an openID consumer (so people can login to comment using their openID identity instead of having to register). Looks pretty easy.

Interesting (and, not surprisingly, somewhat fiery) conversations in the blogosphere recently about diversity, gender, exclusion, and affirmative action in the web-geek world. Our favorite Meyerbro homonym web-geek Eric Meyer started things off by posting his personal manifesto about why he doesn’t care about diversity, and why when he plans conferences he chooses speakers based purely on “merit” and without considering gender or race. (To borrow liberally from the pithy genius of the other Eric Meyer: “Race and gender are irrelevant. That’s what I (white male) always (white) say (male).”)

(update: I shouldn’t have given Eric Meyer credit for “kicking things off” - he was responding to this Jason Kottke post where he simply lists the percentage of female presenters at various recent “webby” conferences.)

Tantek quickly weighed in with his thoughts, in which he a) blames women for not taking enough initiative to promote themselves in the industry, and b) wonders why nobody is concerned about including enough green-eyed people. (”It’s women’s fault for not working hard enough. And anyway, gender doesn’t make any more difference than eye color. That’s what I (male) always (male) say (male).”)

Then Anil Dash jumped into the fray and chastised Eric Meyer and John Gruber for “defending the boys-only nature of [their] treehouse,” and followed it up by offering a list of “the essentials of Web 2.0 your event doesn’t cover”, following which he notes “Where are the men? Don’t worry - the door is open to them. As soon as one of you has done something with the impact of Flickr…”

Today things took an interesting twist. Apparently Eric Meyer (the non-Meyerbro one) is doing some serious soul-searching about all of this, which is great. (Though apparently there hasn’t been sufficient soul-searching yet for him to stop trying to defend the innocent goodness of what he was “really trying to say”).

In all seriousness, wrestling with privilege — with the stupidity and blindness it sometimes causes us to display, even with the best of intentions — is really gut-wrenching stuff, and I wish Eric all the best. I hope he can come to a place where he might even recognize that “what he was really trying to say” itself might have been coming from a place of privilege and ignorance, and that “who he really is” is a good person whose identity, like all of us with privilege, has been deeply warped and shaped by the blindness of privilege.

jackson pollock.

that’s how he did it. i swear.

i wrote the code for the new world arts site way back in the day, before i knew much about css layout or semantic markup. it includes one table and loads of poorly named classes (several of which should be IDs). while the text-file database system for events is fairly robust (for a text-file events database), the front end isn’t nearly as tightly coded.

today we got a lesson in that - the hard way. our css file was lost and has to be rebuilt.

with the beauty of css i rebuilt the front page structure farily quick - cursing the poorly named sections, the entirely unnecessary table and the general mess of spans serving for strong and em tags - pausing every other line to hack through markup code for the right names to reference. from there i was lost. the back pages use different names and structures and none of the styling markup makes any sense at all.

let that be a lesson to me. this page, for example, i could rebuild to look decent in minutes without even looking at the html code. it’s simple, it all makes sense, and it’s entirely flexible.

For those of you interested, download this (Windows) program to remind you of upcoming birthdays and anniversaries of your friends and family. Developed by David Glick with a requested $5/computer fee. Click the link below to download:

reminder.exe

i’ve been thinking. why should software users (me) always have to alternate between online and offline apps, importing this and exporting that - switching apps and learning new systems. why can’t i have the advantages of webmail and desktop mail without figuring it out for myself? i want a web calendar that i can look at and adjust off or on line. i want my backpack and writeboards available even when i don’t have web access. why not?

it doesn’t seem like too much to ask, does it? and think of the advantages of all your data being backedup by default within the application.

the more i don’t have to think about when i just want to write a note or check my mail, the better.

37 signals want’s a monopoly on my life. bastards.

I’m already paying $5 per month for backpack which i am completely adicted to. i already use it for lists and links and writeboards, and now they go and add a iCal friendly calendar for no extra cost.

i’m a sucker, but they’re competing with google on this one. I have an online calendar that I am fairly happy with. It seems what they can offer me is backpack intigration and a new level of simplicity - but is it too simple? google calendar can do a lot of nice things…

it comes on the heels of my own idea for a new web calendar system. i would like to see a calendar program stores your calendar locally and online. one program - potentially run within a browser. no more importing and exporting from master calendars and subscribed calendars in various applications with different interfaces and specs. why should i have to think about which calendar is more up-to-date and whether I’m online or off. that’s what computers are for. i simply want a calendar i can access from anywhere at any time without having to worry about it.

the other day i started teaching Michelle code, and from the start I went about it all wrong. “This is a DOM tree… This is a div tag…” i’m sorry. next time around i’m going to work on a new approach involving assignments layed out something like:

• draw your website using whatever medium you feel most comfortable in
• re-draw the same design using only straight lines and solid colors
• re-write the same design content using absolutely no graphics
• i haven’t worked this out entirely…

but really it just makes me want to build a better WYSIWYG editor that is actually user friendly following the philosophies of companies like humanized and 37 signals. An editor that doesn’t assume you want this to be a paragraph and that to be a line break, but makes symantics an intigrated part of the process, and naming and creating styles the easiest thing in the world. Something that treats you more like text edit and less like microsoft word. entirely unlike either dreamweaver or iweb. the one with too many buttons and lists and assumptions, the other with no option to even view the code. i want a program that will do it all for you, and teach you a new way of thinking all without breaking your train of thought. i think it’s possible and i think we should do it.

so after downloading 17 widgets off of the dashboard top 50 list (check it out Mac users — there are some cool ones there), david told me about last.fm. it automatically “scrobbles” (records) the music that you listen to on your computer, which…hmm…has some helpful purpose i’m sure. but it’s fun, and you can see what music your friends are listening to and find people who listen to similar music. you can also create custom streaming radio stations. and best of all, you can successfully waste an entire afternoon and not feel guilty about it.

in other news, floyd landis lost the yellow jersey today, but not to a main competitor. i think he’ll be able to get it back this week.

The other evening I was on the way home on the London Underground, waiting for the Northern line train. I walked onto the platform and sat down on one of the benches beside a middle aged man. At first I didn’t notice anything unusual about him; he had tight cropped hair, calloused hands and his skin looked like a man who had spent much of his life in the outdoors. But some of the details were slightly off, like the bottom of his trousers which were tightly cuffed in a way not usually fashionable among men of his age.

A minute or two after I sat down, a train pulled into the station. As it blew by us and then pulled to a stop, he frantically scrawled six five digit number in red ink across a single page of his notebook. 57801, 57301… Though he had been staring straight ahead the entire time, he had somehow managed to read the numbers of each of the six carriages in front of us as they had whizzed by. I realized I was in the presence of a tube spotter and a very good one at that.

As the tube train pulled away from the platform, the man leaned back in visible satisfaction and took a swig from his soda. He was having a great time. As we sat waiting for the next train he began quietly, gruffly humming to himself in an unself-concious. It wasn’t an unpleasant sound, but enough to clearly signal that he was not aware of the social conventions or norms of the space. He vaguely flipped through his notebook and I saw six carriage numbers scrawed broadly across each page. There must have been at least 40 full pages. As he absent mindedly caressed the pages, I began to recognise patterns that were familiar to me from working with autistic clients.

Soon the next train could be heard, roaring down the tunnel. I watched my new friend lean forward in anticipation, his pen poised above his notebook as the air rushed out of the tunnel ahead of the train. And then it was upon us and past us. Again as it went passed he fixed his stare straight ahead for one second before his hand jumped across the page scrawling six more long red numbers. It was my train, so I got on and left him there, sitting happily on the bench by the platform.

the latest game not to be released (or developed (or even thought of)) by word of mouse games.

it’s like tetris, but with snoods! what could be cooler?

i see this working one of two ways. either a) it’s impossible to complete a row because those silly snood shapes just don’t fit together, or b) each snood takes up exactly one ‘block’ of space and it’s nearly impossible not to complete rows.

either way, it’s the coolest game ever.

Dada Mail, the open-source list-management software we use at New World (and are looking at for MMA) is not a software app. That’s right. Computer software is the medium, Dada Mail is an art project.

“Readymade” concept art along the lines of Duchamp’s Fountain (signed urinal) - only not readymade. Built from scratch by an artist with little to no programming experience - this art piece is a medium of it’s own - providing (unlike a painting, say) eveything but the content.

Originally titled Mojo Mail, the name was changed to avoid a trademark infringment law suit from MOJO Mail - a silly idea since artwork is “titled” not “named” in the trademark sense. Any title may be used and reused by any artist. I wonder how long that will last. Will the trademark craze grow to the point where artists are fighting legal battles over titles, or will the new open-source e-wave win out? o, what fun.

my latest exploration in CSS design: css hexagons. thanks to Tantek. no images were used.

not entirely semantic - you use some empty span and div tags, but…

it does flex well with text-size adjustments…

focus is the key word.

• focus on a specific service we provide best
• focus on a specific client group whos needs we know
• focus on your very basic overhead needs
• etc.

and, of course, services have to be talked about inbasic terms of the client’s life. “standards complient” doesn’t mean anything - though long term, low cost flexability might. handicap accessability and search engine optimization might - but even that might need to be boiled down to increased “sales” (as in dissemenation of product, services or even ideas - the basic goals of any web presence).

also comments on the expectations of most nfp’s - usually that products and services should be free.

a product makes better long term profit for less overhead: if we’re looking at nfp’s without money - we may need to cut our time costs by offering something we can more readily mass-produce like a CMS software package. more customization costs more money. generic web design is harder to sell to an organization on a tight budget.

ideal for best profit is smallest group of people (2?) building a strong, innovative app and maketing it. 37signals as an example starting that way. what are our personal goals? what sort of profit do we need?

learn to say no to projects. learn to cut out services that we offer. simplify client base, simplify products, simplify services, simplify overheard, you get the idea.

Michelle sent me this yesterday. New York Times seems to be covering the issue fairly well.

NYTimes.com: Why the Democratic Ethic of the World Wide Web May Be About to End.

the styles are now sticky across the site (www, blog and wiki). if it doesn’t work for you, try deleting your cookies and starting clean. i’d also like to take a little style survey of anyone paying attention at all. flip through the main styles (not commandline etc) and talk to me about which is your favorite and why. what would you like to see? what styles could be combined? what haven’t i been doing that i should? how do you like your links? sidebar? browser-compatability (ha)? level of graphic use? color palette? anything else?