Author Archives: bradk

Tumblr is one of the free platforms most I like because it is very customizable, it can be used as you really want, even from a blank html. I’m lately seeing several tumblrs which feature interesting themes. I just found this one by Thirozumi, to be honest in the beginning I didn’t know what I was seeing, I only noticed about the colored diagonals and the cool visual effect by scrolling down or right. Then I went to its archive to see the single posts and what kind of content had there. On the archive there are normal pictures from reblogs or posts but if you click on whatever picture you go to a single colored diagonal, so this tumblr shows all the content published on in that diagonal and deformed way, I really like it, it’s like two projects in one, a personal research and an abstract colored visualization from all that research.

via TRIANGULATION BLOG.

What continues to fascinate me about tumblr is how it on a one hand operates similarly to a social network site, where posting content and following others is drop-dead simple, yet on the other allows for the customization and identity expressed through design afforded by the web itself. Another theme that I think is really cool is this large-format video theme, vhx. Makes me want to shoot some cool video just to show it off using this theme.

In 1987, a small Dallas-based company launched a floppy disk magazine that was supposed to be a grand experiment in the future of the medium. At $19.95 an issue, The New Aladdin was a bi-monthly general-interest magazine that hoped to give readers an entirely new kind of interactive experience; complete with animated graphics, computer games, music, puzzles, and feature stories that allowed you to ask questions.

via The Magazine of the Future (on floppy disk!) | Paleofuture.

It would have been cool to be working on this back then, heavily experimental.

The web of course supersedes the idea of a traditional content bundled in “magazine” format. Now everything old is new again with the rise of the iPad. Seeing this floppy drive magazine that now seems hopelessly outdated makes me realize how outdated the idea of a magazine is, period. Even if it delivered over state of the art mobile network and displayed on a beautiful retina display. The web is the thing. Of course all new media is additive and magazines will probably be around for quite a while, if not forever.

On another note, I tried out a new presentation geared towards the Open Lab project, but also as a way to try and focus on some of the elements I think make a community like this work. I focused on the importance of integrating pop culture, media, and remix into an online community framework. The idea for me is that a community in the 21st century needs to understand the idea of the viral and embrace it to some degree—basically acknowledging that the visual vernacular of our moment is essential to understanding what makes for compelling cultural interaction on the web.

via bavatuesdays.

OpenLab is an open-source, digital platform designed to support teaching and learning at New York City College of Technology (NYCCT), and to promote student and faculty engagement in the intellectual and social life of the college community.

via City Tech OpenLab.

One system for sites for people, courses, projects, clubs, ePortfolio. Nicely designed.

QAMA won’t tell you the answer until you make a sufficiently accurate estimate — proof you understand the function you want it to perform.

via WIRED.

Watch a dude doing something he likes using various technologies to create and share his vision.

Found via RW Boyer who says more about this video than I can.

Thanks to Tim Owens for pointing me to wpengine in a comment on my previous post about Squarespace.

I have been looking at services like phpfog and Amazon’s elastic beaenstalk as a way to host a wordpress in a scalable environment. wpengine looks to be the most promising for wordpress. For one, it is designed around wordpress, and scaling wordpress. They take all of the sysadmin stuff out of the equation. some of the things that really standout about wp engine:

• You get not just an single wp instance but also a staging instance, automatically
• You can install plugins and get full sftp access to your site and the staging site
• no need to fuss with caching plugins
• unfortunately, at the base level, the dashboard is still not protected by ssl. The lack of a simple system to deal with ssl for logged in users, but plain http for the general public still is a major problem with WP. Yes, there are ways to acheive this on your own install, but they require a lot of fuss.

Of course, upgrading wordpress is never fool-proof if you have made a lot of customizations. From the wpengine faq:

However, when WordPress comes out with a new minor release (e.g. v3.1.4 -> v3.2.0) or a major release (e.g. v2.9.2 -> v3.0.1), the same rules don’t apply. Upgrading can and does cause blogs to break.

Specifically, upgrading causes breakage with plugins and themes which are no longer compatible. Popular plugins and themes often have patched versions ready in time, although there’s always a few which infamously take a little longer to release a fix. Others take much longer — as much as a month — while others still might never release a fix if they’re not under active development.

Then of course there’s custom code in themes and plugins which also might or might not need to be updated.

[...]

When we’re ready, we’ll recommend that you upgrade your blog. You still need to test to make sure you’re comfortable with that. Then we’ll automatically push out the latest release, unless you tell us not to, which we can honor.

I think square space solves this problem by managing the entire system, while still giving tools to customize. It’s the classic tradeoff of a rich open-source ecosystem where you have full control but need to spend time twiddling things versus a more controlled space that more-or-less just works.

I am playing with wpengine, trying to learn more. It is a very impressive offering. I can see myself moving my blog here.

Yesterday I mentioned some ways squarespace could be considered a next-generation content management system. One thing that bugs me about squarespace is that much of its offering is still based on the idea of a traditional website. One of my basic rules for the web is that a blog should be the default format for any website. Nine times out of 10 when someone thinks they want a “site” and not a “blog”, still what they really need is a blog. You should be forced to get special dispensation from the pope in order to create a non-blog website. What I mean is that most people and organizations just really need a place to dump their stuff. They don’t need a multi-page online catalog or magazine. Squarespace tempts me to endless design a “site”, not just post my stuff.

and of you are not site what the deal is with squarespace, watch this short video.