a gross salute

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.

Last week I traveled to Orlando, Florida from Boston, Ma. I managed every aspect of the trip, from packing to sending a thank-you card, with my iPhone. I rarely touched paper and never felt unprepared or wanting. Here’s how I managed a quickie vacation with an iPhone (and you can, too).

via Boston to Orlando with an iPhone | 52 Tiger.

File under traditional computers becoming less necessary. I have made several trips without a laptop, and I have even stopped taking my iPad if I know I’ll be busy most of the time. The future is now.

After trying it for a while, I have decided to get rid of the header on this blog. Headers just take up too much space with delivering a whole lot, imho. Down with headers! Compare:

This is even more important when it comes to viewing on a mobile device: