Featured Posts
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Word Content: Bloggers not publishing original content anymore?
Posted on December 24th, 2007 at 20:51 in Internet, Blogging, Thoughts.
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Just recently, I came across this website. It’s called Word Content, and its main purpose is to give you, for a fee, unique articles to publish on your website. When I saw it, I was surprised by the concept: if blogging is all about people expressing their personal opinion and publishing it for the whole world to read, why would you want to buy articles for your blog? So I searched for an explanation in this post.
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Announcing Chameleon
Posted on January 27th, 2007 at 21:37 in Internet, Blogging, Projects, Chameleon.
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Today, I officially release Chameleon, a blogging platform focused on customizability and extensibility. Its first public version, version 0.5.5 Beta, comes with quite a lot of functionality already included, but with even more still missing. Along the way to 1.0, this functionality will be added, growing Chameleon into a mature blogging solution.
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Adding tag suggestion to your form fields
Posted on January 26th, 2007 at 21:10 in Programming, Internet, Web 2.0.
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In this post, I will try to explain how to add suggestions to your form fields. When using simple text fields to represent a many-to-many relationship between items and tags, it is applicable to provide a method for the user to easily view existing tags, so he can keep using the same spelling and style. Therefore, tag suggestion à la del.icio.us is probably the best solution here.
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Advanced content management
Posted on December 1st, 2006 at 19:46 in Internet, Blogging, Projects.
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The last few months, I’ve been working on a new project: a personal publishing platform. Originating from a blogging platform, the application I’m currently developing is much more: all different kinds of entries can be managed through it. Whether you want to post articles, blog posts, recipes or images, the system manages them all in the same way, but displays them differently.
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Introduction into OpenID
Posted on October 22nd, 2006 at 19:41 in Internet, Web 2.0, Technology.
3 Replies.
OpenID is a decentralized and open identity management protocol. It defines how applications can request a user to authenticate using his OpenID, which is stored on his server or at a service he trusts. OpenID was originally only an authentication protocol, but in future it may even allow applications to exchange data about the user, with the user’s permission of course.
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Enhancing KDE: Setting up transparent window decorations
Posted on August 2nd, 2006 at 16:46 in Computer, Linux.
6 Replies.
In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to set up transparent, pseudo-transparent in fact, window decorations (title bars and window borders) in KDE. Using Crystal and KDE, it’s very easy to set up a fresh and unique desktop environment, with a touch of transparency.
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The Alternatives IV: Photo sharing
Posted on July 8th, 2006 at 14:42 in Web 2.0.
6 Replies.
This is my third post in the series “The Alternatives”, in which I compare “standard” Web 2.0 applications with their alternatives. It’s been four months since I wrote my last post, but now I finally publish my post about photo sharing sites. Of course, Flickr is the standard photo sharing site, and I will compare it with Riya, Parazz, 23 and Zooomr. There’s also a list of services which I didn’t review and a table comparing prices, upload limit and storage space for free and paying plans.
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About learning curves
Posted on July 6th, 2006 at 16:21 in Programming, Personal, Thoughts.
No Replies.
Holidays have started for me. There’s a lot I would like to do during these, and probably not so much I’ll be able to realize. There are about three things I’d like to learn: Django, Python and Blender. However, I’ll not be able to do all three, so I’ll have to choose. While I was thinking about what I’d do, I considered their learning time, and envisioned the learning curves. All three projects have very different learning curves, and that’s what I’m going to figure out in this post.
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Shopify: Online stores for everyone
Posted on June 19th, 2006 at 19:43 in Internet, Review.
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Shopify is a service that allows you to set up online stores; simple, smooth and supple. It is overall very impressive, because of its simplicity and customizability. Shopify allows everyone to set up a simple store, without much of a hassle when it comes to receiving payments through different systems, paying fees for the application itself, theming and adjusting it, or hosting and maintaining the site.
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The importance of open APIs
Posted on May 28th, 2006 at 14:52 in Internet, Web 2.0, The Semantic Web, Technology, Thoughts.
2 Replies.
While the web keeps evolving, APIs are becoming more important. By allowing your users to access your application from the outside, you assure they will use it, not only on your site but also on their and others’ sites. Let me sum up here why you need to open your APIs.
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DabbleDB: Online database management
Posted on May 13th, 2006 at 18:34 in Internet, Web 2.0, Review.
1 Reply.
You maybe already heard something about DabbleDB, an online database manager and spreadsheet application. It’s quite famous for its excellent demonstration video, impressing users with its extensive feature set and usability. DabbleDB allows you to manage large amounts of data easily, without the need to learn how to query data, and without using obscure terms.
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Riya: photo sharing, face recognition and more
Posted on April 23rd, 2006 at 14:03 in Web 2.0, Review.
1 Reply.
Riya is a photo sharing service with face recognition. It recognizes faces in photos, and then you have to say who they are. After you upload a lot of photos, Riya will be able to recognize people itself. You can not only show the names of the people in the photo, but you can also search for all photos with a specific person in them. Futhermore, you can share photos and people, have friends, and train Riya to recognize people better.
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Haven’t had enough yet? Ma.gnolia, Spurl.net and Diigo
Posted on April 10th, 2006 at 18:24 in Web 2.0, Review.
1 Reply.
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Listal
Posted on March 27th, 2006 at 18:37 in Web 2.0, Review.
No Replies.
Listal is a service that lets you track all books, music, DVDs, movies and games you own and want. You can search their database and add items to your collection if you own them, or to your wanted list if you want them. It’s an easy-to-use application for managing your collections, online and accessible for your friends.
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The Alternatives III: To-do lists
Posted on March 4th, 2006 at 21:28 in Web 2.0.
No Replies.
This is the second post in my series “The Alternatives”. In this post, I will compare some to-do list applications. I selected Remember The Milk, voo2do and Bla-bla list as alternatives, and Ta-da list as the standard one. Remember The Milk turned out to be the best one, with a big lead before the others.
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The Alternatives II: Bookmarking
Posted on February 13th, 2006 at 19:08 in Web 2.0.
5 Replies.
This is my first post in the series “The Alternatives”. As told before, this one will be about bookmarking applications. del.icio.us is definitely the standard one, and I’m going to compare it with Simpy, Furl, BlinkList, Shadows, BlogMarks.net and RawSugar. It’s an extensive comparison, with a lot of screenshots, and more on my Flickr account.
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Review: Newsvine
Posted on January 22nd, 2006 at 12:55 in Web 2.0, Review.
No Replies.
Newsvine is a news site where the community decides what’s on the front page. It’s Web 2.0 style news, a little bit like digg, but with much more features. For example, the way articles are created: there are three. Newsvine automatically aggregates from the Associated Press, you can write articles yourself, or you can create a link to an existing article.
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Review: Last.fm
Posted on December 23rd, 2005 at 15:10 in Web 2.0.
No Replies.
Last.fm is all about music. When you sign up, you get a music profile. That profile displays to which songs, artists and genres you listen frequently. To gather this data, you have to install a plug in for your music player. Each time you listen to a song it sends the data to the Last.fm server.
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Gmail clips: it is useless
Posted on December 9th, 2005 at 17:53 in Internet, Web 2.0.
1 Reply.
Gmail recently added Gmail Clips, a new feature that adds headlines to your inbox. I think this wasn’t necessary, it takes too much time to set up compared with what you get. The list of feeds can’t be imported from Google Reader, nor from the Personalized Homepage or any other resource. It’s also only possible to see the headlines in Gmail, not on other Google pages.
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Store threatens one blogger, all bloggers responding
Posted on November 30th, 2005 at 16:17 in Internet, Blogging.
No Replies.
Recently, Thomas Hawk posted about his experience with a camera store. He says he wanted to order a camera online, but the company, PriceRitePhoto, didn’t want to send him the camera. One of the people he spoke to over the phone, even started threaten him. His story already received more than 1700 diggs, and numbers are still increasing.
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