If there’s ever been a better argument for net neutrality, I have yet to see it. Sure there’s the whole “Jon Stewart rips into senator Ted ‘A series of tubes’ Stevens” video (yes, the same Ted Stevens who wanted to build the famous “bridge to nowhere” in his home state of Alaska). But, frankly, if you really want to get me motivated all you have to do is get Peter Pan guy and Tron Guy to ask me for help.

Point being: head over to WeAreTheWeb.org and get yourself involved.

Once upon a time I used to be a big fan of Homesite. That was back when Macrodobia had pretty much first acquired it, and I started getting into the text-editor scene and away from WYSIWYG editors (sometime in 2000). As time has moved on I’ve moved away from Homesite and have wandered through a few different tools, still trying to find one that really seems like it suits my needs. I like syntax highlighting and not a whole lot else, typically. I’ve done Dreamweaver in code view for a while, BBEdit when I used to have my Mac (G3 WallStreet Powerbook) way back in the day. More recently I’ve started poking around in some of the open-source editors. I admit to keeping my love of jEdit, it’s a simple little app that’s good for quick fixes and has some nice features (I still love the FTP plugin that lets you use an FTP server just like it was part of your normal file system), but it’s started feeling a little minimal for some of the wider projects that I’ve been having tossed at me over time. So when I saw the EasyEclipse project’s stuff I snagged a copy of the LAMP version and made a go of it, which went well (especially once I got Subclipse in there too) but still seemed a little bogged down with a bunch of features I was never going to use (support for ANT, the assumption that you were using XAMPP and not your own Apache service, making most everything run across their “Projects” system so editing a single text file wasn’t as obvious as I would have liked, etc.).

When Alex showed me a write-up of Aptana (because he knows I’m a compulsive experimenter in these kinds of things) I initially balked at it for just being Eclipse with a different icon. But this morning I actually installed it and have been giving it a shot and it seems to be a little more like the “doesn’t include all the Eclipse stuff you’ll never use” editor that sort of fits my needs so far. My only real complaint has been that I had to hack around a bit to get some of the EasyEclipse language support plugins installed. (They only like to install into a directory with an eclipse.exe file in it, but with aptana there is no eclipse.exe, there’s just aptana.exe. so I made a copy and renamed it to eclipse.exe and that worked peachy.)

You can head over here to get a copy for yourself, and they even have a nice little collection of screencasts to help folks get started too.

Chris: web 3.0 will come when someone releases a browser that bounces you between myspace and wikipedia and nowhere else.

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Just found this over on the SXSW website.

GET OUT YOUR 2007 CALENDAR

While this year’s SXSW is still fresh in your mind clear a space on your calendar for SXSW 2007. Here are the dates for next year’s conferences and festivals:

Music: Wednesday, March 14 - Sunday, March 18, 2007

Film: Friday, March 9 - Saturday, March 17, 2007

Interactive: Friday, March 9 - Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Registrations and hotel reservations will be accepted beginning about August 2006. Join our email listservs and watch this space for the exact dates.

This time I expect everyone to be in attendance. (ahem, ahem, ahem.)

Okay, woes makes it sound like things are all exploding and dying or something. Really it’s just annoying stuff that we’re hitting around the office. In particular: We have a project in subversion, but the client also makes changes to their site directly on their own server. So our SVN and their FTP don’t necessarilly match up. So someone here went onto the dev server (where a copy from SVN is checked out to) and deleted a couple directories to clear them out of the way, then downloaded new copies of those directories onto the dev server. So it has the same file structure, but it doesn’t have the .svn folders in there so SVN throws a fit if you try to update or add your changes. If anyone’s familiar with a situation like this I’d love to hear about it.

After about a month of non-postage time for me to dust things off for a minute again.

Anyway, a while back I unveiled the new version of my bookmarks database (you can see it in action over here) and this morning I got an email from Daniel in Berlin asking if I could share a copy of the code. So, without further ado the code is here (10k ZIP file).

I’d like to think most of the code is fairly self-explanatory. It done in PHP (and the proxy.php file currently uses CURL because fopen() for remote URLs is disabled on my host), all the JS is done in jQuery. It’s still under the CC By Attribution/Non-Commercial/Share-Alike license, so do with it what you will as long as you stick with those guidelines.

(The activity.gif file was generated using AJAXload.info’s system, so if you want to swap it to something else that’s a good start.)

Alex just upgraded Ekwipment on CSS Beauty to the latest set of code I have. The public side of things seems to all be going well (he said making the changes to his pages was super easy). But (as usual) the process of seeing the admin with a large quantity of actual data in it (he’s got nearly 200 jobs in the database) shows some serious holes in the user interaction in that area.

In any case go forth and take a look (and see if you can notice the differences).

…apparently I was wrong.

Seems some folks who put together a list of “favorite vlogs” for wired decided that a site titled “Boring But Short” wasn’t enough of a warning.

Boring But Short
boringbutshort.com
The “boring” part is right, but at 10 seconds, these clips are 9.5 seconds too long. They should change the URL to boringbutnotshortenough.com.

Update: If any of you have the May print edition of Wired (the one with Al Gore on the cover) it’s on page 132. I have a horrible cameraphone pic of it over on flickr.

Update: BoringButNotShortEnough.com

Update: (yes, another) Chris has posted a far better image than mine of the wired print piece on flickr.

Apparently one of the students in the “Web Career Strategies” course at the Seattle Central Community College thought my portfolio was good (I’m Portfolio #2). Too bad I don’t have a contact form, just that “contact” link in the main nav on the side of the page.

What I thought was really interesting though was seeing Kottke’s work with a “con” description of “The design of the sites is boring.”

Update: Looks like I’ve made it to more than one student in the course’s list: On the home page, the large buttons didn’t blend well with the rest of the page content..

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks that I’ve been barely posting in, so I figured it was time to catch things up again.

On March 31st I gave my notice at my previous job. About a week after one of the other 2 web designers had left, and the day after they told one of the best haXX0rs I’ve known they were letting him go. So I gave my notice and let the 12th be my last day as a little birthday present to myself and got to leave that job on my 30th birthday, then meet my dad, step-mother, grandfather and Andrea for a nice dinner. Took a couple days off to hack around with a bit of stuff (added some new stuff to Ekwipment, but it’s still not done yet), then Andrea got a room for us in Atlantic City so we went up there and blew a bunch of money and had a great time (pics on flickr). So today was my first day on a new gig, good team, good environment. Shows great promise.

A while back Alex told me he was given a Web 2.0 Award from the SEOmoz folks. I never really read his interview about it until today so imagine my surprise when my name came up in it (for Ekwipment and a couple Vanilla extensions I helped him out with).

How big is your development team? Anything special you’d like to say about them?
All development is done by me with the exception of some custom PHP apps that were built by my good friend Michael Raichelson.

Though apparently I’m just not good enough to warrant an actual link.

Speaking of oft-ignored blogs…

So, once upon a time I used to have a copy of APB that I kept everything in. But the app itself got sort of abandoned and with the rise of del.icio.us (and more recently Ma.gnolia) I found that there were other services that people ran that I could use and not have to deal with it myself. So recently I ported all my del.icio.us bookmarks to Ma.gnolia (to get everything synced up between the two) and used the Ma.gnolia “import from firefox bookmark HTML format” doohickey to make a dump of my APB bookmarks and import all those too (though it did a pretty pitiful job of “convert folder names to tags” I must say) so everything would all be up on some services that would be a little more flexible. Since then I’ve started using OnlyWire to simultaneously bookmark things to both places.

Anyway, over the weekend I got bored and sat down with some jQuery and PHP time and rebuilt my bookmarks page to pull data from del.icio.us (they have the best API at the moment) and make it do all sorts of “web2.0″ goodness. The result: the brand new HOME.NIFKIN.COM

CSS-voodoo-master turned WordPress hacker to the stars Chris Casciano has launched a new version of his Chunky Soup.net complete with microformatty (hCard and hAtom) goodness. So get over there and check it out, yo!

I know I only used the new IE7 for a couple hours, but it has to go. To be fair: the CSS support has gotten much better than the last build I tried. But the simple fact is: everyone sending me bugs here at work is most likely using IE6, so I just need to be having the same experience as them to figure out what’s going on.

In other news: giving the new Firefox 2.0 alpha 1 (what kind of name is “Bon Echo” anyway?) a quick spin and liking it so far (hat tip to WaSP).

So Ether.com has launched their service which they describe as “paypal for time”. Essentially you sign up and give them information on your area of expertise, then set your billing rates you want to use for your time. Then they set you up with a toll-free number and an extension that points straight to you so that people who need help with something can call in, agree to your rate and get in touch with you. (Obviously they let you schedule available times and aim where you want the calls to go to and all that sort of good stuff, and you don’t have to take the calls right away, you can give a call back within a window of time.)

Conveneiently I’ve been approved as a beta user so if there’s anyone out there who needs some deep web-techy nerd action you can give me a call. Either by checking out my Ether page or by calling my number directly at 1-888-MY-ETHER ext. 01379886.