CogBlogged from ‘June, 2005’

PeanutButterWikiMake a free, password protected wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich.Tags: wiki

RTMark: Your Real Corporation Clearinghouse®TMark receives project ideas from internet users, then lists them (here). Each listed project has its own discussion list (linked from the project). When a project requires a bit of funding to be accomplished, sometimes investors will step up to the plate and offer their help. Even more often, people will offer non-financial help or feedback.Tags: socialtech

C’mom, admit it, you’ve ego surfed… typed your name into Google to see what you come up with, or if your site is in the top ten. No? Just me? Well here is a new game to play, see what ads a Google search leads your name to. This all came about since a colleague mentioned that the prolific and generous linking Stephen Downes had posted something on his “home page” about me. An…. ahem… full URL is always better, but just being curious, I used the search box on Stephen’s site which uses Google search. I lost interest in combing the results, but got curious about all the AdWord references to me. And curiosity got the better of me so a clicking I went ….

PleaseReview – The online document review system – Home Pagethe new approach to collaborative document authoring & review. PleaseReview provides a structured, browser-based environment to manage the document review process and enable simultaneous, paragraph-by-paragraph reviews of MS Word documents and document sets. PDFs, images and other document types are also handled.Tags: collaboration Fair Use DayWe think Fair Use should have its own "Day", a day to celebrate Fair Use in any lawful way you wish. Exercise your Fair Use rights or contact a corporation or government of your choosing and let them know you want Fair Use rights and you want them protected – demand your Fair Use rights! Use what ever means you have available: phone, email, smoke signals, snail-mail, etc.Tags: copyright

Online Dictionary, Encyclopedia and Thesaurus. Free access. English, Medical, Legal, Financial, and Computer Dictionaries, Thesaurus, Acronyms, Encyclopedia, a Literature Reference Library, and a Search Engine all in one! Tags: reference MBoffin.com – Designline – A Design Timeline I have often wondered what it would be like to see a web site design progress from start to finish, with each tweak and change being shown as it progresses—a design timeline, if you will. To create this designline, I took a screenshot basically every time I saved my HTML file. I’m one of those people who impulsively hits Ctrl-S after every tiny little change, so you end up seeing every little change made to the file as it goes. I started out with a blank text file and I go all the way to a completed site design. Check it out. Tags: design, webdev OSS Watch – open source software advisory service [...]

This might be a sideways version of a screen cast. At Mboffin.com, Dylan created an animated GIF that shows a screen shot captures for each change as a web site was developed. You can watch it evolve from un-formatted semantic HTML through different iterations of font sizes, creation of the page elements, etc. It’s a testament to the organic evolution of a hand hewed design that is kneaded like bread, not popped out of some easy bake oven. It is like watching a stop motion movie of a flower emerging from a bud. It is like… well that’s enough tacky metaphors See “Designline A Design Timeline”: I have often wondered what it would be like to see a web site design progress from start to finish, with each tweak and change being shown as it progresses—a design timeline, if you will. I don’t mean from conceptual start to finish—from blank [...]

I’ve not had nearly the desired time to monkey around in WordPress (hence the near stock template), but I am hoping over the more slow time of summer to slowly add and tinker and perhaps break. I am still trying to get my mind around the template/tag structure, which is fairly sensible. What I’d really like is an ability to use PHP code in posts and templates, and I feel it is possible (I played this morning with the RunPHP plugin which seems more suitable for echo() type commands, where I prefer more code leverage. My project was to convert the old “Where’s Alan” page that uses the slick IndyJuniour Flash mapper, XML in a complete PHP template I wrote in MovableType. I have a menu that allows me to pass a year as a script parameter, and thus pull up the XML file associated with that year. I tried [...]

One can be a busy blogger just copying the neat things D’Arcy Norman does… liks playing with the gnomz comic creator he wrote about a while back. This is just one of those things that at first you might thing, “What a silly waste of time and computer resources!”, which is true, but don’t be so quick to judge… the site, gnomz.com allows anyone like me who can barely draw a stick figure, to create their one characters and build a comic strip. Now if you think about it, writing a good comic is not easy as you have limited space and dialogue, and really need to tell a story very quickly, and end with a punch. I cannot claim my first lame attempt is anything to send Doonesbury off the pages, but here is my cats and dogs yapping about “Aren’t They Just Diaries?” (first pane snapped below): If [...]

After toying a bit with Jots yesterday getting the bookmarklet tool to work, I am getting to like it more and more as a bookmark manager. I might be switching from ‘furling’ to ‘jotting’… It more or less has everything you get with del.icio.us, meaning easy bookmarking, searching, tagging, rss feeds, seeing what others are marking, but being a newer kid on the social bookmarking block, it seems more responsive, cleaner interface, etc. Plus it has the ability to create groups of “privileged users” (need to think more about how that might be useful). I will be toying with it the next few days, weeks to see if ti is worth sticking with, my jots site is http://jots.com/users/cogdog with RSS feed http://rss.jots.com/users/cogdog. But the unique feature is the built in API to automatically post a days worth of bookmarked sites to your weblog via XML-RPC interface. The editing page for [...]