Recent Posts
» Social Networking via Shotgun
05/07/08 13:25 from Man with no blog
A good 12 months ago you could depend upon a a solid core of your social network to be centralised on several common social networking sites, such as flickr , twitter , facebook , linkedin . Things where relatively stable, well as much as ..
» Time for a Change
03/07/08 15:08 from Man with no blog
When I started this blog 18 months back, the design and template was temporary at best. But as you do, I tweaked and tweaked. Added a theme randomiser, moved things around. Suddenly it's 18 months on and the temporary design is looking lik..
» Welcome Quinn
03/07/08 00:18 from Miles' Blog
If you've wondered what has happened to me, and why I'm not online much, the above picture should give it away. Our third child, Quinn Nathaniel Burke was born on Monday (30th June), making this blog post three days late (I did manage to u..
» One lost laptop: Returned
03/07/08 00:12 from Bloggy Hell
Yesterday, whilst being distracted by a phone call as I got in to me car, I did what we all dread doing - I left my EeePC on the top of my car as I drove away. I noticed that something was a miss a few streets away from me house, and promp..
» Use CSS to speed your unobtrusive JavaScript
01/07/08 11:59 from Bloggy Hell
Unobtrusive JavaScript does for JavaScript what CSS did for HTML design. Separating the design and business logic client side means better re-use and compatibility. To make a truly unobtrusive site, you should start with a base, non-JavaSc..
» OZIA 2008 is go
26/06/08 12:43 from Nick Cowie
Eric Scheid has confirmed that OZIA 2008 is at the Stamford Plaza in Double Bay on 20 & 21 September. So I have booked my flight for OZIA 2008 and WDS08 and my accommodation for both conferences, and I am not the only one. So why I so exci..
» Goodbye Newsgator, hello Feedly
22/06/08 08:38 from Nick Cowie
In the past few days since it's release Feedly has been generating a huge buzz, a quick look for Feedly on Summize (Twitter search engine) gives you an idea of the impact this extension for Firefox 3 has had on early adopters in that time...
» A quick history of conversation on the web
22/06/08 06:30 from Nick Cowie
Conversation has been a hot topic on the web recently, with TechCrunch , Duncan Riley , Alex van Elsas and Julian Baldwin amongst others. The main concern seems to be that new comments solutions are taking the conversation away from the or..
» 7 Score and 10 List Items?
21/06/08 14:41 from Man with no blog
You've done the Information Architecture (IA) of the site months ago, the high resolution (graphic) designs of the side are finished, the site is cut and have been implemented into the CMS . The client has been busy filling the IA structur..
» Forecasting the weather in ruby: bom-weather
21/06/08 04:20 from Matt Didcoe
Well, perhaps not forecasting the weather…but certainly getting the Bureau of Meteorology's forecast and passing it on The ruby library/gem we're using for this project is Ben Schwarz bom-weather gem - http://github.com/benschwarz/bo..
» Copyright is not the right to copy.
20/06/08 13:55 from Man with no blog
The Web is wonderful it's full of all this content, all this information. It's a copy writer or blogger's dream. You just don't have to do any work at all. It's all laid out there for you, all you have to do is find it and take it. Maybe j..
» Community Service Announcement
20/06/08 09:44 from Matt Didcoe
This is just a friendly warning for the citizens of Perth, Western Australia… I now have my Probationary licence only 730 days until I become a fully qualified driver! It should be noted however, that I can't afford to fill a car wit..
» 88 Miles in the Business Review Weekly’s top 100 Australian Web 2.0 Applications
19/06/08 10:31 from Bloggy Hell
Business Review Weekly released it's list of top 100 Australian web 2.0 lists today and 88 Miles came in at number 58! There are some pretty cool apps on the list, including big players like Atlassian and of course our good friends Saasu.c..
» On my way home meme take 2
17/06/08 15:26 from Nick Cowie
After getting tagged again by Ruth and speaking to Miles who was visiting the State Library to work on his special project. I decided to have a second go at the On my way home meme . This time a more typical trip home, by train and bike, l..
» Crazy text cloud meme - “I have a dream”
17/06/08 08:47 from Matt Didcoe
In response to Myles requests for crazy text meme's and Miles challenge , I took Martin Luther King's “I have a dream” speech and text clouded it. The result: In a few days I'll hopefully post something that might be worth read..
» Apology Tag Cloud
17/06/08 06:24 from Miles' Blog
My mate, Myles Eftos, recently blogged about this great little app, Wordle , which creates a ‘tag cloud' based on text that you can upload. He suggested a meme using your blog content to create a tag cloud, however rather than my own..
» Wordle Meme - Crazy text clouds
16/06/08 14:37 from Bloggy Hell
To draw you all away from the fact that I've been lax in posting this month, here is some graphical distractions. The Wordle meme is simple: Cut and paste the copy from you blog or website, go to Wordle and it generates a crazy text cloud...
» Twitter, Plurk and FriendFeed as discussion tools.
14/06/08 16:30 from Nick Cowie
Following up from my previous post on Conversation vs Noise . This is about carrying out discussions, this is not about status updates like “I just had baked beans on toast for dinner”, nor is it about the reliability of the se..
» Happy Birthday to me!
14/06/08 12:32 from Matt Didcoe
Yes, another day has passed (well, nearly passed here in Perth, WA) and I've aged by yet another year. Got a whole stack of presents including two books from the Pragmatic bookshelf: Deploying Rails Applications and GIS for Web Developers,..
» A few changes happening around here
14/06/08 06:40 from Nick Cowie
If you happen to be reading this post through my website, you might notice a few changes. Which should be hopefully be the first of many, it is time I dragged this blog out of 2006, the last time I did any major changes into 2008. Find Me ..
» Plurk, Twitter, BrightKite, Hellotxt, Ping.fm, FriendFeed et al can they work together?
14/06/08 03:47 from Nick Cowie
Conversation vs. Noise The title might sound like linkbait, picking on some of the new darlings of social networking, but my question is should we be the services using them in combination, flooding the channels with a lot of noise and lit..
» Confessions of a blank generation alpha geek
13/06/08 00:48 from Nick Cowie
Blank Generation It started a couple of weeks beek reading Nathanael B's post on Gen Y workers in the Gen Y workplace . I thought I better check that I was Gen X before commenting, so off to the authority of wikipedia. However, depending o..
» My way home meme
10/06/08 14:45 from Nick Cowie
Ben tagged me with the my way home meme , and being busy last week, I ignored my feed reader until the weekend. I had originally thought I should do it in reverse, take the photos on my way to work and reverse them, because I start work la..
» The iPhone and Australia
10/06/08 13:54 from Matt Didcoe
After hearing the keynote delivered by Steve Jobs in the wee hours of this morning (AWST), the scuttlebutt surrounding the iPhone's release in Australia, in 3G form, was finally confirmed. Currently, two providers are announced as carrying..
» WDS08 are giving an iPhone away and I want to win it.
10/06/08 12:57 from Nick Cowie
Do I want one of those brand new 3G iPhone, YES . But I will wait until what will and see what is going to happen with the offers by all the major telcos in Australia, before committing. One of the big issues for me and probably 100,000 pe..
» PHP is not a framework
09/06/08 12:46 from node.mu
This post started as a comment on Kay's blog post about Akash Mehta's post titled “Last we checked, PHP IS a framework” . But my comment veered off-topic. So here we are. Feel free to recurse back and read what they had to say ..
» Living on the edge of the web
09/06/08 11:46 from Miles' Blog
This really should be filed under a new category ‘ Oh golly, I can't believe I didn't blog about that! ‘ but anyhow… It was announced at BarCamp2.0, a month ago , that the WA Chapter of the Australian Web Industry Associa..
» Another angle on the frameworks debate
08/06/08 06:41 from kay lives here
This post started life as a comment on Akash Mehta’s post on the SitePoint PHP blog Last we checked, PHP IS a framework , but it started to get long and ranty so I moved it over here. I’m allowed to rant on my own blog, right? Akash wa..
» Is Plurk There or Not
07/06/08 15:33 from Man with no blog
Over the last few weeks the armchair communication developers of the world have been solving the woes of the Twitter infrastructure and communication problems. And out of all this advice Plurk has come to light. Plurk is interesting, it's ..
» Midnite Youth Theatre Company redesign
07/06/08 13:28 from Matt Didcoe
For the upcoming production of The Cherry Orchard, the Midnite Youth Theatre Company wanted a new look that put a focus on the current production. A new boilerplate has now been created that will be the standard for upcoming shows. I'm rea..
» MadPilot’s new(ish) phone number
06/06/08 16:31 from Bloggy Hell
Now that I've relocated back into my home office, I've decided to revert back to my old VoIP number: +61-8-6424-8234 . Although Skype was doing a perfectly good job at taking and making phone calls, the NetGear SPH101 Skype phone wasn't re..
» On My Way Home
06/06/08 13:59 from Man with no blog
Well a good friend Ben Winter-Giles has tagged me for an interesting meme. You have to document with a simple camera your journey home. I don't often do memes, but this one is interesting in that it gives a snapshot of our lives in the web..
» Is OAuth Doomed?
05/06/08 15:06 from Man with no blog
I have been watching OAuth and OpenID develop over time, wishing and hoping they would both take root and bloom into something wonderful. Now I think the concepts and ideas behind these two, especially OAuth is a wonderful Idea. What is OA..
» On My Way Homeme
04/06/08 14:39 from Velvet Unravelled
I've been tagged by Ben Winter-Giles for his On my way Homeme . Since I've been really slack about doing the other memes for which I've been tagged I thought I should make up for it. The idea is to take a photographic representation of you..
» Announcing: Black Swan Blogs
03/06/08 15:19 from Matt Didcoe
What is Black Swan Blogs you might ask? Well, in short terms, BSB (I can't keep typing the whole thing ) is a feed aggregator, taking the thoughts, feelings and news of people in Western Australia and melding them into one MASSIVE FEED. Cu..
» Australia gets some web conferences, 2008 edition
03/06/08 14:16 from kay lives here
It's going to be a good year for conferences down under! Next week I'm off to Sydney for WebDU . I'm going to be covering the event for SitePoint and Fusion Authority, and I can't wait – my first post on WebDU at SitePoint is up already...
» Rails 2.1 - now ready for boarding
01/06/08 05:08 from Matt Didcoe
Rails 2.1 is now available as a full release. Standard install method: gem install rails As most of you are probably aware, RubyGems will automatically –include-dependencies now (if your up to date) You can also get it via Git with t..
» For the safety of the swimmers…
29/05/08 09:46 from Bloggy Hell
For the past twelve months, I've been a house mate at the Silicon Beach House - the collaborative, shared office space in the Perth CBD. Having seen a number of arrivals and departures over the past year, it will see it final set of depart..
» Tempered Real World UX
29/05/08 01:00 from Man with no blog
From a user experience view we are always looking for the real world interaction that we can translate into the virtual world. The procedure that we can mirror with an element of user familiarity to leverage of a person's previous experien..
» See me speak at Web Directions South ‘08!
28/05/08 15:14 from Bloggy Hell
I got asked to talk at Web Directions South 08 a couple of months ago, but it was one of those “I won't believe it until I see it in HTML” kind of moments. Well, John and Maxine just announced the speaker list for this year, an..
» Gov 2.0 or circa 1980
28/05/08 14:38 from Man with no blog
Lots of talk of late on Government 2.0, good friend Nick Cowie has a blog searching for examples of it, Stephen Collins is trying to rile it up, Matthew Hodgson muses over it and John Allsopp wonders if the future is now for some, there ar..
» A stark realisation
26/05/08 16:47 from Bloggy Hell
There comes a moment in every career where you realise that there is a whole world outside of what you do. Sure, you don't have to have three PhDs to figure out the world of macrame is significantly different to Ruby on Rails hacking, but ..
» mod_rails hat tip #1
25/05/08 11:12 from Matt Didcoe
If developing a new application on a mod_rails (passenger) install and working in RAILS_ENV=development, it's a good idea to set the VirtualHost config to reflect this: ServerName xxx.yyy DocumentRoot /var/www/xxx.yyy/public RailsEnv devel..
» A multi-touch pad of my very own
22/05/08 14:36 from Bloggy Hell
I simply had to have one. As I previously posted, the ever so clever guy from http://ssandler.wordpress.com/MTmini/ posted instructions for making your own multi-touch (think Microsoft Surface or iPod Touch) pad. So what can any self-respe..
» Multi-touch screen for under $50
22/05/08 02:14 from Bloggy Hell
This is why I love the intarwebs. I have found a project for this weekend. (Go to http://ssandler.wordpress.com/MTmini/ to get the skinny.)
» Step Away from the Machine
22/05/08 01:00 from Man with no blog
Been doing an intense amount of hi-fi site design of late. Nothing wrong with that, I enjoy the creativity. Being challenged to find the design, to produce a professional produce with the bounds of the clients specifications. Moving throug..
» Tweet topic research results
20/05/08 04:04 from Miles' Blog
Browsing through the public timeline , and my own Twitter feeds , I can't help but feel the above completely fabricated results graph is surprisingly accurate. Don't be offended, it's all in good humour. Image: Fictional research graph on ..
» The Buddha joins Twitter
16/05/08 05:01 from Miles' Blog
You may all be interested to learn that Buddha has joined Twitter . OK, maybe not the real Buddha , but twice a day you can receive some of his teachings and inspirational quotes on your Twitter feed. As a testbed for some ideas I have for..
» BarCamp Perth 2.0 - Done and dusted
11/05/08 10:35 from Matt Didcoe
It was a great day weather wise, for staying inside and hanging out with a bunch of geeks (web and non-web). I had grand plans to present a talk about what is happening in the Rails world at the moment. Time however, leading up to BarCamp,..
» Like frameworks? I do
05/05/08 15:30 from kay lives here
I've been a Fusebox gal from way back in the version 2ish days, before versioning was something that was done with any kind of discipline. I still remember the old mailing list days very fondly - there was a very close community that grew ..
