Archived: My “Social Experiments”

Some of you might have noticed that, prior to my site redesign, I silently placed a couple of applications in my homepage, as a kind of social exploration. After the redesign I no longer had a place for them, and since a few people asked where can they find these piece, I archived them in a more formal location.

"Pulse" was the first one, and it was a proof of concept while testing a database of IP addressed categorized by country, which I got from ip-to-country.com.

"Post(it)" is the last one, and I built as a proof of concept for minimalistic controls, and to cover the homepage during the redesign. Word spread in a short period of time, and now it is just a messy screen full of notes.

I plan to continue developing on these and other info-social experiments. I need to find an appropriate place for them though, as I lost the homepage to the new design.

Macromedia Relaunches Flash as a Platform

In a move that is being received with a smile by the open-source-friendly segment of the Flash development community, Macromedia announced that they will be joining the Eclipse Foundation to create a "next-generation rich Internet application development tool," codenamed Zorn and based on Eclipse. Further more, Macromedia launched a new website and a series of whitepapers forecasting the future of the Flash Platform.

For many of us, the idea of Flash as a viable development platform for RIAs has been a reality for some time. Now, Macromedia is putting it in black-and-white. Built around the strenghts of the Flash Player, Macromedia has built a universe of development tools, server-side technologies, solutions and partnerships that affect directly the way we do business. With what is being announced for Maelstrom (Flash Player 8), Macromedia has proved again that they listen to the community. Some of the stuff coming in the next generation of the Flash player, according to today's announcements:

- File upload and download
- Support for GIF, PNG and Progressive JPEG image formats
- Better font readability
- Enhanced Video codecs

All of this, together with the ability of developing Flash applications within an open-source environment such as Eclipse, which has been embraced by an important segment of the Flash community, is enough to have everybody happy and waiting to see what else will come after Maelstrom is released.

PHP also Turning Ten

What do you know, PHP and Coldfusion have almost the same age. June 8th is the 10th anniversary of Rasmus Lerdorf's original Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) announcement.

To celebrate, New York PHP is organizing a party at the Remote Lounge, next Wednesday starting at 6:30 pm.

[via NYPHP]

New Design (Almost) Finished

As some of you might have already noticed, I took some time over the long weekend to implement the new design I had been working on, during the past few weeks. I just waited until today to make the "official" announcement, after getting some preliminary feedback. If you haven't seen it yet, I invite you to do so and leave any comments or sueggestions you may have.

I have noticed that spammers are already working on cracking my new comment system. I feel this time their probabilities of success are slim, but I don't want to get into too much detail just yet, just in case. I hope these spam-free days last for a while, it really sucks having to go through all incoming comments, when 99% of them are spam...

With this, the new blog enters in beta. I still have to fix a few details, especially regarding spare documents that have to be integrated to the template. However, the whole thing is stable enough to start testing it. If you find anything not working as it is supposed to, please let me know.

In future posts, I will be discussing some of the main features of the new design and blogging engine, while documenting lessons learned. I've tried to "eat my own dog food" regarding Usability, so I would really appreciate any feedback you can provide.