walkah: striving towards mediocrity

I'm really excited about today's (beta) release of google gears for safari. Why? because, as I've just tested, but enabling the plugin for safari it makes it available for all of my fluid app Site Specific Browsers (SSB's).

If you pay close attention here, you'll know that I'm a big fan of fluid and the idea of SSB's in general. I use apps for Remember the Milk (my current task management / GTD tool) and Google Reader extensively. Both of these sites support gears already for use offline (read: on airplanes). However, by using Fluid (based on Safari's webkit), I had to forgo gears/offline access. Thus, when traveling, I'd taken to opening a tab in firefox for each of those sites (if I remembered, and as long as I didn't need to otherwise restart firefox, etc).

Well, I just had a wonderful experience. I downloaded gears for safari, installed it... and instantly all of my fluid instances were gears enabled. Love it!

I'm certainly not the first to post about this, but it looks like Drupal will have a strong showing at SXSW Interactive 2009. There's even a front page post on drupal.org to bring awareness. A group of us from Lullabot went last year and we had an absolute blast. If you haven't been, sign up now!

The panel picker is live and I suggest you *all* vote for Drupal with Its Pants Off (you know you wanna). What's really exciting, though, is the long list of other Drupal panels on the list.

Looks like there'll be lots of Drupal in Austin next March... even http://sxsw.com/ is Drupal powered!

My hotel is booked. See you there!

Sadly, I won't be there... but you should be!

I have to sit this one out due to scheduling conflicts, but the posted schedule looks really good. Of course, the Lullabot team members going are all over the schedule. Everyone should attend webchick's intro to testing and be sure to attend the testing party - she has promised chocolate!

Scanning through the schedule, it's nice to see that fellow Toronto Drupal Users Group member, Emma Jane, will be giving a presentation on Drupal for small business networks.

So, while my socks and I will only be there in spirit, you should be there in person. Register now!

I finally "re-launched" my blog last night, after tinkering for a few months. I'm now running (at the time of writing) Drupal 6.3. More interesting, however, is that my site is almost entirely powered now by Views 2.

The biggest visible change is the home page. Inspired in part by Dave Shea's lovely blog, I wanted to make my front page shorter. So now, I'm displaying the latest full post, with 9 previous titles only. This is all done with views (using the awesome new "attachment" display type).

The other interesting bit is that I'm using the latest version of twitter module so that the "twitter" block on the right is actually views2 powered as well (and gets cached).

I'm sure I'll keep tweaking, but I dig it. How about you?

If you're amongst the handful of people wondering where I've been and why it's been so quiet here... I've been on the road. Most recently, I was offline on vacation. Resting and recharging for the busy fall to come.

If I owe you an email - it's coming, I promise. If you like pictures - here they are.

As someone who spends a fair bit of time on the road, I've become increasingly paranoid about my backup strategy as well as my general "travel kit". To address both, I made a purchase recently that I'm so in love with I just had to blog it:

The G-Drive Mini from G-Tech is an awesome little portable hard-drive. I got the 250GB, dual interface model and so far it has been wonderful. At 250gb, it has plenty of room to store my Time Machine backups as well as any extra files I (might) need on the road.

It's a really nice looking little unit: aluminum case (that matches my macbook pro), with it's own heat sink. It's quiet enough that I hardly notice it. AND it comes with it's very own leather carrying case.

I'm happy with the new addition to my travel bag, and I'd recommend it for yours as well.

My favorite web browser slash social movement, Firefox, released version 3.0 yesterday. To generate some buzz around the new release, the folks at Mozilla are trying to set a Guinness World Record for software downloads in 24 hours. They're initial target was 5 million downloads. As of this writing, they're at 6.5 million downloads and counting - with 6 hours to go!

I also spent a few hours last night at the Mozilla Toronto launch party. Mozilla is full of great people doing great work... it was nice to help celebrate their latest milestone.

If you haven't yet, go now. Get Firefox 3.

Last night I put together a simple module for Drupal to implement the XRDS-Simple spec. It is based loosely on the xrds-simple wordpress plugin.

XRDS-Simple is an important piece of the DiSo project. From the XRDS-Simple spec::

XRDS-Simple provides a format and workflow for the discovery of resources metadata, and other linked resources. As web services continue to grow, applications utilize a wider range of web services and resources across multiple providers. XRDS-Simple allows providers to document their resources in a machine-readable way, which can be automatically discovered by consumer applications.

So, check it out: http://drupal.org/project/xrds_simple .

I had an interesting e-mail exchange yesterday with Chris Messina and a handful of folks from the DiSo project about "DiSo for Drupal". For those of you who haven't heard of it DiSo is:

DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris puts it: “to build a social network with its skin inside out”.

See, Chris recently started a new job working on DiSo full-time at Vidoop. With the announcements of Facebook connect and Google's Friend Connect, there is a battle raging for control of your identity and your relationships. DiSo, in many respects, is the free open answer for the rest of the internet. It combines several free, open standards that already exist in the wild like OpenID, OAuth, and Microformats for exchanging identity and "friend" information.

So, Chris reached out a handful of us Drupal folks about getting on board. The good news is: we, the Drupal community, are already well on our way:

• OpenID (in Drupal 6.x core)
• OpenID Provider : http://drupal.org/project/openid_provider
• OpenID Attribute Exchange : http://drupal.org/project/openid_ax (in progress via Google SoC)
• OAuth : http://drupal.org/project/oauth
• Atom : syndication only - http://drupal.org/project/atom - might be nice to have a basic envelop generator/parser implementation
• XMPP : http://drupal.org/project/jabber , http://drupal.org/project/xmpp and http://drupal.org/project/xmpp_server (the latest of which is maybe the most promising)
• vCard / hCard : http://drupal.org/project/vcard

The big holes at the moment (from a DiSo perspective) are XRDS-Simple support and better support for microformats - specifically XFN.

From the list of Drupal modules above, you may notice that this is an area of interest of mine :-P I look forward to working with the rest of the DiSo project and the Drupal community on this stuff!

My love affair with Fluid.app continues. The latest release (0.9.1.4) includes support for running your SSB as a Menu Extra (i.e. something in the OS X (check out the video).

As shown in the video, I think the best use for this new feature is in conjunction with iPhone sites. In the video, Tod shows creating an app for http://i.brightkite.com/. I've been using this to check-in on BrightKite. It's nice, unobtrusive and easy in lieu of BrightKite's own, native desktop apps.

My other favorite (pictured) is http://i.rememberthemilk.com/. Remember the Milk's iPhone app has a nice feature that the "Today" tasks list also shows overdue tasks (which I haven't figured out how to do in the standard web app).

More and more of my webapp usage is moving to fluid these days. I can't say enough good things about this app. And google gears support is coming!!