SE Radio aims at quality – rather than quantity
It's been a while since I wrote here - been too busy otherwise. Follow up posts on the Web DSL are in the making, but today I have some other news.
The SE Radio team announced they will be lowering the frequency of their PODCasts to once every 4 weeks instead of once every 2 weeks. Reasons are busy schedules mainly - guess that could be considered a pay-off of doing a good job.
Anyway, check out their continuing PODCasts at http://www.se-radio.net
The Google Wonder Wheel
Thanks to Twitter I only needed 6 months to discover the existence of the Google Wonder Wheel. It's been there since May, but I only just now learned about it in an article about how children search the web to find out about.
What is it?
The wheel basically resembles a multi-level mindmap, that allows you to see where you are going when following a thread of search results. When you search, next to a list of resulting pages, videos and images you get a small mindmap like image with your query in the middle and a set of links to (groups of) search results around it. When you click a link, another similar wheel is added, but centered around the search term you clicked. The image next to this post shows the image I got after searching for 'domain specific languages' and then clicking 'domain specific modeling' on the wheel.
With each click, the shape of the mindmap changes, showing always the wheel you came from, and the wheel for the term you came from. Next to the wheel, the search results (pages, images, and videos) for the term you clicked are shown, in the familiar way.
Useful!
I like this idea, and I'll be using it a lot from now on when researching topics of interest. I've been creating my own mindmaps on-and-off for years, although not as structurally as some, and this will only make it easier to do so when collecting input for articles, columns and blog posts.
How could I miss that?
As Steven Kelly kindly pointed out, my RSS and Atom feeds were broken. No idea why, but they were….
Anyway they’re working again, if people have the right links that is….
Technorati Tags: Blogging
Updated blog template
Tonight I installed the Slate template on this blog. It has a neat black and white look, a built-in contact form and an archive function.
A few things needs to be implemented at a later date:
- I left the Search facility disabled, because the style sheet does not integrate it neatly into the look of the rest of the template.
Categories are not shown with the article
Apart from this, I need to fix the fact that comments are disabled by default if I post through ScribeFire (from within Firefox). The XML-RPC interface offered by TextPattern is a lot faster than the one I had with Serendipity, by the way.
Switched to Textpattern
Today I completed the switch to Textpattern for this blog. This engine is smaller (in footprint) than Serendipity and has less (to me) useless features. The site will change it’s look gradually over the next couple of weeks and months, moving away from the default style to my own personalised blog again.
Oh – and I did loose all comments in the conversion process, due to a stupid feature of Serendipity: a full RSS feed does not include comments. I still have the database though, so I might republish the more relevant ones later.
Weblog upgrades and software development issues
It’s been a week since this blog went down due to security issues at my hosting provider. Nothing serious, in fact they were upgrading security measures in PHP and MySQL, to prevent piracy and other mischief. As a result, a number of security settings were enabled which disabled some (weak in sense of security) functions in my weblog. After an upgrade to PHP5, things were fixed, but it took me another 2 days to find out that my Serendipity engine was not able to deal with that because it relied on experimental PHP4 features. This proves two things that I’ve seen before in software engineering:
- Using experimental features of a platform in a product is stupid
- Quality attributes (like security) cannot easily be added to a product after development of functionality. Take them into account from the start.
Many thanks to the people at HostingExtreme for working on a secure hosting environment, and for helping me fix this.
Alive…
Been quiet for a bit, but expect some posts about the following topics in the short to medium term here:
- In The relationship between domain specific modeling and variability management in product families
- More on architecture tradeoffs</li><li>Music: Releasing old vinyl albums on CD – can I create a business out of that?
- Meanwhile, I’m recovering work rhythm after 3 weeks of vacation, and trying to get over my frustration with the behaviour of Tour de France cyclists that use doping, or lie to their employers. This has nothing to do with sports anymore….
New blog engine
Just replaced my old WordPress installation with Serendipity. New looks, new toys, and I got it working in less than an hour. Enjoy!
Visitors
Strange – according to web server statistics I get 112 visits per month, divided over 60 unique visitors. Yet nobody ever comments on what I wrote – is it that bad?
Translating old articles
I just posted the first in a series of articles. The original articles were published in Dutch, but they seem worthwhile publishing in English on this site.
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