Number One

Or, never underestimate the importance of have a lieutenant when building a community-driven project. If you don’t go down with the ship and go MIA, your number one can help pick up the pieces.

“Over the past month, a lot of concern has been expressed on the Blueprint mailing list. Olav, the project founder, has not been heard from since he updated the framework to version 0.7 in February, and the last sign of any activity from him was 2 months ago on his Twitter account.”

Sure, it’s your baby and you want complete control, but do the right thing by your community and appoint a second. A coup may solve things now, but what happens when/ if the owner returns?

Sex Talk

Richard writes of a fascinating experiment — involving a bot written in python and sex chat via IRC — the results make for a slightly unusual yet (strangely) interesting insight into the male drive to procreate.

“Weekends are boring, so today I set myself a project to stave off boredom. This is part of the result. I downloaded Pyborg, and set it up to join 6 of the most active sex-oriented IRC channels on Dalnet.”

That some persisted in trying to ‘get it on’ despite discovering lonelygirlrach was actually a bot is both a sad and-yet-unsurprising reflection on how people actively tend to fantasise and ‘fill in the blanks’ when conversing with those they cannot see.

Someone really should hire that man.

Dead Already

Lucas needs to pass on Star Wars to someone else. Or kill it, permanently. Cameron Hunt puts it best:

“After this movie, it’s ensuing tie-in TV-series, and the upcoming live-action show (which might as well be titled Days Of Our Jedi), the cash cow will be beaten, dead, buried, rotten, yet exhumed on Lucas’ egotistical whim.”

This is the droll, tired and life-sucking crap Star Wars has become. You’ll find more life in your refrigerator.

George, shut it down. Now.

Electro Dial

The following comment matches my own considered view — a computer calling me tells me you do not care about either your product, or the consumer you wish to form a relationship with. Thus, neither do I.

“I will not hold the line while I wait for someone to try and sell me something I don’t want. Whatever software you’re using to dial people and then drop them in a queue, get rid of it. Least effective marketing strategy ever.”

No Explore

Joen unleashes the pent-up-grey within us all and launches a new design — replete with a special message for Internet Explorer 6 users:

“Fullpage zoom is only available in modern browsers — nearly all browsers built after the year 2001, or in humanspeak: not IE6. That means users of said browser aren’t welcome here any more. That includes potential clients for my webdesign business; yep, I’m that serious. I won’t build your crap anymore!”

I admire anyone that can tell one-quarter-and-a-bit of the worlds browsing community to “get bent”.

Spiced Hams

Twitter continues to suffer load issues. The thing that continues to strike me as awkwardly inefficient, is the functionality around the ability to ‘follow’ everyone. That’s an inherently flawed design as the one-to-many link typically means the spammer is receiving millions of (waste) updates a day. Many spammers equals endless load.

“To combat aggressive following directly we have recently imposed new limits on following—spammy accounts following to many users have been drastically curbed. Those that existed prior to this new limit await review.”

About fucking time — there should have been a zero-tolerance policy on this from day one. Anyone automatically following everyone else isn’t there to listen — a simple limit on followers-per-day is all it takes.

Desk View

Joen updates us with progress at Deskvu, replete with new community involvement options — you can even go noshop-ing for prints.

“Resident digital life refurbishing outlet, Deskvu, or in humanspeak: website holding wallpapers, has been updated. There’s a refreshed layout, an updated frontpage and most interestingly: an option for you to submit your own wallpapers. Woohoo!”

Foxed Search

Shaun has been busy again and has added great new language translation functionality to Shortwave.

“Shortwave has a new default trigger. The tr trigger is short for ‘Translate the current page’.”

Unfortunately, whilst the Shortwave Javascript bookmarklet will pass the currently viewed tab as a variable, Firefox’s built-in search function, and thus Shortwave Search does not have any such functionality.

I am exploring ways to try and overcome this limitation (if at all possible) — existing search capabilities are not affected however.

Building Roads

The advantage of ignoring market research and massaged studio numbers on ‘everything’ is that you get to build something that you want to build.

“Interesting how influential people like Henry Ford, Steve Jobs and Andrew Stanton all ignore their audience or customers.”

It’s not a new concept and Pixar certainly aren’t the first to shun industry numbers — although I’m sure it helps that they can afford to do so — Kevin Smith has managed to do it more than once on a shoe-string budget.

Hicks Review

John Hicks provides an account of his most recent pursuit in taming Expression Engine — and comes to an entirely sensible and smart conclusion.

“Once people got wind that I’d been trying out Expression Engine, I’ve been badgered with the question “Which one should I use: Textpattern or Expression Engine?”.”