Rob wanted to know where I’ve been getting the clip art images on my recent posts. They’re from the seriously cool, but overly hard to use, Open Clip Art Library. They have a ton of SVG images so when combined with Inkscape can be converted to PNG images at any size. I wound up downloading an old archive release of the library which includes PNG versions of all the images and now use OS X to browse and search.

I’ve got a copy of each of the PNG images in their own directory which I can use coverflow to flick through, or I can use spotlight to search the full collection which includes text files containing the key words and info for each image. Combining the two I can easily find the image I want and preview a bunch of them. I then use the image editor built into EditLive! to add a drop shadow for that bit of extra polish.

The Open Clip Art Library seem to be in a sticky situation of trying to import all these old images into their new system so they can be better searched etc. The search seems to work fairly well, but lists the results as text rather than just letting you quickly see the image which is why the library is so hard to use. I definitely sense an EditLive! plugin in my future…

I’m keen to investigate the project some more and see if a little coding work couldn’t solve most of these issues, but getting started in a new code base takes time and I just haven’t had a big enough block of time to dig into it yet. It also seems like the project has only recently become active again which is a good sign.

So a big thanks to whoever the team is behind the open clip art library, it’s great stuff and hopefully I can jump in and help out soon.

Ephox provides a bunch of different sites with feeds to help people keep up to date about what’s happening with our software and the company.  For example, LiveWorks! helps you learn more about our products and get the most out of them, the releases blog keeps you up to date with the latest stuff and the official Ephox blog has all the company news. Then of course there’s a range of blogs by Ephox employees like this one and they’re all gathered up at People@Ephox. So guess which feed is the most popular by far?

Yep, People@Ephox. Now, People@Ephox obviously includes the posts from all our official blogs so you get the hints and tips from LiveWorks!, the release notifications and the official company news but the majority of posts that come through are from employee’s blogs discussing random stuff from Guitar Hero, to rebuilding PCs, touring around the Australian outback and even sometimes talking about work. Add to that the fairly significant number of visits to the actual People@Ephox site as well and it’s even more impressive.

Personally, I think that’s fantastic. To be honest, when I put together People@Ephox, I didn’t really expect it to be that popular – almost just checking off the “hip company that cares about it’s users” list. We do genuinely care about our users and I’m always looking for ways to stay in touch with them and make sure they’re getting the most out of our products but I would have thought the majority of people these days would only be interested in the more official sites. I tend to subscribe to employee’s blogs for companies that I deal with, but everyone keeps telling me how unusual I am. At least in this case they’re not entirely right (though in many others they definitely are).

Companies spend a huge amount of time building up contact lists and trying to get clients to opt-in to receive newsletters and whatever else and while they certainly go out to far more people than People@Ephox does, there’s a really important difference.  People@Ephox really hasn’t done anything to make it easy to opt-in to. There’s no email subscriptions, no fancy Web 2.0 buttons to subscribe in a million different web based readers, not even the marketing department obligatory call to action, just an RSS feed, and people subscribe.  I’ll bet (hope) they’re far more interested in the content too.

So to all of our clients, partners and users who come to read this – thanks for taking an interest. I’d love to stay up to date with you and your companies too so please do post the URL to your blog in the comments whether it’s official or unofficial and even if it never mentions anything to do with EditLive!

UPDATE: Since it’s so easy to do, now you can subscribe via email. Just visit the site, put your email address in the box, solve the captcha and click the link in the email you get. Don’t forget to thank the spammers for making the internet such a pain…

Got a couple of good comments on my last post about NewsGator Syncing that I thought were worth following up on. Firstly, Greg Reinacker points to the article I had in mind about how NewsGator polls the feeds, and Andy pointed me to this forum posting about it which shows how to see why feeds aren’t updating.

When I go and look at my feeds I find a whole bunch reported as having errors from the source of the feed – obviously why they’re not updating. There’s just one problem, even Andy’s comments are marked as broken:

Comments for Andy's blog All Error from the source of the feed 6/22/2008 12:37

So Andy, when did you break your comments feed, how do you plan to fix it given that it’s hosted by WordPress.com and what do you think the chances are that it was a temporary error that’s now caused NewsGator to barf and stop pulling down your comment feed?

It gets worse:

Google Blog Search: EditLive All Authentication failed 5/16/2008 1:17:27 AM

So did Google screw up or did NewsGator? I think you can toss a coin on that one. After going through and pinging all my feeds there’s suddenly 41 new items from those dead feeds dating as far back as February that NewsGator was hiding from me.

I think Greg’s posted summed up the problem with the current approach nicely:

Something I’ve been thinking about is some kind of status page or something where someone can type in the name of a feed, and we’ll display status for that feed (including why it’s in the penalty box if it is)…we’ve resisted doing this because it’s just one of those things our users shouldn’t have to worry about.

User’s shouldn’t have to worry about this! NewsGator needs to do a much better job at pulling feeds back out of the penalty box or better yet, get rid of the penalty box altogether. There are just way too many feeds out there that are broken in some way and way too many ways that a site might time out because of connection problems between NewsGator and them or a maintenance window or whatever. I just want to read the news when it comes through and I want NewsGator to stop getting in the way and make that happen.

PS: Apologies for the number of comments that have been incorrectly marked as spam, the anti-spam system isn’t working out too well and the feed that notifies me of marginal comments to review was being eaten by NewsGator (they had some down time a while back so it obviously got permanently moved to the penalty box).

I’m commuting to work these days since Ephox has a sweet office in Windsor and while I’m there by myself at the moment its still nice to get out of the house. Anyway the point is I now have 30 to 40 minutes each day walking to the train station, waiting for trains or sitting on the train. In the mornings this is the perfect opportunity to review email and feeds but in the afternoon there aren’t many of those so the trip is somewhat boring. Of course this is the perfect use case for audio books an podcasts so I’m going to have to try a few out. Previously I haven’t bothered with podcasts because the information density is too low. Its so much more efficient to read text instead of listening to someone talk. Its rare that emotion and speaking tone really adds anything to technical discussions. If you have spare time sitting on a train though that’s not really a consideration so you may as well cover off that extra content that isn’t provided as text.

I come from a family of teachers and despite running for the technological hills myself, still wound up marrying a teacher, so I’m surprisingly familiar with schools, teaching and technology in schools. It also helps that I’ve had a couple of jobs running IT in schools and I’ve always kept an interest in how technology is being used to aid teaching.

It should come as no surprise then that I was quite interested in Mark Ahlness’ post about a new WYSIWYG editor being added to the blog software his third grade students have been using. Now firstly, it’s cool that third graders are blogging – it gives them an interesting place to practice writing and by being interesting and novel, hopefully develops an interest in writing. After all, behind most learning there’s fun and passion.

Allowing teachers to teach writing in this new medium is, for me at least, huge. Now, I've of course got kids who will go nuts over fonts, colors, pictures, links, etc, etc – because they look so cool. Some teachers see this as a nightmare. OMG, the kids are just going to waste their time, etc, etc. Well, get a grip and teach them, I say. To me this is a dream come true – a chance to teach my kids that, as much as content, design matters – to borrow a phrase from Dean Shareski. And content does indeed come first, yes it does.

This is the point where we all learn from 3rd graders. Design matters and design is as much a part of the actual content as it is part of the site layout. Having an editor that lets users express their meaning rather than just enter text is really important. If you’ve locked your CMS down to the point where content authors can’t do anything but write text, you’ve probably gone too far and you’re now through out visual content – not just formatting. The key is in finding the balance and I’m really glad to see that third graders are getting the opportunity to experiment and find that balance because that’s the only way to learn.