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.
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?
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.
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.
There are a lot of articles around the place giving generally good advice on how to be a better blogger and get noticed. Alastair Rankine highlights one of the key problems with slavishly following this advice – you become boring:
I was initially attracted to Atwood’s blog for its relatively simple premise and smart delivery. With startling regularity over an extended time he managed to deliver bite-sized morsels relating to the stated domain of programming and human factors. He writes well and generally illustrates his point in a clear and easy to digest style. It’s quite engaging.
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It seems quite apparent that Jeff Atwood has stepped outside his expertise recently, and that this is something he did comparatively rarely in the past. I haven’t gone groveling through his past posts, but from my recollection I’m pretty sure his hit rate used to be better.
Tomorrow is a day I’ve been looking forward to for quite a few years. Dylan Just, one of my best mates from uni, is starting at Ephox. He’s not yet on Planet Ephox but I think we’re fixing that tomorrow morning.
Indeed that has been fixed. Welcome on board Dylan! Any other Ephox folk who want to start blogging – just let me know!
Some interesting responses to my complaint about feed readers stripping CSS:
There’s a common misperception that my complaint was about all styles but in fact I was just referring to inline styles on the basis that they are actually part of the content, not just presentation. Sam Ruby points to a feed from Wikipedia that is exactly the use case I had in mind. Many of the comments however want to strip styles to preserve a uniform look in a “river of news” type of reader, for example Nick’s comment:
I got some really positive feedback on the various community/openness projects that I’ve been spearheading within Ephox from one of our OEMs today. Apparently they’ve discovered our early access program and are already trying out our brand new Express Edit functionality1. It’s really nice to actually hear from clients that these elements are useful as we haven’t really managed to build up a community, even if we are seeing gradually increasing traffic. For a while now we’ve had potential new employees commenting on Planet Ephox which is great, but we haven’t really heard from clients taking advantage of it, even if we’ve seen some of the indirect effects via analytics and support cases.
Mindy McAdams gives advice about how students should test their online page designs, the trouble is the statistics she’s looking at are lying to her.
You can see that although the screen resolutions larger than 1024 x 768 add up to more people (4,512 vs. 3,524), the single most common resolution in use (among people who read this blog, that is) is 1024 x 768. You can also see that the number of people viewing the site at the old standard, 800 x 600, is quite small.
Conclusion: It is sensible to design this blog to look good at a resolution of 1024 x 768, and to test it at some higher resolutions to make sure it doesn’t become unusable.
I have to agree with “Jon”, Gruber (John with a h) does have a habit of linking to sites that link to him regardless of how good they are. For instance, this link list entry was a complete waste of time…
I wonder if there’s any limit to it?
I discovered one of our client’s company blogs1 tonight because they mentioned they’d just upgraded to EditLive! 6. Reading through the backlog I discovered they’ve found a clever way to reduce the impact of form spam that I hadn’t come across before2 – only accept the submission if it uses multipart/form-encoding not just a plain post. Like most techniques it won’t work if everyone does it but it’s another interesting way to differentiate.