The other day I got an email from someone asking about being a founding CTO of a tech startup. I replied with some brief advice, but it got me thinking: I've been doing this for a decade now, and was creating projects on the Internet for a full decade before ...
February 25, 2014
My love is like base64 encoding. Lossless and incomprehensible.
My love is like an alphanumeric URL variable. Easily escaped.
My love is like JPEG. It looks good at first but it's full of distortions.
My love is like GIF. Surprisingly hard to say out loud.
My love is like Prolog. Backwards.
My love is like ...
February 15, 2014
1. Elgg
I've written before about how Elgg got its name. I had just recently graduated, and due to an unwise predisposition for flippant humor, I didn't have a single serious email address to my name. I needed one in order to apply for jobs. My full last name is Werdmüller ...
February 13, 2014
From Amber Case's wonderful talk on the Rise of the IndieWeb:
When the storytelling is told by people, not by traction or real implementation, then whoever tells the best story wins.
- Blaine Cook
Her slides are over here.
It strikes me that this quote is a Rorschach test. People like me are likely ...
February 13, 2014
I've just come back from the Day We Fight Back protest, which was held outside the AT&T office where Mark Klein revealed a secret room where the NSA was intercepting communications. Mark himself came out to speak, and it was wonderful to see so many people coming out on the ...
February 12, 2014
Rereading the Guardian article about Elgg, I'd forgotten this detail, which is true:
The idea was conceived in late 2003, when Ben Werdmuller and Tosh were working at Edinburgh University developing e-learning and e-portfolio systems. Werdmuller (an avid blogger) persuaded Tosh (who had just started a PhD in e-portfolios) to start ...
February 7, 2014
The turning point for my first startup came one rainy Friday afternoon, in February 2007.
As TechCrunch reported:
A new open source cross-site social networking service called Explode launched today and looks like a very appealing alternative to the now Yahoo! owned MyBlogLog. Built by UK open-source social network provider Curverider ...
February 7, 2014