Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
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Today is the first day of National Novel Writing Month, a terrifying exercise where thousands of would-be writers attempt to write a complete novel during November. It rarely works out for me - although my great life aspiration is to be a novelist, I have a nasty habit of going
We're doing a thought experiment about hosting a small amount of advertising on Elgg.net. The behaviour would be as follows: Logged in users would not see ads by default, but could switch them on in their account settings if they wanted to support Elgg.net. Users viewing
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This is a more personal (and sillier) video blog post, about being back in Edinburgh and a little bit about the origins of Elgg. I've used it kind of as an excuse for more editing practice - I've been using Windows Movie Maker, but I wonder
Optimising page load time from a Google engineer. The techies among you may be interested in his findings, including the major discovery that splitting static files over four hostnames dramatically decreases perceived response time. Worth a read if web administration is even a small part of your job.
The mystery of the Elgg name continues! Douglas's post made me laugh out loud. Thanks for the smile :) I'm pretty sure I've mentioned the actual origin of the name here before, but for now, I will remain tight-lipped and hope that Elgg joins Google
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For the past couple of days I've been in Barcelona in order to attend the Bazaar Project's seminar, Hey Dude, Where's My Data? Flippant name, important concept (one that I've been banging on about for ages in this blog): the free tools
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This is an experiment with Google Video and subtitling. Adding subtitles to movies hosted on Google Video is really easy; there's a brief tutorial on their official site. {{video:http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-5327937454848470194&hl=en-GB}} It seems to work, but note that the
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As reported by my guilty pleasure blog Techcrunch, Technorati (the blog search engine) have announced support for OpenID. From the blog post: The movement to spread Open ID aims to make our lives easier, our data more secure and help users avoid closed silos from big vendors throwing their weight
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Video is, after all, another way to express yourself online. This one's streamed from Youtube, but I'll see if I can work out a way to even have video embedded straight from Elgg. {{video:http://www.youtube.com/v/EMhaRAmzKH0}}
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You can now embed videos from popular sites like Google Video, Youtube and Photobucket in your Elgg blog. To do this, you'll need to find the 'embed HTML' code for the video site you're looking at, and extract the URL inside the src tag.
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We've been looking at new offices for Curverider, but hadn't quite reckoned on how painful the experience would be. Dave remarked that it's like finding student digs, with exactly the same range of quality from both accommodation and landlords. One particularly memorable space we
Dave and I have a project idea and are looking for a cartoonist to draw a couple of reusable frames. Anyone out there good at drawing?