Ben Werdmuller helps leaders at newsrooms, non-profits, and mission-driven organizations to navigate their biggest technology challenges.
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I don't suppose any of the PHP programmers reading this know an easy way to load the content of external pages using HTTP authentication, do you? Aside from in the URL line. That would come in really handy. Meanwhile, I've just made myself the world'
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Here's an interesting one - the InnoDB component that helps keep MySQL ticking along is now owned by Oracle. MySQL is the most popular database system for web applications, which is why we chose it to power Elgg[1]; Oracle is the most powerful corporate database software vendor
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My local install of Elgg now reads in entries from RSS files and aggregates them on a page. A couple of interface tweaks and I'll upload my work to this site, probably over the weekend. Assuming there isn't some kind of almighty programming hiccup, this should
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Microsoft Windows celebrates its 20th birthday this week. I'd post something really acerbic, but I'm sitting at a Windows 2000 workstation; my laptop at home (on which 90% of the Elgg code was written) runs Windows XP. I have a desktop that dual boots Windows 2000
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It's an open secret that I was inspired to write the first draft for Elgg (we'll call it version 0.001) after experiences supporting and programming for one of the closed-source virtual learning environments. I felt, and still feel, that it is unfair for universities to
A full 5% of Elgg.net traffic is from Bloglines. I find that amazing for several reasons. First of all, it's great that people are using the RSS to that extent. Elgg.net got 1.2 million hits in August, so 5% isn't peanuts - and
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Google Reader: an RSS aggregator done Gmail-style. Buggy as hell, but possibly worth keeping an eye on.
Light-hearted but timely: What does Elgg stand for? It stands for using existing, well-used Internet technologies in an educational setting instead of reinventing the wheel! Oh, wait, you're wanting to know if it's an acronym? It's not. Although if you can make it into
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In reponse to this article in The Register, I sent the following to Andrew this morning: Sir, In response to your question, “how good and bad do you think it will get?”, I think the answer is: “pretty good” – even if I unconditionally agree with your assertion that Web 2.
I'd like to congratulate our advisory board member Leonard Lin and the rest of the gang at Upcoming.org for their acquisition by Yahoo. Nice one!
This is the big one: The move is expected to be part of a larger technology initiative in which Sun will help Google build a network to provide Web-based applications that will enable the companies to compete with their common rival, Microsoft Corp. http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/story/
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Ning allows you to create your own web 2.0 widgets. Cool. I think. Or at least, fun to say. PHP developers can customise the internals as much as they like, whereas everyone else can clone other peoples' projects and customise the externals to suit their needs. Apparently this