General
Open GUI library
Yahoo have released their user interface library free under the open source BSD license. Their bid to become darlings of the blogger set continues apace.
Latest
General
Speak for free
Goodbye Skype, it was nice knowing you: the eBay-owned Voice over IP firm has agreed to cripple their software on non-Intel machines. If you log in with a PC based on an AMD chip, as many are, the number of people you can conference with is halved, for no reason
General
Using your resource tab
The resource tab is one of the most powerful features in Elgg. Each resource is a feed of information from either within Elgg or elsewhere on the web, which you can view on its own or together on an aggregated page that looks a bit like a weblog. How does
General
Embedded chat
3Bubbles - another daffy Web 2.0 name - is a way to embed chat rooms in blog posts, using a small piece of code. The interface itself is AJAX-based, so you don't need any extra plugins; just the browser It's in closed beta at the
Ubiquitous computing
I'm writing this on the 5.32 oxford to london. Literally half the carriage - including me - is glued to their mobile phone. They're communicating, but at the same time sitting in a kind of eery silence. Is technology destroying our sense of community? Or
General
Online safety, MySpace and Elgg
Ken Yarmosh is talking about safety and MySpace. Recently there's been a bit of a media furore over the social networking site, and some parents and teachers are correspondingly worried about web technologies their children might be using at school. This, in part, means Elgg, so I thought
Web design in e-learning
Web design from scratch has a good overview of current web style. I love all these pages, with perhaps the exception of LinkedIn; the site it's hosted on isn't bad either. In fact, I actually really like the style of the moment in general: big text,
General
The value of being an underdog
I'm just saying, but after looking at this photo blog of food eaten at Google, I'd like to invite them to buy us out. Like, right now, no consultation required. I'll figure out a way to pay Dave off. Hunger does strange things to
Open source VoIP
OpenZoep is a GPL-licensed open source VoIP client for Windows, Mac and Linux. They're promoting an extension to the XMPP/Jabber spec that would allow for SIP calls using XMPP networks, which would finally allow for an interoperable peer to peer voice system. XMPP really does seem like
Blog growth
The State of the Blogosphere for February 2006 has been released. Of course, it relates more to the blogs that the search engine / aggregator Technorati tracks than the sum total of blogs in the world, but it still makes interesting reading. The service is now tracking more than 50,000
General
Busting through
Dave Winer: How RSS can bust through. I'm tempted to disagree with him here. RSS itself will never bust through; neither will FOAF, RDF, OPML or any other XML-based format. And using a centralised service run by a commercial company? Forget it. It's an easy mistake
General
0.4 bug fix
Elgg v0.4 has a bug where default icons might not be displayed on some screens. This patch fixes it; simply replace the included files. Update: This has been changed as of 9:26am GMT. Thanks to Misja for pointing out the problem.