Studio 12a

blog, blog, blog it all
blog it if it’s big or small

…blog even if you’re wrong
won’t you blog about this song?

How could anyone resist? This is a fabulous comical youtube clip based on the song “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel. Thank goodness for “fair use” (as long as it stays up). A must watch for Web2.0 junkies.

Subversion (SVN) is a very robust version control system offered by Tigris.org. Subversion offers hooks that can be triggered at various points of the commit process. These hooks can be used to trigger external scripts to perform various tasks. Examples include sending an email about commits and using SVN Notify Mirror to mirror changes to a remote server or local directory.

SVN::Notify::Mirror is a CPAN package created by John Peacock. It uses SVN::Notify as a base and extends this perl Module by adding the ability to push changes to a local or remote mirror. We’ll use this script and a post-commit hook to automatically sync a development server upon commit.

Read the rest »

Eric Feng offers 250 tips on public speaking. Granted, that’s probably more than one wants to read just before speaking but several are very affirming or inspiring.

Follow the 80/20 rule - 80% prepared. 20% impromptu. Being prepared is extremely important but when you are too prepared, you take the fun out of a speech. The 20% spontaneity allows you to milk any situations that arises while you deliver your speech.

Eric also updated his blog with a down-sized list of 50 very valuable public speaking tips. Similar content just minified for those of us with shorter attention spans.

The article “The Unofficial How-To of Open Source” on the website of “Enterprise Open Source” is an interesting analysis on reasons for adopting an Open Source strategy and tips on running an Open Source Project.

Open source software is shifting the software industry into a new paradigm, moving from developing proprietary code behind closed doors to developing code that can be shared, modified and redistributed openly. Key benefits associated with this shift is reducing development cost and software components complexity, developing re-usable common-off-the-shelf software assets, while increasing flexibility and using common enablers. Organizations that embrace the open source model and follow it when it influences positively their ways of building software, will increase their chances to retain their competitive advantage.

My first online article for developer.com came out this week. The article is titled “10 Cool Things You Can Do With JavaScript and YUI“. It’s around 3000 words and includes a working prototype with a source-code download for the lightbox technique using YUI.

Do you have an article suggestion or something web related you would like to know more about? Leave a comment.

In a recent podcast of boagworld, I heard a brief mention of CSS Frameworks. Creating reusable CSS has been on my to-do list for about a year now, but ‘the list’ of to-do’s keeps growing and somehow this never got to the top of the list. Luckily, I found that Mike Stenhouse already published an article on his CSS Framework back in April of 2005. I’ve briefly started one project using Mike’s framework and it seems to work well, besides a difference of naming conventions for page areas.

The idea is pretty simple. Those of us who write CSS  on regular occasion tend to form patterns in markup, CSS styles and naming conventions. Additionally, there are a few standard layouts that we see repeated all over the web. Some patterns are more obvious than others. There’s the left vertical navigation, top horizontal navigation and 1-3 column layouts to name a few. By using a framework, either yours or one by someone like Mike, you should be able to fine tune the CSS to fix browser bugs, change the layout easily and rapidly deploy cross-browser HTML/CSS.

I downloaded a WordPress theme recently that introduced me to Ultimate Tag Warrior, a tag management plugin for WordPress < 2.3.

Ultimate Tag Warrior is a multi-headed hydra of a plugin. It allows you to add tags either through the Write Post page in wordpress in a tag box, on posts using an AJAXy box, and in posts using special syntax from external editors (or internally, if you’d like). From the write post page, you can also get suggestions for tags using the Yahoo! keyword suggestion service. Once you’ve got your tags entered; you enter a realm of interesting ways of doing things with your tags.

Rumors are going around that Google is shutting down Adsense accounts for made for Adsense (MFA) websites. MFA websites have been around since the launch of Google Adsense. Webmasters that have mastered this technique of website creation are rumored to be able to make aroud $70,000 USD per month.

The technique is pretty simple. Websites are created to target high dollar search keywords and populated with Ads (generally, no content). Traffic is driven to the websites using Adwords advertising. A search engine user follows the Adwords Ad, thinking it’s what they are looking for…but they find ads on the website and quickly click through to the end advertiser.

To quote Search Engine Roundtable…

“So if they paid $0.20 per click on AdWords and made $0.25 per click with AdSense, they made $0.05. Simple concept.”

The rumor is being fueled by reports on WebmasterWorld.com from website owners that Google is sending notices of account termination to MFA website owners. At the time of this writing, no comment is known to exist from Google’s AdSenseAdvisor.

I can’t tell you how happy I am it’s spring. Spring, to me, means the beginning of enjoying a wonderful crop season, stopping by the fresh produce stands and a season of fresh herbs from my container garden.

I found a really great website for just this type of interest called Local Harvest. Local Harvest offers a farm search by zip code, allowing you to find farms local to your area throughout the U.S. You can also find Farmer’s Markets, CSA’s, Co-Op’s and shop online for natural products. It would be too much to go into everything that is offered on this site, so you should really check it out yourself.

You’ll see more posts here on food and recipes over the course of the summer, as cooking is one of my favorite hobbies. I’ve also added a new category called ‘Life’ for miscellaneous posts on things other than the web and techy things. I debated on starting a new blog for this since the topic is so different, but I have a hard enough time keeping up with my online life as it is…

Resources:

Local Harvest - http://www.localharvest.org/

I love reading LifeHacker.com. In a recent article, they describe 15 ways to optimize Firefox including limiting RAM usage, keyboard shortcuts (some were new to me), smart keywords for search and deleting urls from your address bar history.

I found that the article was written with the PC in mind, but Mac users generally know how to convert keystrokes. Firefox has previously been hanging and giving the ’spinny ball o’ death’, but I haven’t seen this since making the edits suggested to about:config.

Here’s the article…Lifehacker’s Firefox Tricks.