everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Year: 2005

  • Sarcasm & Vitriol

    The enormity of the suffering and absurdity of the federal government’s response is beginning to sink in. Some are turning to sarcasm:

    Two images transposed by mrfurious, President Bush posing with a new guitar given to him while he was visiting a San Diego Airforce Base the day after Katrina hit New Orleans. The original photo can be found here but I think everyone agrees that this is going to be a photo op that Bush is going to want to forget.

    Others are just plain angry. Listen to the full interview of Ray Nagin, the Mayor of New Orleans. Very powerful stuff, his outburst struck a chord with the interviewers and left them speechless.

    That was yesterday when tempers were fraying at the lack of response. The President later admited that the initial response was not enough and, thankfully, we now see that food and water is getting through.

  • Katrina Resources

    Four sites that I want to highlight that are excellent sources of information about Katrina.

    Earthlink has put up a site where you can search for someone or add information on how to reach someone. They also provide links to other sites that provide the same information.
    HurricaneHelp

    Craigslist has put up a page with links to all the various relief organizations and information on how you can help.
    Katrina 2005

    Metroblogging New Orleans     is covering the disaster from the local angle.

    The Inderdictor is a LiveJournal user who looks after one of the few (maybe only) ISPs running in New Orleans (he’s on diesel power). Minute-by-Minute postings of the chaos on the streets.

  • RSS feeds for Salesforce

    You gotta love it. Ex-Newsgator developer, Charlie Wood has attached RSS feeds to salesforce.com. If you have a salesforce.com subscription, you can now subscribe to a feed of your Open Opportunities or Open Escalations. This has been out since July and is now in 2.0 – I’m only now caught wind of it.

    On their TypePad-powered blog they are taking feedback from their customers and announcing new features so if you’re a user, this is a feed you’ll want to subscribe.

    Charlie’s venture, Spanning Partners, has the tagline, “RSS-enabling the enterprise, one application at a time.” Cool, I can’t wait to see what’s next!

  • Serendipitous Audio Streaming

    Now joining last.fm is a new service, Pandora, which supplements revenue from affiliations with Amazon and Apple with a very reasonable subscription fee ($36/year, $12/quarter). The interface works better for me but that’s mostly because they’ve simplified the number options they make available. Unlike Last.fm, you cannot tag your music collection nor does it monitor what music you play to adjust your profile which is what I find so fascinating about last.fm.

    Last weekend I had friends over for dinner and had last.fm’s “vocal jazz” tag streaming all night long and we were constantly surprised with the things passed our way – Judy Garland, rare Louis Armstrong, the occasional spoken word rap, all like rare cheeses on a silver platter.

    Last.fm is worth it if you invest the time to manage your profile and feed the ecosystem – Pandora is more for the person that wants to boot up, login, and start listening right away.

    One point in Pandora’s favor – they have a Movable Type blog so they can post on their plans for the future.

  • Round Up of Round Ups

    It’s that time again. Both Kottke and MacManus post lengthy on the inevitable coming together of web services into a unified Web OS. The state of web 2.0.

    GoogleOS? YahooOS? MozillaOS? WebOS? – Jason Kottke
    Web as Platform Mash-Ups – Richard MacManus

  • Infoworld on Blogs as lightweight content management

    InfoWorld surveys the corporate blogging landscape and sees them as a right-sized solution to basic content management. If you’re publishing a website, you’re managing content. Yet, if you go shopping around for a traditional content management solution, the enterprise software vendors will give you a six figure estimate with a healthy “services” chunk thrown in.

    Deploying a full-blown ECM (enterprise content management) system to address basic corporate content publishing and
    workflow needs has been likened to trying to kill a fly with a rocket launcher. A more suitable solution may lie in souped-up blogging tools, which by design simplify content publishing.

    I couldn’t have said it better myself. From Blog tools tackle content management.

  • Movable Type 3.2

    The pop of a champagne cork at Noon today signaled that Movable Type 3.2 has been pushed out for general release. Jay, Brad, Ezra, Anil, Walt, and too many countless others to list all pulled together and have launched a product for which they should be really, really proud.

    I’m always amazed at the depth of talent here and how Six Apart can consistently launch products which are not only powerful publishing platforms but also lightweight (the .zip file of the full install is a dainty 1.7MB) and  elegant in design.

    Administrative Dashboard,
    Plug-in based spam filters,
    A template picker,
    all this and much, much, more

    We’re running a back-to-school special and knocking $30 off the price of our personal editions until the end of September or you can go to our hosting partners and get an account with Movable Type pre-installed. One of our ProNet consultants already jumped on the bandwagon and is offering to upgrade your MT install starting at $40.

    Amidst all this, there’s still room for humor with nice little touches such as a shit-colored Junk folder and a little retro-badge in hommage to the Netscape of yore.

  • Six Apart Mascot

    OK, I can no longer resist. My colleagues from my previous employer would appreciate this because I always was going on about how we needed a mascot to liven up our image.

    Say hello to Toph & TophToph the official TypePad mascot.

  • The lowdown on RSS Feeds

    Feeds, feeds, feeds. What are they and what can they do for me? How do I read them and how do I make them? All of us at Six Apart get these questions everyday. For this very reason, Anil’s written up a great summary. Without further ado, the Six Apart Guide to Feeds.

    Please resist the urge to click on that little orange button, it doesn’t do anything but confuse. Next generation browsers will take care of this confusing behaviour once and for all just as Apple’s Safari is doing for Mac users today.