Success! After reading the Macromedia article linked to in the previous entry, I was able to successfully create a VERY basic weblog viewer in Flash reading an XML file generated by Movable Type with a slightly customized template. It wasn’t too bad at all.
See the results here.
The time has come. I’m being pulled from more than one direction to learn to integrate Flash MX 2004 and XML… The journey begins tonight and it begins right here.
Today I found a decent online tool for creating color schemes. It’s different from others available in that it almost forces you to use a “good” color scheme. Many color scheme programs will let you do just about anything. While the flexibility has it’s advantages, if you’re color scheme challeneged, it almost defeats the purpose of the software.
Anyway, I installed it here… http://marcusvorwaller.com/colormatch/ . Check it out.
Also… while I was configuring the database, I found a site I did awhile back that started out as a portfolio site. It’s here: http://marcus.vorwaller.cc. I figure it’s not linked anywhere else, why not put one to it here 🙂
If you’re interested in putting your family tree online, there’s only one way to go–PhpGedView. Most genealogy programs will export to the common GEDCOM format and aside from a webserver that supports PHP, that’s all you need. In fact, if you.re just getting started, you don’t even need a GEDCOM file, you can create it from the web interface phpGedView provides.
The project is Open Source and has an active team of friendly developers headed by John Finlay. After the research I’ve done, it.s the only good way to graphically display your family tree online in a usable, dynamic format.
Ok, so this isn’t the most exciting thing you might have seen this year, but here they are, all the programs in my applications folder on my G5 at work. I really think you can tell quite a bit about what type of computer user someone is by their applications, if not about what type of person they are in general. If you haven’t figured it out already, click the image to see it full size.
Just today I found Iconverter and Pic2Icon, two very cool free programs for creating Icons from existing files. Another cool one to check out is ColorDesigner, a program for creating color schemes.
In keeping with the “best of” theme of this site, this entry is about the Open Source Content Management System that I believe to be the best all-around. WebGUI.
WebGUI is almost 100% template driven. When you go to a WebGUI site, you won’t know it right away because it looks just like every other WebGUI site. It is easy to make the site look how you want without breaking the content engine or tweaking source code. There are other solutions available that are also template driven, but I have yet to find one that maintains the ease of use and customizability of WebGUI.
In this article, I’m taking Linux (Debian and others), Macintosh OS X (Panther) and Windows XP and comparing them to find the ideal operating system for web design and development. After using Windows, Macintosh OS X and Linux (in various incarnations) each for extended periods of time over the last 4 1/2 years, here is what I’ve found.
Linux
Advantages: The obvious advantage to developing on Linux is that you’re working on the OS that you’ll probably be running your site on. It’s nice to be able to save locally and view your content on a local webserver. This is also possible in Windows and OS X so it’s not necessarily a major advantage but it’s nice.
Other advantages of Linux are that it has great text editors (Quanta, Kate, gEdit to name a few) and there is no lack of FTP tools. In my mind, that’s about it as far as advantages go.
Read on for disadvantages of Linux and my insights on OS X and Windows.
If you use Movable Type, Nucleus or Blogger for your weblog and you work on a Mac, check out Kung-Log. It’s a desktop application that will retrieve past posts as well as enabling you to post new entries to your weblog. I’m using it now and if you’re reading this… it worked :). This is another feature – it lets you insert the song you’re listening to in iTunes. I’m listening to: To Protect The Family Name from the album “Winners Never Quit” by Pedro The Lion
From last night:
Installing MovableType… starting at 10:45…. finishing at exactly 11:45. Wow. That took longer than I expected, but alas it’s done. I probably would have been find sticking with Blogger, but in my never ending quest to have the latest and greatest software, MovableType was a necessity.
Now I have this itching wonder in the back of my head why I can’t upgrade MCPAN. That will have to wait for another day…
Both my father and father-in-law have spent time extolling the virtues of Mind Mapping–basically brainstorming on paper. I have come to realize the benefits of doing it, but for me, doing something on actual paper is just too reminicent of high school or filling out a form at the DMV or something horrible like that. I prefer to do things the digital way.
The other day, I discovered Nova Mind for Mac OS X which is a way of doing it digitally. I was pretty impressed with the functionality, but due to the fact that I don’t have a Mac at home (yet) it’s not much use. Plus it costs $59 dollars, which I suppose isn’t bad, but it’s more than I’m willing to pay. I also found Concept Draw but their MindMapping software is $149 and not quite as elegant as Nova Mind, though probably more functional.
Tonight I discovered a couple Windows products–both freeware/open source that look like they will do the trick. The first is appropriately titled Freemind. It’s very functional, decent looking and you can do pretty much whatever you need to do with it right from the keyboard so there’s no interrupting your train of thought by reaching over and missing the mouse. In addition to it being great on the desktop, there’s a feature that lets you publish fully functional mindMaps to the web in without even having to export them. Here’s an example.
The next one I found was called KeyNote (not to be confused with Keynote. It’s more of a tool for outlining and creating hierarichal documents (like this blog for example). So far, I’ve been impressed with it. It’s seems about as fully featured as any Office XP application, including Macro capabilites. Hmm. maybe I should write a macro to enable publishing to this Blog. Then it would be some serious competion to MacJournal.
I’m happy. If you’re interested, I’d say check them both out. You can’t go wrong with free 🙂