Asphalt Roads

I’m looking for a sidebar widget capable of delivering the content of just one tag of my del.icio.us feed. Does it exists?

Clients gladly request dynamic sites, with CMS capabilities so they can update their content when it’s needed without having to phone the designer for a quick fix.

But the same hypothetical client has been using MS Word for years and wants the same functionality. He or she expects full control over fonts, colors, layouts. And at the moment he/she realizes it’s not as it was on Word, quickly says “hey, but Word has that save as HTML button somewhere”.

Yes, it has happened to me several times.

Create a PDF with free tools is rather easy. Going a little bit deeper requires more knowledge, time and money not directly proportional to the expected results. And that’s just for users that are prone to research on their own. The vast majority of users doesn’t want to be bother with installing new applications, learning different ways or just slowing down their workflow.

Peter Forret has a great idea — let the PDF exist in a space similar to what YouTube is for videos.

He goes a long way explaining the inner workings of this system, and wisely avoids the copyright problem.

The service of his dreams would be relatively easy to set up, he lists the following features:

• The difference between automatically downloading or opening a document can be controlled with the Content-Type HTTP header.
• the JPG preview of a PDF file can be created with ImageMagick + GhostScript (free)
• you could easily add the same services for remote PDFs, i.e. the customer gives a URL instead of uploading a document. There is a whole copyright minefield there that I will wisely ignore.
• Since we will have stored or cached each PDf file, it’s easy to let users add PDFs to their own PDFviewr storage account.
• A connection to a remote print and bind service like Print(fu) is very easy to make. It’s a pity Print(fu) does not ship to Europe yet, because I would surely use them to have e.g. the DCI specs (176 pages) printed in a nice booklet.
• The equivalent for Youtube’s video format conversion (Quicktime, MPEG4, AVI … to Flash video) is our PDF conversion to HTML, JPG.
• Since documents are normally formatted in portrait orientation (higher than wide) and computer screens are normally in landscape orientation (wider than high), they are no natural match. To view a PDF document on screen, one could use a two-facing-pages layout for large screens, or a half-a-page-at-a-time approach for smaller screens.
• In all our web 2.0 enthousiasm, we could add folksonomy (tags), comments, ratings … so that “good content” would float up.
• Monetisation? Well, add a payment system for commercial documents.

That, at least for me, sounds good. If he gets working on this possibly he can have a succesful start-up company.

"[D]el.icio.us has more RSS than HTML traffic"

Joshua Schacter – del.icio.us – Things we’ve learned

Picture by Larsz

I’ve been experimenting with Squible and K2 at my other blog. They are like twin themes as they share some code. They have AJAX sections and come equipped (or ready at least) for the most popular plugins like Gravatars, recent comments, Nice Archives and FlickrRSS.

I’m pretty sure those themes should be included in wordpress.com. Michael Heilemann never ceases to innovate in blog design, maybe for WP 1.6 K2 will be the default theme.

It’s really sad but spammers are getting into Flickr.

All the problema was created when the plugins tried to reach a site in order to get the country of origin of each hit. I commented line 99 where the function is called on wp-shortstat.php (v.1.3) and now it works, altough I lost country information but it’s finally working back.

I was a happy user of wp-shortstat for my WP blogs until this week. I don’t know what happened but suddenly every one of my sites were painfully slow. I tried several things and none of them worked. Today I decided to uncheck all the plugins and voilá, everything was dandy. Turning on each one led me to isolate wp-shortsat as the culprit.

Now, I really love what Mint offers but don’t want to spend a large sum of money for each install of it. My only hope is to find what’s the bug on my wp-shortstat and fix it by myself.

Update: the problem was quickly fixed.

This is what I get at the validation site:

This page is not Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional!

Update: I have just reported it via the Feedback form on my admin interface and on the WP FAQ site

So the Xbox 360 release is creeping up on us like that Mexican food I decided to have for breakfast.

Gizmodo, The Gadget Blog