Software As She’s Developed

We’re having a TiddlyWeb fest tomorrow, and I explained one of the things I want to get out of it is a canonical design sketch. Luke Hohman’s superb text, Beyond Software Architecture, explains how he comes into a project and asks people to draw the architecture. A great predictor of the project’s state is whether people [...]

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There is a well-established “grammar” for how we sign up and log into websites. Provide your name, email and password; verify the email; login to the site with username and password until you’re timed out. You know the drill. But a wave of new web apps and protocols is challenging the status quo, breaking the [...]

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Scrumptious is a web framework I’ve begun working on at Osmosoft. It’s a web app and web service for sharing bookmarks and comments about websites, and pretty much anything else with a unique URL. Things it is related to: Delicious (bookmarking), Digg (threaded comments), JS-Kit and Disqus (embedded comments with common identity across multiple sites). Scrumptious [...]

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I’m currently at an Osmosoft hackathon event, working on a tiddlywiki vertical called mediawikiunplugged. No time to say more now, but we needed a bunch of mediawiki sites for testing. So in addition to the obWikipedia and obAjaxPatterns, here are more: http://wikihow.com http://browse.workliteracy.com/examples/mediawiki/* http://www.mono-project.com/* http://www.elearninglearning.com/examples/mediawiki/ https://developer.mozilla.org/En http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page http://wowwiki.com http://www.wikia.com/wiki/c:marveldatabase http://recipes.wikia.com/wiki/Recipes_Wiki http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL_Portal http://www.aboutus.org/ http://guildwars.wikia.com And a list of the biggest wikis according to Alexa (retrieved thanks to [...]

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Just back from Clay Shirky’s talk. I’ve been following him for years, so it was great to see him live. Notes taken on my phone, typo beware! Today – launching softback edition of book and updating thesis since then (incl recent events includig Obama). “speculative” “group action just got easier” So what happens when u lower the cost of [...]

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I haven’t blogged about WebWait since launching it almost two years ago. But it’s been quietly growing into quite a pretty well known site among certain communities in various languages. What I like seeing is people are actually getting value from it…it’s not just a novelty, but a tool for them. Here are some examples. A [...]

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I can’t let the current credit crunch / financial crisis / Wall St meltdown pass without mentioning the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, aka SOX. I feel compelled to do so because I haven’t seen it mentioned once in the mainstream media during the past fortnight of turbulence, and yet it should have at least played some role in [...]

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My fellow Osmosoftie Paul Downey made this bodacious sketch when I ran through my @Media Ajax presentation on OpenSketch: If you haven’t seen his handiwork before, he has a great talent for this distinctive style of text. Check them out. He also created The Web Is Agreement (I made a little remix of it into a [...]

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This is how the official olympics medal tally looks: It’s not only the official tally, but the one linked from google each time you type “olympics” and terms like “australia olympics”. Thus making it an absurdly popular page at this time. As you can see, the design is reedeeeculous. The thing you want to see the [...]

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I recently got fed up of spam. Well, that happened a long time ago. What bothered me recently, enough to take action, was false positives, i.e. real email that fell into my spam folder. My primary email address, michael@mahemoff.com, gets about 3000 mails a day…so what goes in my spam folder, stays in my spam [...]

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