Lab notes

Best way to describe it, I guess Wiki on steroids for cataloging open source projects. Here’s what the AJAX tag page looks like:
http://www.swik.net/tag/ajax

Swik project pages are different from the typical wiki pages you may have seen before. Each project page has a bunch of topics: anyone can add or edit topics, or add or edit entries in topics.

For example, you might add a new topic ‘Interesting Links’ under a Documentation topic, or edit an existing entry to correct or expand it.

Search for any Open Source Project, Swik can automatically find information for it. Or you can link to http://swik.net/project/yourProjectName and the project will automatically be created.

And anyone can add new sections to each page, and the contents is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Pretty cool.

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MyPalmLife’s John is also excited about EverNote. Not surprising. I’ve been using EverNote for a few months now and can’t imagine getting any work done without it. Every person I show it to, loves it. That’s the sign of a great product.

I use it to capture anything, from the really important stuff to the menial — I can add stuff without a filter because EverNote makes it super easy to find that stuff later on. Like a blog, you can easily scroll to edit things from the most recent to way back then, or zoom on all the posts tagged with a certain category. And the full text search is amazingly fast. You can enter text, drag & drop from a different application, or capture from the Web using a FireFox extension (I hear there’s also one for IE). I just can’t wait for EverNote to come out with a Palm version (they say September), and for it to work with Google Desktop Search.

EverNote is a fantastic tool for capturing ideas, content, tasks and all manner of stuff from virtually any electronic source. In it’s self this may not seem so radical but it incorporates so many other great and unique features I cannot list them here – not least because I’m still finding them!

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Just launched, still in beta (all cool things are, nowdays), Jobazaar offers a new take on job listings. It uses tags to catalog and search, RSS feeds to keep you on top of things, and each job listing is actually a conversation. For example, this one.

Jobazaar is an online bazaar for every kind of job. Not necessarily occupations. You can quickly find someone doing something for you. It doesn’t matter what.

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Why microformats? Because people can read and write microformats without a post-graduate degree in semantics. Because they fit right into HTML. And HTML is slightly more known and commonly used than RDF. Because they work on a Web that already exists, there’s no need to tear it down and build something new.

n the true spirit of the web, microformats are designed for humans first, taking advantage of what works today. Built on exisiting standards such as XML and XHTML, microformats are a new way of thinking about markup, exposing the visible data that’s already in page content. If you’ve ever pondered the many ways in which to markup an event, a calendar or a business card, then you’ve already understood the importance of microformats. By deciding on “micro” “formats” for valuable chunks of data, we can apply a rich structure that we, as humans, can write, edit, and understand. Microformats are about using the full potential of the web now, rather than throwing away what works and geting people to change they way they work.

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Yubnub is …

Well I have completed my submission for the 2005 “Rails Day” 24-hour programming contest. The idea was to make the coolest program in 24 hours, using a wonderful programming system called Ruby on Rails.

… a good laugh when you first see it and think it’s geek humor … a really neat idea after you use it a few times … what’s going to replace Google as the default keyword search in my browser.

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The news is out that NewsGator has acquired FeedDemon.

When I first got exposed to RSS I was mildly curious about this new technology, and played around with a few subscriptions, and a bunch of news readers. Then I found FeedDemon. I was hooked. Not only was FeedDemon a top rate application, it actually changed the way I consumed information. Ok, RSS did have something to do with it, but what really set the ball in motion was the speed with which I could get the feeds, browse through them and focus on the important ones. I have more feeds than I can keep track of, barely enough time to read the top ones, and a great user experience to pull it through.

And then FeedDemon added searches. So I have feeds using keywords for all the feeds I don’t have time to browse.

And then FeedDemon added podcasting. Like any new technology, I tested out podcasting in the early days, but was too lazy to actually use it. When FeedDemon added iTunes synchronization, I turned into a regular listener, with never a dull moment on my daily commute.

So congratulations to Nick Bradbury and the NewsGator team. But wait, it gets even better. NewsGator will honor existing FeedDemon customers with 2 years of free service and upgrades. So now I also get to try NewsGator, and I heard a lot of promising things about their service. That’s what I call commitment to customers. Congratulations to all of us.

The GTD TiddlyWiki is a Get Things Done (book) adaptation of Jeremy Ruston’s incredible (and open source) TiddlyWiki.

TiddlyWiki is hard to describe but easy to use. It’s a dynamic Web page that lives on your computer, there’s no need for a server of Internet connection. Just click Alt-S and you changes are saved. You can add more entries using Wiki-style shorthand. Entries are linked, but you can also search (find as you type) or look them up on the timeline.

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