Andy McKay's blog

Just noticed that if you download Skype, you get specific instructions for your browser, with little screenshots. You can see this here. That's a simple idea that's probably been used elsewhere, but that's a great for making the software easier to download and use.

Didn't hear about this one until recently, but there's a Google Calendar and a matching API. At the moment I use iCal with my wife and you are going to have to work hard to get me out of that, we love it. So what I'm looking for is a nice simple way to get my iCal online in a readable HTML format ... without installing any software. So I'm not going to use Google Calendar in a while, but I was working on a Google Maps mashup last Friday. Doing things on a Friday is bad, because then they fester in my brain for a weekend. In Google Maps I pull in a map into an iframe and populate it. So why can't I pull in a calendar through Javascript and then populate it with my public ical feed? Someone's already got ical into RSS, so now we have to find a way to pull in calendar through a simple Javascript call. If I can do that, i can mashup the RSS of my iCal feed with the calendar. Searching for Javascript calendar is fruitless, pointing to almost endless popup calendars. Google Calendar API seems dedicated to adding and editing items. Sounds like a quick science project one evening.

Sidnei has been working on an experimental installer of 2.5, please go and download it and give him all the feedback you can. Any help appreciated. In unrelated news, two reasonably hard core Plone and Zope users switch their blogs to Wordpress in the same week. What's with that?

Absolutely totally rocks. Does exactly what it should. Kudos to the creators and Jon Stahl who mentioned it to me. Yes, this site is using it.

Via whits blog:

Why are people still afraid of JavaScript

Here's my go:

1. Unless you are new to the web, everyone has been bitten by Javascript implementation hell in the early 2000's when very few people knew what or why they were doing things, other than "well its cool".
2. It's a nightmare to debug if you aren't familiar with it.
3. Testing is hard and loops back into point 2.

Am I scared of writing Javascript? No.

1. Go use dojo or another fine toolkit like scriptalicious, they remove much of the cross browser hell.
2. Have you seen the Venkman debugger? There are many other fine tools out there.
3. Selenium and other fine testing products are now available.

In the end though number 1 is the killer. It's had such a bad rap for so many years it takes time to get over this. Get over it, go do something interesting and you'll see it's not as bad as it was.

Jon Udell posts on web presentations, pointing to S5 and HTML Slidy. Both of these are excellent systems and I think the time has truly come to seperate the world from their PowerPoint dependencies.

There's an option in HTML Slidy to make each slide's title the HTML doctitle, and of course I turned that on because I'm always looking for ways to make my stuff more coherent and useful in search results contexts. But to no avail.

Good question, as I'm doing quite a bit of plotting and planning around presentations right now. The simplest solution is a publish process to publish pages individually. In a slightly different arena, this problem has also cropped up at Enfold recently where I've been addressing a complete Ajax front end for Plone. In this scenario Enfold Entransit writes out a complete set of xml to the filesystem, it screams Ajax to pull it together. But then how do bots index the site? No idea. But then this does beg the question, how valuable to a search engine is a multi page view of a topic? Does that truly represent how the data should be presented? I would argue its not that important. For me the breaking down of a slide into multiple pages is an act of logical planning through my topic. Individually each slide taken out of context, is only partially useful in comparison to the whole. Breaking down of the talk into slides is purely a representation of the time frame for the talk and the limit of only being able to fit one set of things onto a screen. The fact that all that content can be shown in one HTML page (as below) is to me good enough. For the record a couple of interesting things. I've been using S5 for about 2 years and its great. I added S5 support to Plone then, mainly out of frustration dealing with Powerpoint and OpenOffice. It's really nice to be able to write a presentation in any format Plone can handle: Structured text, Restructured text, HTML via Kupu or Epoz gui editors or just plain HTML. Then its output as a presentation, for example: Plain page: http://www.enfoldsystems.com/About/Talks/overview S5 presentation: http://www.enfoldsystems.com/About/Talks/overview/s5_document Aas with many things, it was Jon Udell who started me down this path about 5 years ago by complaining to me about having to open one of my presentations in PowerPoint.

Many moons ago I started ZopeZen as a blog for Zope. It's done well over the last 5 years and it's been a labour of love keeping it up. But the fact is that now I don't post or work on it much anymore - probably because for a while I just haven't been on the ground doing as much Zope or Plone as I used to. This makes me feel guilty, so if anyone out there would like to take ZopeZen up and keep the blog going forward, please yell. I'd love to give it to you. Requirements:

• Maintain it as a community site.
• Don't mind how you run it, but there is a lot of useful stuff in archives there, would be nice to keep the old content up.
• Must be in Plone or Zope.
• Link back to me here.

Anyone interested?

This week I made an effort to work on my blog and sometimes these things can work out to be way easier than you might think. Installing Wordpress and Subversion were as simple as apt-get install packagename, freaky. Compare that to installing previous components especially the nightmarishly complicated CVS and life just seems to easy.

This is the obligatory first post.