Offmessage

Forkd gets the elevator pitch treatment over at the PDA blog.  And a stumping great picture of me.  Which is nice (if you like pictures of people in suits looking simultaneously smug and stoned, that is).

This thread over at AskMeFi (Plone vs. Drupal) is surprising in its vociferous hatred of Plone.  Part of me really wants to get involved; wade in on behalf of Plone and explain exactly why Drupal is a labyrinthine mess…  But…  I can’t.  The last week I’ve been struggling to get to grips with Plone 3.x.  It’s been really tough.  Today is not the day to defend something that’s been pissing me off constantly for the last week.

Right now I’d be happy for any alternative on the Python CMS front (Exotypes, anyone?).  If this is the way Plone is going I’m not sure I want to follow any more.

The real question here is why someone would have made a purple hat with a leopard print band, and not put a feather in it!?

They are indeed. My beta invite to Lovely Charts turned up today, and I have to say it’s about as awesome as I had hoped. Proper Visio-esque drag-and-drop chart, wireframe, and network diagram generation all within the browser. Yes it’s still beta (there’s no print, for example) but it’s really rather fine.

I am an Internet veteran. That is all.

Well then.  We’re there.  After months and months of development Forkd is opening up to public registrations.  Feta mark 4 is released today with yet more snazzy new features, including a really rather awesome activity stream, Wordpress integration, RSS feeds, commit messages and much more.  We’ve even managed, amazingly, to bring something new to the game of tagging with the ‘tag brush’ feature.

We’re stopping development for a bit to focus on growing our user and recipe base, but the plan is to start on the next release (Gammon?) in about a month.  If you’ve not signed up, please do.  And please try out some of the tasty tasty food.

I have, for some time, been absolutely appalled by people spouting ‘digital native’ concepts in meetings when talking about the under twenties. The idea that “they think differently, act differently, are completely native” to the Internet when we oldies are not is often so entrenched that I have been accused (and I quote) of “designing applications for yourself, a white mid-thirties man” and “losing touch with my users”.

Apparently someone who has completely forgotten what it was like to be young is able to tell me that I have lost touch. Pah! I spit on their nonsense and go back to user centred design and thorough user testing against my target demographic and let them wallow in their contrived stupidity.

Anyway. JISC has just published a report (PDF) that rather supports common sense. (Summary from Ars Technica).  Nice to have people who actually should be researching and commenting on this sort of thing come out with something we can refer to (and hopefully use to shut these digital native theorists up).

As an aside, I was in a meeting with Matt Locke (ex of BBC Innovation, now at Channel4) when someone started spouting this crap again. His use of Tom Wolfe’s Kandy-kolored Tangerine-flake Streamlined Baby as an example of exactly how one generation feels about the one following it was, I thought, particularly apt.  And it reminded of a good book, too.

Forkd is coming on leaps and bounds (possibly because I haven’t touched the code for months now….).  There’s been another release today (this is Feta 3 now) which adds loads of cool features:

• Blog integration
• No need for Flickr
• Easier to find other people

If you haven’t already got an account please shout; we’re going to open up invites to the public soon, and surely you want to be in on the ground floor?

We have had customers who have astroturfed. We have taken the piss out of them, in the vain hope they’d stop. This is what might happen if they don’t. The Internet is a surly bitch. (ta Francois).

The above is a video done by friends Eko for Science City York. I post, simply as I rather like it, and you can see two of our sites in there somewhere