Categories
Blogs and Blogging Community Publishing

Birth Announcement

The Missus (aka the Rogue Librarian) has been laboring for some time on a new community site. Today it launched.

Things I Learned the Hard Way is a place where women can share life lessons about home, family, friendship and work. Our contributors write well and they want to share their experience with others.

The new site is a place for women of different ages, situations, and life experiences to share hard-won knowledge, from the maternal to the Machiavellian (how do some female bosses use “advice” and “compliments” to keep female employees down?), the silly to the sublime. Participation is encouraged; writers are sought.

[tags]thingsilearnedthehardway, roguelibrarian, publishing, blogs, women[/tags]

Categories
Applications cities Community Design links Publishing Tools war, peace, and justice writing

Inspiration and perspiration

AIGA | Aquent Salary Survey Calculator
Are you getting paid what you should? Find out with this free online calculator, created by AIGA and Aquent after surveying nearly 6,500 design professionals.
Pantone’s Fall Fashion Color Report
The fashion forecast is for cool, calm colors from the earth. Wear them tomorrow, see them on your website the day after.
Magic 8_Ball on ‘Zune’
Daring Fireball has fun kicking Microsoft’s me-tooism.
CreativeIQ: Create Letterhead Templates in MS Word
Creating letterhead templates in Microsoft Word that don’t suck.
Most Inspired
Design inspiration aggregation.
Netdiver: Outstanding
Design inspiration, collected by Netdiver. Sharp concepts and fresh perspectives.
“People nearby started to panic”
A mobile phone rings on a London-to-New-York flight.
Time Capsules: Douglas Coupland: September 11
From the vantage point of a 52-day book tour that began on September 11, 2001, the author recalls the surreal first days of post-9/11 America.
Congress: Hall Pass Revoked

If Net Neutrality didn’t do enough to get you squirming HR5319 AKA Deleting Online Predators Act AKA DOPA should serve as proof that Congress should no longer be allowed to vote on any laws governing the internet. In case you missed the news, DOPA basically will require all public schools and libraries to block access to social networking sites and chat rooms.

The Agency Model is Dead – Blue Flavor
Brian Fling of new agency Blue Flavor lists “signs of the decline in the traditional agency” and discusses his agency’s nontraditional approach.
AppZapper – Making uninstalls easy
AppZapper for Mac OS X lets you confidently try new apps while knowing you can uninstall them easily. Drag one or more unwanted apps onto AppZapper and watch as it finds all the extra files and lets you delete them with a single click.
Bokardo: Why Netscape Will Succeed
Bokardo, a blog about social web design, says Netscape’s reinvention of itself as a mass-market version of Digg will succeed.
Zach Klein: Connected Ventures + IAC
The guys behind collegehumor.com sell to Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp.

[tags]design, business, inspiration, fashion, color, AIGA, salaries, links, digg, netscape, blue flavor, bbc, douglas coupland, 9/11, 911, writers, book tour, publishing, memoirs, mac os x, macosx, software, net neutrality, online predator, london, new york, nyc[/tags]

Categories
Community Publishing

Is this thing on?

Just letting my RSS peeps know that zeldman.com now accepts comments. As of yesterday, actually. All right, then.

[tags]zeldman, wordpress, blog, comments[/tags]

Categories
Applications Community

Applications on parade

The ice caps may be melting, the nations may be playing chicken with the Apocalypse, but there is still some good in the world. Today we look at two newly released (free, open source) web applications and a (new, free) community built around that oldest of human activities. No, that other oldest of human activities: sharing stories.

Waferbaby’s open source CMS

Waferbaby is both a site and a person. The site has been around for about a dozen years, the person (Daniel Bogan) for somewhat more. But wait. Now Waferbaby is also a third thing. It is also the content management system (CMS) that Waferbaby the person built to drive Waferbaby the website. The website has many features. So does the CMS. Why do you care? Because you can use the CMS if you want to. Waferbaby, the open source content management system, built with Ruby on Rails and “freely available under a liberal BSD license” is yours for the taking. Be gentle.

Enhanced Simple PHP Gallery v2.0

Point B Studio’s Enhanced Simple PHP Gallery is free, open-source software that lets you post photos online. The brainchild of Rich Pedley and Paul Griffin, the program is thriving at the nurturing bosom of brilliant web architects and developers.

With version 2.0, it has been completely overhauled to support detailed annotation (“footnotes”) of objects (such as artwork or photos), including citations, dimensions, latitude/longitude and other identification metadata.

A demo page lets you log in as an administrator and put the program through its paces. Point B welcomes comments and suggestions. Happy gallery-mongering!

Dandelife debuts

(Disclaimer: I sit on Dandelife’s advisory board.)

Dandelife is a social network built around the telling of your life’s stories. You can use Dandelife to create your own personal biography and then share that with the rest of the world. Imagine all your own notes on all the people you’ve met, the places you’ve been, the events you’ve gone to and the stories you could tell about them all. That’s your Dandelife.

Co-founder Kelly Abbott, late of Airshare.org and other socially conscious web projects, is that rare entrepreneur whose primary motivation is not cash but community. Soft-launched this week, Dandelife isn’t perfect yet, but it is already attracting storytellers, and Abbott hopes to recruit more creative people spinning more yarns, “making the site that much more fun to waste time at.”

Tags are beginning to emerge: there are drinking stories, nickname origin stories, 9/11 stories. People are joining and sharing. Here are a few stories that struck me:

a very long story about how i got an unfortunate nickname
Embarrassing but well written coming-of-age tale.
Champagne Katie
The story of an unfortunate nickname.
Hilarious brush-up (sic) with death
Life and near-death in the Himalayas.
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