Changed the name of the social knowledgebase project to mega cheatsheet. 'Social' sounded good at the outset, but that word has been a bit overplayed lately. Since I've been coding more juju into the tool, and using it myself for a couple months to store actual data, it is really turning into a big fat cheatsheet with multiple dimensions. Thus the name change.

It would be cool to find a way to really make it fast and easy to add cheats to the db from outside of the site itself. I keep toying with some sort of web service approach that would allow things to be pulled in from other tools that are integrated in the browser, kind of like how delicious has their firefox plugin. Or the way google notes are integrated. So that might be the next fun thing to play around with.

Updates: Replaced the Simple Search backend for searching with Ferret. I really like the new one. Simple Search was good as a quick way to get a basic search function up and running, but it was a deal killer that entering two words made the search scope wider instead of more narrow like you'd expect. Search is the core of an app like this one.

Also, added syntax highlighting. Mostly, that was just fun to figure out how to implement. Merged bluecloth with coderay. Nifty.

Oh, and added a basic RSS feed for Most Recent cheats. Might add more granular ones as well.

Still having a blast fiddling with the knowledgebase. Created the thing to solve a real problem I was having with storing cheat notes. Now I've been using it for a few weeks and it seems to do what I wanted.

Issues. Turns out that BlueCloth - which is the very cool ruby implementation of MarkDown - has a leetle tiny bug that makes rendering nested tags in code snippets a bit weird. So I'll keep an eye on BlueCloth for an update.

OpenID has turned out to work well. Since I built this tool pretty fast, I've still got some work to do with advanced user and content management. This thing is not a full fledged CMS after all. But, it does the basics, and less is more in a way. At least I'm going to try to keep it as lean as I can.

Went with ruby on rails to build a social knowledgebase for developers. I had been writing a bunch of cheatsheets in text files to keep track of notes on how to do things. Decided to web-ize it. As my work has moved more toward the command line, system administration, and coding, I needed some logical way to store reminders of code syntaxes and things. Figured I'd whip up a rails app to do the trick.

Figured while I was making it that I might as well let other people use it to store their own collections of commands and notes as well. That way, people could benefit from other peeps' notes as well. Launched it this week and it seems to work pretty well out of the box. I'll be juicing it up as I get time.

I don't like requiring folks to log in and create accounts, so I used OpenID. As that technology becomes more mainstream, users can just use their OpenID creds to access their collections. Had to do some kind of auth, tho, so that users could have their own collections, and also to avoid a spam over-run of the comments and stuff.

Any feedback? Add a comment here, or pop me an email and let me know.

Between family and work and all, I'm just finding a little time to play around with stuff on the computer for kicks. Installed xubuntu linux on an old laptop I had kicking around. Great way to infuse some life into an outdated old box. Got a standard LAMP + Zope/Plone + Ruby/Rails + SVN setup going.

Found out that I may have been a bit mistaken about Site5's capabilities. When I saw they had rails and python suport, I kind of assumed they had zope/plone support. This is not hte case, but then I haven't ssh'd into the server share yet, so maybe I can install it myself. A bit doubtful, tho.

So maybe the new products I fiddle around with creating will be ruby or php apps for now. Zope/Plone was looking like the way to go at first once I started to see the beauty of building new products. Well, the jury's still out on what I want to use as a primary logic language to develop my own experimental projects. I finished developing a ruby on rails app at work and it went well. Part of me still drifts toward straight PHP tho, since it seems more transparent and direct. Less "convention" imposed on your idea. Not that convention is bad. That's the beauty of rails. It's just that sometimes you want to do something ... unconventional.

We'll see.

Just moved the lab over to Site5 hosting. Wow. Page loads now are almost instantaneous. Ending up paying double what I was before, but it's still not bad and the site is about 5 times faster. I wanted a host that would have support for ruby on rails and python and Site5 delivered.

Looked into Dreamhost as well. They were the runner up. Nice package there too but I found the speed to be better on Site5. I have to admit, I'm pretty fired up about this new hosting. Now to deploy that rails app :-)

I went ahead and upgraded the drupal code on wooblelab for kicks. Been so busy with other stuff that I was running a pretty old version of drupal here. Good news is the site is running on PHP5 finally. I heard that drupal is going to include some AJAX stuff pretty soon, so wanted to get my codebase more recent so I could play with it when it comes out.

It sure is great to have MAMP in my life now. It makes it so easy to have a dev version of stuff on my local machine to make changes, then just ftp them up to the host periodically. Thanks MAMP!

Our team at DU launched our plone-powered site: the website for Dominican University of California. Pretty cool. Took six months from start to finish to survey the organization, strategize, decide on a CMS, design, migrate data, clean, organize, produce ... well you get the picture. It was a lot of work.

The final product came out really well. As with all web projects, we'll be evolving it continuously. Got a few loose links and things still. Actually, this was the first project I've done where I've been really hands on with thousands of pages of info. Wow. Shifting focus from UI and design to also include migration and plumbing was a bit of a rude awakening.

Designers like myself, I think, tend to strive for perfection. This is not a very useful idea in the "real world" of massive amounts of data. A better goal is basic functionality :) Well, we got there. It's a cool project. And plone stood up to all we could throw at it. Looking forward to shining and polishing over time, especially in the area of events data management and presentation - something I've come to realize is a highly complicated task in webdev.

A few cool things about the site architecture: It's more or less xhtml compliant. (with all those content editors, and tight timelines, the best you can do is shoot for "more or less":-) Plus the layout for the site is table-less which is pretty groovy. It's on its way to being section 508 accessible. At least the basic foundation is there. We have a vision impaired student at school which is really neat since it'll give me the chance to work with her to make the site more accessible over time. Want to set up more access keys and things. Pretty excited about that.

There's a lot of hype around web2.0 in general, and I like to stay a bit skeptical to keep things in perspective while checking out new online services. But, I just added the whole social bookmarking thing to my list of things I actually benefit from using. I chose del.icio.us

Spurl and Furl look really cool and there are some others, too. But I went with del.icio.us to give the whole thing a whirl and I'm happy with how easy it is, and how much I get out of it. One of the things that got me to actually start using it was the fact that you can get an extension for firefox so you can just bookmark and tag links in your browser. Then I popped the linkroll into the wooblelab sidebar. This is a cool feature since a lot of times, I just want to share a neat link I came across. Now it happens automatically on the site. Nifty.

I reckon that if you gel together in a blog type site like wooblelab: youtube for video, flickr for photos, winksite mobile, etc. you get some pretty snazzy multimedia jig jig going on when it all gets tied together.

Flock seems to realize this, and they're packaging it all up nicely in a new browser. Cool idea. For now, I figure I can do the same thing with a Drupal site like this one, but I think Flock will be useful because it links it all together in one spot - the browser. Something to watch.

I'm messing with RonR, and at the same time doing a lot of development with zope/plone. So the logical question is: should I just stick with python and find a fast rollout web framework built around that language? Here are two candidates if you're thinking along similar lines: Django and TurboGears.

Creds out to Limi from Plone for letting me know about these two frameworks. (I've been able to work with Limi a couple times over the past few months and for anyone looking for an excellent plone consultant, well, what can I say, he's a co-founder of plone, so I guess it figures he's super awesome.)

Both Django and TurboGears look really powerful, simple, elegant and quick to pick up ...if you know python already! But, I don't know python really well. Unfortunately, I'm more of (what Limi called in a conversation) a "scripter" - meaning I can hack my way around other people's python code well enough to get projects built. And with zope and plone, that's all most people really need to get their endeavor sailing around on the frosty waves of the www.

So, Django and TurboGears look pretty groovy, both. I'd *like* to attempt a web app in those frameworks, but I'll probably stick to Ruby on Rails for now, just due to my own coding limitations. Not that ruby itself is any easier, but the Rails framework appears to be simple enough that even a hack-job like me can figure his way through to building a custom project - with a minimal amount of time learning the intricacies of the base language.

[Notice: This post is getting a bit old now, and I've since moved on to using macports to set up a custom development environment with stand-alone apache, ruby, rails, mysql etc. So as new versions of locomotive and MAMP are released over time, some of these tips below might become outdated.]

I like technology that's easy to set up initially, so I can do a "sniff test" and get a feel for the thing. I've been meaning to develop a Ruby on Rails app for a while and finally got started this weekend. A great help is locomotive.

Locomotive is an app that downloads as a dmg so you can just unwrap it and copy it to your applications folder and start going. (Don't get me wrong: downloading bins and setting up in the terminal is fun and all but, easy is good, and frequently you just want to get cracking as fast as possible.) Since it's all stand alone, you can just delete the locomotive folder if you don't like it. Pretty cool.

Here are a few quick tips from what I did to get set up initially.

After you install locomotive, you can just follow along with the great video that's on the locomotive site to get cracking. But, when you need to do stuff in the terminal, remember to launch the terminal through locomtive (Rails > Open Terminal or command T) rather than just opening your mac terminal. This way, you get all the PATH variables set up correctly and Rails finds everything you need. Critical.

Also, I decided that it would be nifty to use a mysql database instead of the sqlite db that ships with locomotive. In the spirit of keeping things easy, I downloaded MAMP, a stand-alone app that runs apache2, mysql, php and phpmyadmin. Again, easy to install and run. Only issue is, how to you get locomotive to find mysql since now it's in a specific spot inside the mamp directory?

Three things: One, open preferences in locomotive and add this to your "Additional Path(s) field:

Use your password after -p above, and note that there's no space after -p before your password starts. This worked for me since I changed the default password in MAMP. If you haven't done that, just use the default that ships with MAMP.

Lately I've seen more and more "nonsense" spam. I'm not really sure what this stuff does. You get an email, or comment posted to your site anonymously that says something like "salkjsdfjadkkjfkasdjf". Is it just me or does it seem like those tricky chipmunks are testing methods of getting past spam filters?

So here's where I'm stuck. If it's not just a test, feeling things out, then where's the payoff for them? If you click through on the nonsense embedded links, they go nowhere. Tricky chipmunks. And by the way, what kind of human (rodent) actually spends their time creating these things? I guess it makes me kind of annoyed. What if that energy were put to a good use instead of wasted on stuff that just annoys people? Argghhh. *sigh*

This will probably be the last update on my experience with plone, prior to actually launching the project I've been working on. First I should say that the more I work with plone the more impressed with it I am. Overall I'd give it a strong "A" and recommend it highly.

Navigation: A-
Turns out that while I was in development, J. Cameron Cooper released a new navigation tool called sprout. This looks like it will provide a lot more flexibility to the navigation struture that ships with plone right out of the box.

I had been hacking Martin Aspeli's plone navigation hack prior to that. (Can I interject that the support on plone's mail list is awesome!)It occurs to me that powerful options for structuring navigation are a critical part of a robust content management system. Seems like a no-brainer when you say it, but still. When you're dealing with thousands of pages of content, a nice way to present it all is key. Taking cue from 37signals, I "started in the middle" of this project, and figured out what my navigation needs were organically as the content started to fill in. This is something I would recommend to anyone building a plone site from scratch. Dump some content in before you finalize your navigation system.

Content Management: A
In eight words: it's basically a file system for the web. This is the best in my opinion and I haven't found anything that compares. Plus, we (OK, actually my boss) figured out how to insert mass data into plone through ftp. This is huge. Needless to say, you don't want to enter it all manually if you can avoid it. So, given the fact that you can ftp content into plone, well, the options are wide open for managing it once you've got it in there. The only thing I think would be nifty to have is a "ghost" system like you see in Silva: add a page somewhere that's the master for that content and then have duplicates of it in other locations that update dynamically any time the master is updated. I think this kind of thing is attainable in a way with "smart folders" in plone, but it's one more step. I like the simplicity of Silva's approach to that.

Documentation: A-
The docs on plone.org are suprisingly good. There are holes, but once you discover the mail list and all the helpful people there, you can't ask for much more from an open source project.

Contributor Experience: A-
I've been training people to use plone to edit their content and they seem to like it. It's got a great interface for adding, modifying content. The kupu editor that ship with plone works well. Any drawbacks are really my own fault at this point. Read: I went for the "table-less" layout at the core, and this is inherently harder to keep consistent than the standard table-based layout. But, what can I say, I'd rather have a few difficulties and get rid of tables than get locked into tables long term.

Conclusion - Overall: A
Plone is the choice if you're looking to manage a large web site with lots of content, lots of authors, lots of granular permissions, and any sort of inherent hierarchy to the data. The "minuses" in the A grades above are just to point out the fact that more work will make it better over time. As a side note: had the opportunity to spend a day with Alexander Limi, one of the founders of plone, and he's great. With people like that at the core, plone will only get better over time.

If you want to publish a smallish site, you can do it faster hard coding it, since plone/zope/python takes a while to get comfortable with. But if you need the robust engine of a web based cms, gotta go plone. For the record, the project I'll be releasing in a month or so was in dev for about 6 months. This included initial assessment of options/goals, meeting with higher ups to get buy-off, design, coding, data import and dynamic content coding for forms and things. Actually pretty fast in the greater scheme of things since all of us involved were new to plone at the outset.

I work enough on a computer that I don't really want to get games for my mac. It works better to get a good game for the ps2 or the gamecube. Then I can get ultra lazy and play in bed :-) Lately, though I've been having a hard time finding anything worth buying.

Guess I'm getting really picky. I did a stint with military games a couple years ago and then got burnt out on the whole shooting things idea. I'm more into the colorful platform games that are designed for kids. Things like Spyro the Dragon. I like the way those games are really about exploration and discovery.

I've been playing Pikmin and Animal Crossing on the new to me (bought it used for cheap) gamecube. Pikmin is a bit too hard at the upper levels, and Animal Crossing is really a neat idea but too slow. So I was thinking that maybe something where you get to create a world would be a good idea. Remember the old sim city stuff? That was a neat idea. They do make one for the ps1, but I don't know, it looks kind of drab.

I'm thinking there could be a new sort of genre some day that combines the colorful, fantastical exploration stuff of platform games like Spyro with the creative aspects of the old sim city. But, I can't find it. Again, if I had the time ...

I got the slothcam widget for my machine at work the other week. Then, I was going to de-install it since I couldn't view the caltrans 101 north videos through it (would have been cool for checking out the commute conditions.) For kicks I loaded up the Panda Cam and got totally hooked.

Now I check the Panda Cam all the time! The best is if you get to see Su Lin, the newborn. Pandas don't really look like real animals. They look more like Japanese Hello Kitty type characters.

I'm fiddling around building a plone-powered site. I'm really impressed with it as a content management system. Of course, there are some weird drawbacks, and I'm sure I'll find more as I get farther into it. Overall, though, I really like the way it's structured fundamentally as a web-based HFS.

Here are a couple quick things that bug, just to get them out of the way. One, you can't reliably export xml out of zope (the framework for plone.) In terms of web services, that's pretty annoying. Second, the templating architecture is a bit disjointed. I'm thinking that once I get more into my current project, I'll probably submit an improved tableless skin with super easy to follow documentation on what parts live where, to the main plone site.

On the upside, it's got a great fundamental architecture. I like python as a codebase. The file management structure is awesome. And, there are a bunch of cool scalability and extensibility type things that I find attractive. Plone gets high marks overall for an open source cms. (I did say I'd post more as I got farther along didn't I?) And, I plan on posting more once I get a basic structure implemented for my current project. Until then ...

As a designer, one tends to get inspired by things that are well made - things that perform really, really well. So, it's no surprise that I get really fired up by Bosch power tools, BMW automobiles, and F-18 superhornets. But then there's that part of you that thinks, "Is this also the stuff that's destroying the earth?"

I saw the Blue Angles fly last Sunday and it was superhornet cool. We were out at a 'secret spot' and got low flyovers six times. Full sonic impact and wing flaps from the pilots. (My wife swears it's because she was wearing Navy colors, and, well stranger things have happened.) But, peeps at work look at me a bit wierd as I describe how incredible the experience is, and say things like, "wow, that's cool, but, you know, those planes are kind of violent and evil ... aren't they?"

So, I've been thinking about this a bit the past week. Of course, there are a lot of ways you could analyze it: the planes may be violent, but they protect the country; better to spend money on aerial displays of entertainment than dropping bombs on people; etc. My main take-away is this: Well-made tools are better than poorly-made tools. Whenever you have a well-made tool in your hands, you have a certain amount of power. It is, therefore, strategically imperative that you wield that tool with an awareness of doing good rather than evil with that power.

After all this, I end up back at - yet another - Antoine de Saint-Exupery quote:

"The machine does not isolate us from the great problems of nature but plunges us more deeply into them."

I go hiking every weekend. Just an hour - no big deal. But I make a point of getting out into the hills so I can't see any houses or cars. What I find is that the kinds of things I think about change. I'll start out thinking about work, stuff I need to do, what's happening in the real estate market. By the end, I'm remembering weird stuff from years ago and having very fluid ideas. That's cool.

Also, I played disc golf for the first time a couple weeks ago. Now this is just an epic excuse to get out and walk around in the hills for a few hours. And, it's one of those games that's just goofy fun, like regular golf, but a lot less expensive.

So, I'm thinking that, as part of getting used to this new structure of being creative 5 days a week, it's important to make time to do nothing and just walk around. If I don't make time for it, I tend to feel it about Thursday or so. Less energy and less ability to make cool stuff.

The great thing about working at a university is that there are so many frickin' smart people just floating around at any given moment. I was talking with someone on campus the other day and they turned me on to Tiddlywiki, which I tend to refer to - out of sheer mental laziness and early childhood experience as - tiddlywinks.

This is the coolest tool I've seen in a while. I mean, yeah, things like plone and drupal are great for managing high powered content. But when you want a little tiny ap that you can download and begin using in under 10 minutes, you got to go with tiddlywiki (tiddlywinks).

I created a little test site which I can "myBrain" or something like that. And I just post random thoughts to it, tag it, and I have a searchable database of spontaneous thoughts. This is good. My "home page" for my little tool has a tiddler that just says, "what was I just thinking?" and reminds me to enter search terms in the search field. Whatever it was that I thought of (last time I entered something) miraculously comes back as a result. I like this tool.

There is also a "server side" iteration (just search google to find it), but after messing around with it and the famous "backpack", I kind of like my simplified tiddlywiki tool better. Learned how to add images, and this costs nothing (as opposed to with the other two server side tools.) So, I'm going with tiddlywiki as the braindump tool par excellence.

It occured to me today that I've made a decision about my creative life. It is: I really like web technology as a medium for creativity and communication. And if I'm going to use it as my primary medium, then I have to be **really** good at using it. This poses more of a challenge than you might think at first.

See, I've always been one of those 'generalist' types that likes fiddling around on the guitar, making some paintings, maybe some video for good measure. I like writing, there's something about physical stuff like Aikido that strikes me as really creative, and I like building stuff.

But, you do all that stuff on the side, sort of 'for yourself' and at the end of the day, you've only gotten down a few levels in each thing. I have this feeling that it's still worthwhile to do it all, and that somehow each thing augments the other, and eventually it all comes together somehow.

But it's also true that you have to balance these things with your professional career. And, as we all learn eventually, the career world likes specificity more than generalism. So, lately I find myself learning python, ruby, php and mysql, and getting really techy. I mean, geesh, I actually read books about unix now. So what does this all mean? Where am I headed? Am I becoming an engineer, a computer programmer, a logic-driven command line coder? Well, yes, it appears I am. And yet, there's something about that path that appeals to me. There's a sort of simple beauty to it, like the kind of stuff that inspired the 2000 era 7 series bmw, the bosch power tool, and the mitsubishi zero ... maybe even the zen rock gardens in Kyoto.

So, lately, I dig deeper into the 'thing behind the thing' and it leads me to code. Where will this end up?

So, when you work on a computer, it helps to have music. Lately, I like to go into work super early, so I can put on my headphones and focus for a bit before the office fills up and I get distracted by other stuff. You know how it is. The other day I downloaded three songs from iTunes that harken back to the good old days of pong, atari, and the commodore 64. Yes, I'm talking about Kraftwerk songs.

So here's the list of songs I got: Elektro Kardiogrammm, Trans Europe Express, and -the classic- Tour de France. Were those guys the most awesome or what?! Good stuff to write computer code to. Check it out, you'll be more productive, I guarantee it.

Started my new gig as director of web services at dominican university of california. Needless to say, I've had my head buried in researching open source web tech tools for the past few weeks. Haven't had much time to post art news, but I'll just mention that automated systems are really groovy when it comes to creation and publishing of creative content.

Right now I'm looking into the plone system and having a blast ripping it apart one functional piece at a time. As I get more info on its potential, I'll post more about it. So far so good, although I still don't think I've found my holy grail of open source cms tools. Where's that super easy and powerful system in web aps? Seems to me it's almost a question of an apple computer metaphor in the web ap world. Hmmm.

If I had time to just hang out and build something ***really*** cool right now, it would be a good enterprise-class content management system. I've spent the past year doodling around with open source cms stuff, and from what I've used and seen, drupal seems to be one of the best ... if not the best.

But even drupal isn't really geared toward satisfying the publishing needs of large organizations. Drupal is really good at enabling communication in open, non-hierarchical communities. Professional organizations on the other hand, are usually very hierarchical and at the same time, content publishers need a tool that's so easy to use that they can't make mistakes.

What would be really great, would be to have a publishing system where users with different permission levels could publish content to their "area" really easily. And I mean really, really easily. I think this tends to be one of the major hurdles for developers, since we tend to fail at making things truly easy for users most of the time. This kind of publishing system strikes me as the holy grail of web developement right now. I'm going to don my armor and head out in search of it. Or, I'll just build it. Now, about finding that free time ...

At my last design gig in the city, there was a poster that had this quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery: "You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away." Of course, with my current thinking about design, this appealed to me. It led me to this site which lists some other nice ideas of Antoine's.

Another quote on that site reminded me about how I approach teaching art and design: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

Then I see this quote: "Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit." and it has the same ring of truth to it. So I wonder, if design improves as it becomes more simple and economical, then isn't it also possible to go so austere that your work loses spirit and dies?

"My design aesthetic is moving more and more towards simplicity and economy." It occurred to me that I say that a lot these days in coversations with people, and it gets me thinking about why that's happening. It could be that it's just a function of getting older: I think you get increasingly annoyed by confusion as time goes by. Or, it could be that it has to do with the fact that I'm spending more time browsing, analyzing and building web sites and tools.

The web is a "speedy" environment, and I notice that I tend to jump around a lot when browsing. In that kind of context, the most useful sites are the ones that facilitate scanning and quick browsing. Currently, I'm impressed with flickr and netflix when it comes to speedy usability.

You can now browse the wooblelab on your cell. I set up a mobile version of the lab through winksite.com. To check it out, click on the "mobilized by wink site" badge under lab utilities in the sidebar. If you're on a desktop, you'll be redirected to a desktop emulator of the mobile site. If you're on a cell, you'll hit the mobile version of the site.

Have to say that I'm really impressed with the service they're offering. First of all, it's free. I tend to like web tools that are really useful and free. Also, I emailed tech support at wink and not only got a fast response, but had a great conversation with them about the future of mobile technology as it relates to rss, web, and chat. This is definitely an area to keep an eye on, and winksite seems to be right on the ball. Word is they're redesigning their site to make it easier for non-techies to use. So stay posted on what they're up to. As signal v noise recently pointed out, small, fast moving tech companies with great ideas and fast rollout are where it's at these days.

You know what's so cool about blogging technology? The fact that you can update the content on your site daily ... or even twice a day if you've had enough coffee. And it's so easy. All you have to do is come up with something worthwhile to say. Hmmm. That's easy, right?

Just saw that Dunstan over at 1976 Design has stopped posting to his blog since he's got lots of other life stuff to do, and sometimes you feel like you just can't keep up with maintaining the level of fresh posts that you feel you should on your site. Boy, I can relate. Just got a new gig and I'll be working niner to fiver so I think it would be great to offer the following:

What say a couple of the folks that frequently visit the site post too? How cool would that be? We could have new groovy ideas about art, design and new media posted to the site almost ... daily! How cool would **that** be? ^_^ I know most of you have busy lives, stuff to do. But, just thought I'd throw the idea out there. I think one of the things that makes sites like signal v noise so much fun to visit is that they've got five or so regular posters. Just makes the content more interesting, dynamic and ... most importantly, frequently updated. So the invitation is out. Feel free to create an account if you haven't yet, and get in there and start posting some stuff to the lab.

Just found this in my email inbox. Looks intriguing.

II International Festival of Electronic Art 404 > Open Call

Deadline: August 15th 2005
"Astas Romas" is organising the second "International Festival of Electronic Art 404", to be held at "Centro Cultural Parque de Espa

The technology quarterly in The Economist has some of the most interesting reviews of trends in technology you can find. In the June 11th-17th, 2005 edition, there's an article about technology imitating nature. (They mention, among other things, that the hook and loop mechanism of burdock seeds inspired George de Mestral to invent velcro in the early 1940s.)

Now, Dr. Julian Vincent, director of the Center for Biomimetic and Natural Technologies at the University of Bath, England, has published a searchable database of "natural patents". I jumped over there and did a search for "swim" and "armor" just for kicks, and got some hits on tuna and mollusk technologies. Pretty cool. So next time I get that million dollar idea, I can just check first to make sure some tweety bird in the rainforest hasn't already had it figured out for millions of years.

A lot of the time when I'm surfing around, I just want to find some ideas. Something new. Something cool. Here's a description pulled from the homepage on coolhunting that says it amazingly concisely: "finding things in the intersection of design, culture and technology that excite the imagination and inspire creativity."

Now that's cool.

Just saw that Rhizome has changed their membership policy. Now, anyone can view and contribute to the site. This is great news. Not that five bucks was a lot of money to pay for such a great art news site, but still.

I'm looking forward to browsing their huge collection of new media art projects.

Andrew Kleindolph's amazing work is hilighted in a new show at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art. Check out the details. Plus, the lacda site looks like a good one to keep an eye on for new work from a variety of new media artists. Found another site to bookmark if you live up in the foggy northern lands of California. This one came from our other featured artist, Jen Garrido.

Just for general edification, wanted to share that the blog I visit most these days is the incredible signal v noise put out by 37 signals. Not only are these guys great web designers, but they also pose important questions about hamburger structure. Worth checking out. And then bookmarking. And then probably going back to later. Well, that is if you have any interest in "usabality", "hamburgers" or the "design of sports drink packaging". Intrigued? You have to be intrigued.

The way I see it, anything that makes a reference to Greek mythology is at least worth looking into :-) Adaptive path has a great series of articles on internet technology and information architecture. The piece on Ajax technology is worth a read for anyone interested in cutting edge usablity in internet UI.

Ajax stands for Asynchronous Javascript and Xml. Yeah, not the guy who holds up the world. Or isn't that his brother Atlas? Guess it is...What did Ajax do anyway, clean stuff? I'm not exactly sure how the "asynchronous" part happens, but if you have the interest, you can find out more here.

Just got the Arcade classics for my PS2 so I can junk out reliving the glory of centipede, tempest, battlezone and asteroids. Glad to see that I'm not the only one who considers those graphic treatments to be amazingly beautiful. Found a story on CNN about a whole group of artists who feel the same.

Acclaimed international artist Jeff Talman will return to bitforms gallery in a show that explores the visual and sonic resonance of the cathedral of Cologne, Germany. In a series of two video installations and one sound installation, Talman delves beneath the placid surface of the cathedral at rest to expose the nuances of "silence."

Endless Columns, a seven-channel video installation, features endless shots that pan up dozens of the columns of the cathedral. The textural quality of the stone is brought forward as the videos engage rhythm, gesture, and counterpoint. A large wall projection presents transparent layers of overlapping columns animated by continual panning. The eight-hundred-year-old stone columns undergo continual perspectival shifts, sweeping the viewer's eye upwards, as the installation further addresses the natures of relativistic, geologic and human time in both the context of the cathedral and the gallery space. Talman's exploration of the nature of the stone and the extreme vertical nature of Gothic architecture pays homage to the human drive to construct the monumental.

In the adjacent gallery, Sound Mass, an eight-channel sound field, creates a new auditory experience from the sonic resonance of the cathedral. This installation is based on the premise that every space has a unique sonic "presence" when at rest, which can be captured by waveform data. Even when a room sounds silent to the naked ear, small circulating wind currents that scrape against walls and other surfaces produce minute sounds, similar to those yielded by blowing air across the mouth of a bottle - this "room tone" is Talman's raw material. After recording the cathedral's room tone, Talman analyzed it and extracted the resonant frequencies. The sound field represents his nuanced choreography of the resonance of the cathedral's unique "negative sound."

The exhibition is completed by breath-sky and breath-stone, one-channel video installations inspired by the shape of the artist's breath during his work in the unheated cathedral in late winter. These wispy traces of human exhalation are set against backdrops of stone and sky, contrasting ephemeral human processes with enduring natural cycles.

http://www.bitforms.com/

Expect some nifty upgrades to the site over the next couple weeks, and the elimination of a few left over bugs from the recent upgrade to drupal 4.6. Enjoy. Any problems with the site since the upgrade? Click on contact in the sidebar and let us know...

***update***
It isn't safari, it's cookies. You have to have cookies enabled to login in as a user.
***original message***
By the way, for any new users, I'm just noticing that safari is getting buggy on the WoobleLab on user-login. I'm going to try to fix it and might just have to upgrade the drupal code altogether to match the hosts new php 5 settings and all that good stuff. If anyone encounters a problem loggin' in with Safari, I recommend just using another browser like Firefox or IE until I get it fixed.

Between watching cspan, surfing the net, and talking with my friend who's an industrial designer, I've come across some great online resources for people interested in making stuff out of technological bits and pieces. Here are three good links to explore.

http://www.makezine.com/
http://www.ifabricate.com:8080/ex/y/project/
http://fab.cba.mit.edu/

As usually happens, I end up at things that have some relation to MIT. Is that place the coolest or what?

Well, I tried. So much for my first attempt to build functional electronic sculpture. Maybe next time I'll start with a simpler project ... like buying myself some Lego MindStorms! Hehh hehh. My old Mac Classic has a grumpy face now and doesn't work! Somehow though ... it's funny ... as in maybe I should have known better than to take a file and a drill to a 15 year old computer and expect it to work when I plugged it back in! :D I popped a pic into the experimental gallery for kicks to show how cool the Classic looks with a simple structure and no plastic shell. I would like to build something techy that can display stuff still. Wish those portable dvd players were cheap already. Seems like they would be perfect to build around and you could just pop in a new dvd that you author on your "real" machine. But, the cost is still high on those things...

Made some changes to the site yesterday to improve scanability and access on 1024x768 monitors. I'm using a lo-rez monitor at work and wanted to simplify a bit for that type of access. Emptying the cache in your browser and reloading the page should get rid of any left over images and style settings if the site loads kind of funky over the next few days :-)

One thing I like about painting large is just the physical process of it. Spent some time last weekend out in the garage with a 36" square canvas and it felt good - like working in the yard, or building something feels good. Doesn't even really matter if what I make turns out to just be a junky "experiment" :-)

To maximize the kinaesthetic aspect, I bolted a brush on to the end of a 5 foot long dowel for effect and did some work like that, at a distance. In fact--just kind of going with the physical thing--I was thinking it might be sort of refreshing to try painting large scale without opening my eyes and see what it's like. The following story I just came across inspires me to give it a whirl.

http://www.blindart.net

Great looking work that comes from a great creative process... From the recent email bitforms sent out:

"The work in Process/Drawing employs ideas explored in conceptual and minimal artworks as focused through the contemporary lens of C.E.B Reas, a member of a new generation of artists using software as their preferred medium.

Reas's software and images are derived from short text instructions explaining processes which define networks. The instructions are expressed in different media including natural language, machine code, computer simulations, and static images. Each translation reveals a different perspective on the process and combines with the others to form a more complete representation. He employs the paradox in the qualitative nature of human perception and the quantitative rules which define digital culture. Relations are created between evolved natural systems and engineered synthetic systems. Organic form emerges from precise mechanical structures. Strict minimal rules are tempered with intuition to form dense kinetic surfaces."

Check out the details at:

http://www.bitforms.com

http://www.reas.com

Is it just me or is the line between "technology" and "art" getting fuzzier by the day?

It probably cost a little more than your standard Lego MindStorms kit to make, but the robot in this link embodies the spirit at the core of the future of robotics. Instead of being driven by explicit coding and machinery, it "learns" how to walk based on feedback sensors and micro-adjustments. Now, that's just cool. And they stuck googly eyes on it :-)

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/02/17/robot.toddlers.ap/index.html

This is the morning of the great unfurling of Christo and Jeanne Claude's "Gates" in Central Park, Manhattan. :-) Wish I were there to witness it first hand. 7,500 steel gates. Saffron.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/parks/central_park/christo_gates

Here's a potentially useful site for new media art teachers that I came across though a post in the rhizome feed.

http://distributedcreativity.org

One project within this site that looks promising is the "Distributed Learning Project". It's refreshing to see more people out there linking new media art with distributed learning technologies. The DLP won't go live until April, but the key contact at the site was very open to my email queries about their project's scope. I hope they succeed in making a valuable resource for the community.

From the homepage:
"The research of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC) focuses on collaboration in media art, technology, and theory with an emphasis on social contexts. The iDC is an international network with a participatory and flexible institutional structure that combines advanced creative production, research, events, and documentation. While the iDC makes appropriate use of emerging low-cost and free social software (ie. peer-to-peer technologies, blogs and mailing lists) it balances these activities with regular face-to-face meetings."

At my current design gig in the big city, I'm working with some fellow designers who have become great resources for ideas and links. One of the ideas that we got to talking about last week was the role of math, geometry, repetition and automation in digital art. I've been rolling around this idea more and more since recently re-reading Lev Manovich and Christopher Alexander. Patterns have played an important role in art and architecture for a long time. Here's a link to a site that blends old Persian patterns with new technology for an impressive result.

http://www.etereaestudios.com/

When you get to the site, be sure to check out the isfahan movie, and "making of". There's also a lot of other interesting research at the site. Amazing what can be done with Electric Image and a lot of time and energy.

Here are links to my two coworkers sites. We're all there to do techy web stuff. But it turns out we're all interested in 3D as well. David Anderson has done some really cool 3D animations for the medical industry that have an ambient, almost dreamy quality to them.

http://www.kankada.com/neurons_mac.shtml

Michael Cote has a great eye for mixing old school aesthetics with modern age 3D character design. Quake fans can download his character designs for use in the game. Or, just enjoy them visually as I do, in a sort of Tim Burton styley narrative way. :-)

http://www.freezerclown.com

Last month, I mentioned Blender3D for fans of opensource. David and Michael told me to also check out Wings3D. I haven't had time to use it yet. But, it looks good. Rumor is that it has an easier learning curve than Blender. So, if you want to get some free 3D software that you could start using quickly, it might be worth checking out. The software can be downloaded at:

http://www.wings3d.com/

WoobleLab conducted the following interview with Jen Garrido through email during the month of December, 2004. We would like to thank her for taking the time to discuss her creative process with us. If you are an artist, designer, or student and find the ideas expressed in this interview to be useful to you, add a comment below and let us - and Jen - know!

WL: Looking at the high level of quality in your paintings, it strikes me that your creative journey towards them must have taken some time. What aspects of creative process do you feel you were "taught" in school, and which ones did you stumble upon slowly through experience?

JG: I grew up in LA, I went to undergraduate school at Sonoma State University and I went to grad school at Mills College.

I think that I had a top-notch undergraduate education. There was no graduate program so the teachers were focused just on us. It was a small program, I only had 3 or 4 teachers for 5 years, so I really got to develop a relationship with them and I think that because they got to develop a relationship with me, my teachers had the opportunity of nurturing who I was as a person and helping me develop my personal process.

I do think that I was taught certain skills like ways of drawing and learning that a big blob can really add something to a figure drawing or about the quality of lines. But I think that I was just given skills, and I took them where I needed to take them for the good of my own work. I am also very lucky that my undergraduate school was a good match for me in that the teachers' styles of teaching fit with who I was. There was no "clashing of personalities." I still keep in contact with them and look to them for advice.

As far as creative process being taught and found, I think that anyone who embarks on a life of making art, even if it is just for 1 month, they will find their own way on how to do things. But one needs to work hard and be open to making things that they don't like until they find that one thing that they do. I feel like I was taught that I needed to have a strong work ethic to make art. Art takes time.

Graduate school was hard for me - that's all I can say about that'

WL: Can you shed any more light on this process of finding your own voice creatively? You mentioned trying lots of things until you found a few that really stuck and that you liked...

JG: I think that is a hard question...I think that a lot of people find their aesthetic voice by looking at other peoples work, at first...but then it is like making soup...you take a little of this and a little of that and let it cook for a while and then spice it up and the voila, you are making work that is you...BUT then, things shift a little and you have to do it all over again, make the soup, that is.

But it is hard to stay consistent and my thought is that the consistency is what really tells you about what you are doing.

Right now I am obsessed with consistency. The work I am doing right now I told myself that I am just going to make these paintings with a white-ish background and I am not going to stray from that because then I get confused...and when I am confused I doubt myself and doubting myself doesn't work well while I am trying to make work. But you know, I am always doubting myself in some way.

WL: Now that you are an Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts, do you feel the experience has influenced the course of your work at all?

JG: I think that it has. When I got out of grad school I found a really small, shared-space studio. My space was an area where people had to walk through to get to the kitchen. It was a perfect situation for the time but I had to work really small. I began thinking about the landscape again - an idea that I have worked with since I started making art - but in grad school I lost it somewhere because I made photos. The photos definitely had a landscape quality but ...Anyway, I was making these series of 3 X 3 inch paintings, 100's of them. A few larger paintings snuck in there but they never felt right.

When I got to the Headlands, I had some space and privacy. I didn't have to pretend that no one was around. It was quiet, I now could look out the window ... all of these things I think added to the current shift in my work, one which I am really happy and excited about...

WL: I'm curious if your relationship to landscape has to do with a specific type of place, or just the beauty of nature in general.

JG: The beauty of nature doesn't creep into my thought process about my work. While I think that the natural environment is beautiful, it doesn't directly inspire me to make work.

I consider my work to be "imagined landscapes." Right now, the paintings have some very literal qualities, which is really new to me. In the past, I have approached that landscape...I am having a hard time describing it. Let me use an example, I used to make paintings about feeling s that I wanted to embody, but felt that I didn't. I wanted to be warm or relaxed. So I used images that I felt spoke to being warm, like blankets or being relaxed, like floaty rafts in a pool. I took those images and either put them in a landscape or made those images into some kind of landscape ... landscape can be anything. In some way I felt that if I was creating an environment that was embodying relaxing, I would be relaxed...like magic. Or, like creating another plane of existence where I could live.

My paintings now don't really hold those same ideas, I more look at the shapes in the landscape and find those inspiring. I am more looking for space within myself. The large paintings of these observed, and also idealized, landscapes allow me to have space.

WL: Have you found that questions of scale are different in photography versus painting? It seems like with photography it might be easier to just "print it larger". With painting, it seems like sometimes the very act of going bigger can raise a whole new set of questions and challenges in your physical process.

JG: I made photographs that were 30 X 40. That is a big photograph. I didn't print it myself. All I did was push a button, get the negative and take it to get printed. After all of the photography phase was over I really felt cheated by the process of making pictures. Painting, for me is so much more about this "search," and in terms of scale, the search becomes so different when the work is larger. Different in a way that is more, body-oriented, and what I mean by that is that I feel that when the size of the panel is closer to the size of my body (I am 5 ft 3in), I have to move around it and move my arms and reach to paint. I have to use bigger brushes and more paint.

With the small paintings, none of that happens, and it gets to be "claustrophobic and tortured" - in some ways, or at least that is how I felt when I left making small paintings.

WL: Are your influences usually other painters, photographers - image-makers in general? Or do you find inspiration in the work of architects, dancers, musicians, poets, sculptors, film-makers - general creative types?

JG: My influences are lots of things. I am hugely influenced by color. The color of anything: food, clothes. And, I am influenced by color combinations and how they make me feel. I am obsessed with magazines: fashion magazines, interior design magazines and cooking magazines. My most favorite painter is Phillip Guston. I feel like his work allowed me to see the world as I see it - be okay with the way I see it - and understand it (my world) more in terms of forms and shapes, repetition and consistency in a body of work. Also, in grad school I took a lyrical poetry class and that really made a difference in the way I see and construct the "imagined landscapes" of my paintings. The lyrical poetry gave me the option of paying attention to all of the senses, making them be able to work together, no matter how obscured it seemed.

I still think about that class and the poetry I read.

Jen Garrido is currently an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County, California.

OK, this is just weird, and really cool, at the same time. Found this through my good friend at cyberdash. It doesn't really fit into any distinct WoobleLab categories, but I'm posting it anyway in "General". Time to get involved in "virtual" real estate development. 6,000 acres of 3D space sold for $26.5 large. :-)

https://www.project-entropia.com/Content.ajp?id=1346

If you're interested in online learning, check out items in the new feed from "Bag of URLs". Lots of good stuff updated daily...You can view all the posts in this area by clicking here. You can also access this area in the future by clicking on the "Feeds | News & Tutorials" link in the sidebar, and then selecting the "Technology" category > "more".

Found this one through Rhizome. Lately, I've had this recurring feeling that more computing power isn't really necessary to create high quality new media art. Instead, you've just got to have some good ideas. The current show at bitforms seems to confirm this. Retro (1950-1970) computer art that pretty much blows away most new stuff. Simple, simple, simple.

http://www.bitforms.com/scratchcode/

I've been finding interesting links by surfing around on the sites that people who spurl, furl & stumbleupon the WoobleLab have in their "favorites". Here's a great one for anyone interested in the world of character art and design. Yet another reason to reinforce my idea that great creative things seem to be happening in Germany and Japan. Berlin. I got to go to Berlin.

Remember to scroll sideways instead of down on this one once you get there...

http://www.pictoplasma.com/doc/index1.html

Last time I was on Flickr (it was obviously a few months ago) they had it all in this drag-and-drop-flash-powered-chat-format that was pretty cool in its own right. But now! Just head on over and check out what you get for free when you set up an account. A free way to upload images and create sets, share with designated people (or everyone), set permissions, etc. Very impressive. You can also feed out your images through RSS, or just "blog it" to your existing blog (has to be one of several supported types).

Well, it was fun to explore the feel of a dark design. But, the reality is, it's just SO much easier to read dark type over a white background, so I'm making the jump back to the white look. The site will be tweaked for a few days to get the new style in line...so forgive wonkiness in the meantime...

Going to keep adding some good sites to this post...so here are two more: (pixelmoon is a really neat idea: users submit tiles and the colony on the moon grows! There's a city, too, at pixeldam.)

http://www.x-panded.com/pixeldam/indexpixelmoon.html

Just general pixel info and a good resource:

http://www.pixelgala.org/

Here's a site to browse for lo-rez inspiration. The whole site is in forum mode--you have to go to the appropriate category (dolls, bases) and then click on a post in the forums to view the work. But...worth it. Reminds me of the good old days in video game art. Head on over to the "artwork" category in:

http://eden-enchanted.com Oh ... so cute! ;-)

Just found this link through that site: Also worth a visit. www.himenosakura.com ^ . ^

Just read a great article in the Economist about the use of 3D game engines to create movies. The article, "Deus ex machinima?" appears on pages 3 & 4 of the Technology Quarterly in the September 18th-24th issue, 2004. The article quotes a book entitled, "3D Game-Based Filmmaking: The Art of Machinima", which may be a good read for anyone interested. I think there's going to be a big future for this method of repurposing the technology. As anyone who has made a movie using 3D software knows, the time to make all those models, set up lighting, fine-tune animation, and render can be overwhelming. The machinima approach could lead to more focus on story, character, ideas, and less focus on technical aspects of production.

Anyone have experience with a mac-compatible game engine that can be used for machinima? If so, respond with a comment or post a story. I remember looking into creating some worlds for Unreal Tournament a while back, but at that point, the software was only available for the PC platform.

www.blender3d.org

There's a lot of great open source software out there. Most of what I've seen and used so far has been for web design and development. But, I've just found out that there's also open source software for 3D modeling and animation.

I just downloaded Blender for Mac OSX, so I could fiddle around with it and see what it's capable of. Blender runs on a variety of platforms, from Mac to Windows to Linux. I've used Electric Image and Maya in the past, so it'll be interesting to compare an open source 3d package for functionality. You can download the software, read about it, and see some samples of 3d work made with the software at www.blender3d.org

Stumbled upon www.stumbleupon.com today. This is a service that allows web surfers to bookmark pages they like in a way that allows other like-minded people to benefit from their bookmarks. Could be a good way for creative types to share info about links to resources that are useful for visual/intermedia arts. For example, if you're into avant garde video on the net, you can hook up with others who share the same interests and see what sites they're marking.

www.furl.net offers a similar type of service.

Also: www.spurl.net

You never know quite where the fertile intersections are going to take place between art, community, and new little techy gadgets. Was pleased to see that there is a site up now that hilites photos taken by...phones. Large scale database implementations that connect thousands of artists can't help but run through the mind...

http://sentonline.com/

Here are some areas of growth at the Lab. Let us know if you're interested in getting involved and helping our community resources to grow :-)

1. Fundraising and Grants Support: Non-profit organizations with strong synergy to the WoobleLab mission & goals are invited to contact us for partnership support.
We are currently seeking a 501.c.3 "sponsor" for our fundraising efforts

2. Content development for "Open CourseWare" materials
3. Schools interested in starting new "LabRoom" Spaces
4. "Featured Artists" information and images
5. Submissions to the "Public Gallery" are always welcome!
6. Any other community members interested in supporting the Lab should feel free to contact us!

Click to email us.

Came across this interesting site today. Seems the designers at Sony are rolling around some alternative digital interfaces to the standard keyboard. I especially like the building block idea. This sort of thing could ultimately change the way digital artists think about creative process with new media tools. Keyboard > Mouse > Wacom Tablet > ?

I've been hoping we'd see some development in this area :-)

MIT has pioneered the publication of a wide array of Open CourseWare on the internet. Students and instructors of the visual arts might be interested in viewing their course, "Foundations in the Visual Arts". This course is part of the architecture department. I've also found that MIT has some very useful resources in their Media Studies department.

You can view the Foundations in the Visual Arts course by clicking here.

Here's a brief reading list from my growing New Media Art library:

"Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion" by Oliver Grau.
"The Language of New Media" by Lev Manovich.
"Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science & Technology" by Stephen Wilson.
"New Screen Media: Cinema/Art/Narrative" edited by Martin Rieser/Andrea Zapp.

Pretty much everything published by the MIT Press is worth checking out. All of these books are available on amazon.com

Just stumbled upon the fact that Laurie Anderson was the Artist in Residence at NASA in 2003. This seems like a great idea to mix art and technology. Didn't even realize they did that kind of thing at NASA.

Bill Viola is an excellent and prolific new media artist. I saw his show at SFMOMA years ago and still think about it. Here are links to some of his material. I bought the book and it's a great one to have around...even just for the photos of his work.

The Book at Amazon
The Viola Site
A Viola Site within SFMOMA Espace

"Headlands Center for the Arts (HCA) is a laboratory for creativity where artists are given time and space to experiment, collaborate and develop new work in a breathtaking natural setting. HCA offers extended, live-in residencies to as many as 30 artists from throughout the U.S. and the world each year and rented studio space for Bay Area artists, providing opportunities for thought and interaction among a diverse community of artists and thinkers working in an array of disciplines. Through residencies and public programs, HCA seeks to explore and interpret the relationship between place and the creative process, and to extend appreciation for the role of artists in society."

Check out upcoming events at:
www.headlands.org

For a good overview of issues surrounding online learning, you might want to start by viewing the excellent site map for elearnspace.

KairosNews has some great conversations on the subject of rhetoric, technology and pedagogy. Also, they just posted a review of the Open CourseWare on the WoobleLab! (You can view the review by clicking
here.) I've also enjoyed visiting CyberDash for info on OpenSource implementations of eLearning technology. In my opinion, if you want a sophisticated OpenSource CMS Platform, you can't beat Drupal.

If I'm correct, 'round about the time of the Renaissance, the fields of art, craft and design began to diverge. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, these categories became even more distinct. A designer might make a "textile", while an artist made a "painting". In the information age, we now also have "digital" - or "new media" - art. Sometimes new media art forms are more on the design-side of the spectrum, and sometimes they are more "artistic".

Making a distinction between art, craft, and design might sometimes be useful. It might help critics to categorize work. Or, it might help an artist or designer to conceptualize the nature of their work and feel more "located" in their process. But, it seems to me that this distinction can also cause problems and limitations for certain practitioners. One could refer instead to a general category of Visual Arts that might be called something like "Creative Visual Expression & Communication", and include art, design and craft - all in one term.

On the WoobleLab, the term "Visual Arts" is used in this broad sense, and includes all three disciplines.

The General Discussion Forum has been replaced by a new system. Now, discussion posts can be submitted by registered users in "story" format. This way, new discussion posts can automatically be promoted to the front page to keep everyone up to speed on the latest news and announcements. Also, we've just added two new functions to the site from the Drupal module list: text emoticons are automatically replaced by graphical smileys, and typed URLs in posts are turned into hyperlinks.

When you create a new "story", select appropriate "topics" from the drop down menu, and your post will be slotted into the correct heading(s).

Author's note: these are getting old now... I used DreamWeaver and tables in these demos. I recommend using xhtml + css design practices instead. But, they're still a good intro if you want to use tables to layout pages, and use DreamWeaver as a design app.

There are five video-based demonstrations in this section. Files are mpeg format. There is sound in these videos. (Quicktime Player required.)



Creating a Site 3.8 megs: 1:11 duration.
Creating a Grid 7.9 megs: 3:30 duration.
Adding Content 5.3 megs: 1:30 duration.
Add Pages & Links 7.6 megs: 2:06 duration.
Upload Site 5.5 megs: 1:40 duration.