Need an easy to use tool to help folks make image galleries? Check out jalbum. As the ‘j’ in the name suggests, it’s java-based, with a nice, simple interface and tons of available templates. We’re going to offer this to students here at Skidmore as a simple way for them to produce photo galleries.
Remember Fractal Design’s Painter?
What if some of the developers of that package went off and built a new cross platform (win32 and OSX) naturalistic painting app, then offered it for free to any and all? If this were the case, chances are high you’d immediately click on this link and get yourself a copy. This is great stuff, especially if you have a pressure sensitive tablet to work with, but even without one it’s a great little drawing/painting app and as usual you can’t beat the price.
What if I went ‘pro’
So perhaps you’ve come across a few of the articles that have been running lately about folks finding themselves able to make a living off of their adsense revenues. I’m pondering going that route myself – finally going ‘live’ with metamusing.net, pushing it off onto a commercial host, connecting myself to all relevant points in the ‘blogosphere,’ adding the adsense bar, letting it go for a year and see where I get. It will only cost me a few hundred $$$ to try it and from pondering, the worst repercussion I can come up with is my ego takes a beating when the world doesn’t beat a path to my website. I’m not looking to make a living off of metamusing, but if it can pay for its hosting bills plus a few dollars here and there I’d be more than content. I’d have to move it to a commercial host since it’s against Time Warner’s terms of service to host a commercial website on their bandwidth. Anyone going to strenuously object if the adsense bar starts appearing here? I might even go so far as to offer a greasemonkey script for folks who really don’t want to see the text ads google puts in.
Another free wiki hosting system
I mentioned a week or so ago how much I liked Jot but lamented that I couldn’t really swing the price. If you’re interested in trying a wiki but can’t swing the price either, check out wikispaces.org. Free, super simple to use and a nice clean interface. It may not have the feature set of Jot but this is a more than capable wiki engine for small teams to work with – a visual editor, versioning, a category/tag system and RSS/Atom feeds are all built in. If you can’t manage to get a wiki running on your own machine this is a great alternative.
A weekend spent swimming
It’s hot here, HOT, so I went swimming friday and saturday. Almost had a disaster friday – after work Soolin and I were overheating so I stopped home, switched into swimming gear, then headed to the hudson on spire falls road. We got there, I tossed the frisbee in the water, and Soolin took off – she lost sight of the frisbee and became obsessed with finding it, or simply confused, and proceeded to just swim down river. She got a couple hundred yards ahead of me as I scrambled along the edge of the river in water ranging from ankle to waist deep. I finally ended up falling in and swimming after her. Long story short a guy in a kayak rescued her, else she would have ended up at the dam in glens falls or who knows where. It was pretty scary, I couldn’t imagine how I would have tracked her down if I had ended up losing sight of her, and I’m immensely frustrated with my inability to get her to respond 100% to the ‘come!’ command. Anyway this led to plan b on saturday – no more off the leash for her. We went back to the same spot, this time me with my paddling life vest on and her on a lead. I hopped in and the two of us swam and drifted about a mile or so downriver, stopping now and then along the bank for her to rest. It was like having a little motor on a string – I let her head wherever she pleased for the most part and just floated along behind as she dragged me too and fro. When we got out we just walked back to the car. I need to get something with a little more buoyancy to it before we go next time because at times Soolin wants me to hold her as we drift, and I can’t stay above water with our combined weight. I might get a doggy life jacket and see if she takes to it, otherwise I’m thinking a styrofoam ‘noodle’ or two will do the trick, or maybe this thing would be a better bet since she probably could get on and off it on her own.
Ruby on Rails – moving the webstack forward
RoR has all the buzz these days in web development land, and for good reason – it’s a fantastic system for building database backed web-apps. Proponents of other languages have been bringing out a variety of similar MVC-based webstacks in response (or at least, lots of them are getting discussed now that RoR has all the buzz – all ships rise on a rising tide and all that). They vary widely in quality, quantity of documentation and ‘readiness to deploy on,’ and I definitely haven’t had the time to dig into all the ones that have been coming out, but I’ll mention one in particular that looks promising, especially if you see learning Ruby as a barrier to entry for Ruby on Rails. Django is a Python-based web framework that emerged out of work the developers did for a variety of consulting projects. It distinguishes itself from a lot of the other emerging frameworks in that (like RoR) it’s been in production for a couple of years. There are also a few decent tutorials out for it. I ran across a pretty insightful comment about RoR as compared to Django, which described Django as a CMS toolkit as compared to RoR’s as a webapp toolkit.
There’s one significant barrier to entry with Django – they’re building off of mod_python and Apache 2.x – if like me you’re still working off of Apache 1.x this can be a deal killer. Still, this is worth monkeying around with, especially if (again like me) you find Python world’s easier to read and write than Ruby.
My favorite project makes it onto chronicle.com
Chronicle.com (The chronicle of higher education, a trade publication that covers the higher ed ‘industry’) covered my favorite project last week, the Romantic Audiences Project. Unfortunately the site is paid registration only, so while I can link to the article you won’t be able to read it unless you have an account. I’m sorely tempted to simply snarf their text and reprint it here, consequences be what they may, but since they don’t refer to me by name (I’m named as the Bowdoin web developer a couple of times), I guess it’s not really worth risking the ire of the chronicle’s copyright cops, assuming they have any. It’s cool to see something I had a role in developing get some positive national press even if they fail to mention me.
Alternative free news (rss) reader for windows
Two more web design link collection links
Subject line pretty much says it all – two more web design/css link collections, one of which Danny was kind of enough to send me an email about. First – the css focused CSS Directory and then the almost too comprehensive for comprehension Web Developer’s Handbook. Both are excellent resources if you’re a web developer looking to keep your skill sharp or needing to research an issue.
Second Life account for free for the next couple of days
So you read Snow Crash (and if you haven’t, what are you waiting for, it is along with Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy responsible for popularizing a whole genre of science fiction and a ripping good tale to boot) and you thought ‘how cool was that!’ My guess is so have the folks at Second Life, but instead of just thinking about it, they proceeded to try and build it, and they’ve come the closest so far to realizing Stephenson’s vision of an immersive virtual world. Normally it costs a one-time fee of $9.95, but to celebrate their anniversary they’re giving away free registrations. You’re a download away from checking out one of the coolest community built online worlds that exists, go check it out quick.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 
