Brian Fitzgerald

Contribute 4 has been released by Adobe. I was pretty surprised as Macromedia NEVER released a product without announcing them almost a month in advance. I have downloaded it and am using it right now to create this blog posting. That’s a new feature in Contribute 4! Don’t get too excited thoughâ??this is the most painful posting experience I have ever had. So painful in fact that I’m going to stop right here. I’ll use it some more today and write something more informative about it later.

On this blog, you will find increasing amounts of ‘religious’ news. I didn’t just find anybody, but have become the webmaster of my congregation’s web site. Since this blog serves as the center of the content I put online, it is unavoidable that content I collect for this relatively new site to arrive here.

Because I am also the webmaster for a public school and this blog is aggregated on a page there, there could be issues. Therefore, I will put everything that is non-religious into a new ‘non-religious’ category. This category has it’s own rss feed and will be the one that I point distrct resources to. Those that prefer the top-level feed will begin seeing much of this new information.

Since this post is a part of that non-religious feed, I have avoided names and links here. You can visit my web site for links to other sites that I’m involved with.

I’ve added my links back to my blog. I’ve posted about this a few times and I’m sure that no one cares, but I want my thought process to be here. I have long had my del.icio.us links displayed on my blog, but I have gone back and forth on including them in the blog postings.

It’s easier to say why I think that this is sometimes a bad idea. First, if you have a bad system, as I have had from time to time, you can end up with a lot of empty posts if you aren’t creating del.icio.us links every day. Second, if you aren’t posting but are linking, it still seems to be kind of goofy to have a blog that’s nothing but links (still preferrable to no blog at all in my opinion).

So, why put them in? Most of you reading my blog are reading it via a news aggregator of some sort, meaning that you are never actually visiting my site. So if I find a fantastic site and link to it, even those that are reading my blog every day do not find out about it because its not being included as a post. Also, not including them creates extra work. When I find something on the internet worth noting, I have to decide whether to create a post, a link or both. It is much easier if I just create the link and then let del.icio.us post the link at the end of the day.

So, that’s the story. I’m using del.icio.us to manage my bookmarks. I’m using the blog poster built into del.icio.us to create the postings and every day at 5pm a post will be created with things that I have linked to that day.

Thoughts, ideas? Drop them in the comments…

• Remember the Day of Atonement
  (tags: HSLuthBlogs)
• Touching God's Heart?
  (tags: HSLuthBlogs)
• Is ColdFusion Harming Itself?
  (tags: coldfusion)
• Social Networking: Time For A Silver Bullet
  A social networking newbie? Want to get up to speed? This article will give you the history, the present and show you where it maybe going.
  (tags: social)
• Teaching What We Donâ??t Know
  Interesting article in Tuesdayâ??s USA Today about how â??Todayâ??s Young â??Digital Nativesâ?? Canâ??t Live, or Study, Without Technology.â? The focus was on Ball State U. in Indiana, the most wired campus in the country. It gives a lot of examples of h
• Kansas State Launches Worldâ??s Largest Podcast Program
  Our degenerate neighbors to the south seem to be getting on the ball with Podcasting, although a commenter on the linked page notes that the whole thing is locked behind blackboard which makes me wonder if it is a podcast at all. Audio files without a RSS
• Other Wikis
  I've fallen off of the wiki wagon but need to get back on. This is a pretty comprehensive list of wiki applications available.
  (tags: wiki)

This can be filed under “posting so I can remember later”. Darwin Ports has become MacForge. This is a super useful, albeit geeky resource for open-source projects that run on OS X.

technorati tags:macforge

Today is the deadline for presentation submissions for the National Educational Computing Conference occuring in Atlanta next summer. I got mine in last night. I proposed a three hour workshop covering the creation of web pages using web standards (xhtml, css, xml, etc.). I’m not real hopeful as it sounds dull and I was tired when I wrote the submission so I may have not sold the idea real well. Sometime in December I’ll learn whether I’m in.

A co-worker of mine sent this out today. It’s called “How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot in Any Programming Language”. My favorite is CSS: “You shoot your right foot with one hand, then switch hands to shoot your left foot but you realize that the gun has turned into a banana.”

Read it here

It’s a Web 2.0 application that serves as a directory to Web 2.0 sites. I wonder if it lists itself…

Adobe Labs has posted new information regarding Apollo â?? their upcoming build-an-application-out-of-html-css-javascript-and-flash development environment.

technorati tags:apollo, adobe

Looking to add a few new programming languages to your repertoire? CNet has 10 suggestions.

MaxUP is a un-conference that will run in parallel to max in October. An un-conference is a conference where you must participate to attend. Think open-mic night at the coffee shop, then require that everyone take the stage if they would like to listen.

Here's the details.

Google plans to add 200 years of newspaper history to its search archives. Perhaps they will run into the same problems with this that they have encountered in trying to put books online but I hope that they succeed. The internet, I believe, has introduced a barrier to history that has not existed before. If I want to look something up on the internet and learn about it, I have to consider how long ago that event happened. If it happened anytime after the mid-90’s I will probably be able to find writing on the internet from that time about the event. If it was before that time, the internet may not give me the kind of perspective I’m after. What are newspapers but a ‘blog? Add 200 years of newspaper history and the internet just got 200 years older. Exciting!

The Call for Participation for NECC 2007 in Atlanta is Open. Deadline is October 4.

Wikispaces is giving away 100,000 FREE wikis to educators. Get yours!

Dan Saffer helps the world understand designers.

New to CSS? Here is a fantastic guide to starting out with CSS.

This isn’t as easy to do as it sounds. Horizontally center, easy; Vertically-center, tricky. Here’s a shot at a solution.

Here’s a site design that takes the painfully boring topic of insurance and makes it fun.

A former Apple employee compares his time there to time at other companies.

Read/Write Web explores question with Opera’s CTO Håkon Wium Lie.

technorati tags:ie7

Read/Write Web’s Top 10 Firefox Web 2.0 Add-ons

Flash is Ten years old! Flash back at the Flash anniversary site.

Here’s another one of those things that I know I need to learn and start using, and haven’t.

The Big Picture on Microformats