Brian Fitzgerald

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

Where do you stand on software/video piracy? I don’t know anybody that’s all for it, but we all seem to have a line that we think is all right to cross. This video compares piracy to things that are pretty absurd…

WebWag is another AJAX-driven start page. Looks great.

Digital Web Magazine - News - Article: The Big Picture on Microformats: You've heard the buzz about microformats, and you've probably been meaning to use them on your sites—perhaps they're sitting somewhere near the bottom of your list of things to do. In his new article, John Allsopp gives us a snapshot of what's happening with microformats today, and he challenges us all to move them closer to the top of the pile.

Bytespring is a content management system built in ColdFusion. Jason Sheedy has posted a FAQ

I haven’t posted for a couple of days, but it’s not because I haven’t been blogging. Several months ago I started to move forward with creating a site where video tutorials could be shared. I had gotten frustrated with the cost of commercial services for what they were offering, while at the same time depressed by the free alternatives. Chris Pultz and I each created one series of videos to get started, and neither of us got further than that. What got in the way? Well, I should say that the new site got in the way of time that we would both rather spend with our families. Who wants to work when you leave work?

So, what about the site? Well, Chris noticed after we began working on the site that screencasting (the new term for narrated screen recordings) was starting to take off and that quite a few folks were beginning to share them on the web. Indeed, in just the few months since I set up the site, tons of these screencasts have been published. Why should we replicate everyone’s effort? Hmmm…

So welcome the new Vuedo.com! I am combing the Internet looking for helpful screencasts so that there is one easy place that people can come to find help with what they are doing. Of course I still plan on creating my own screencasts, but now I’m just filling in the holes I see in what everyone else is already doing.

Visit Vuedo and Subscribe! Let me know what you’d like to see there.

• Ted On Flex - Introducing FlexTV
• Geotagging Photos with Flock
• Interview with George Moore, GM Windows Live
• Digital Web Magazine - News - New Accessibility Book

Ben has a new article up on the Adobe developer center regarding using PDF Forms with ColdFusion MX7. While he notes that these abilities pale in comparison to what will be possible with Scorpio (Next major version of ColdFusion) they offer some things that could be useful now.

The two uses that he illustrates is populating a PDF form with database data AND extracting form data from a PDF form. It requires a custom tag, but looks to be very easy once in place.

• mentalaxis » Badgr 2.0 … Bigger images? You got it!
• Berners-Lee Disses Web 2.0
• Raymond Camden's ColdFusion Blog: Canvas ColdFusion Wiki
• NY Times
• Getting more people to your blog : The Bit Bucket: The Blog of Lucas Sherwood
• macZOT! » Mac Pilot - Customize Your System
• Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO » SEO Advice: Writing useful articles that readers will love

An article on Vitamin today discussed why the author does not use social sites. The ending argument was that the author didn’t have time for their own work and they certainly didn’t have time to be social on one of these new sites.

I understand where they are coming from and have felt this myself from time to time.

Then I think of all of the times (multiple per day) that I have searched and found the answer to a problem that I had on a person’s blog or buried in a forum somewhere. While it would be nearly impossible to thank each person that you receive help from via the internet, I do feel a very strong responsibility to give back to the system. If I save a day of work that I would have struggled to figure something out because somebody took the time to detail their solution on a site, the least I can do is put my own experiences on the web. I rarely comment on others' sites and just as often participate in forums, but if I get it out there somewhere (such as on my blog) then I know that it will be indexed by the search engines and somebody may find an answer to a problem that they run into. Heck, since I run into the same problems over and over, I find the answer to some of my questions on my own blog.

Social sites like del.icio.us and flickr that encourage everyone to chip in can make that goal easier. If I post my bookmarks to somewhere like del.icio.us, then everyone can benefit from things I find instead of them being locked up on my computer. Flickr allows photos to be shared and aggregated, giving views of places and events from many perspectives. These services, among others, can probably be tied into tools that you are already using and can be used in creative ways. I almost never visit these sites. When I take a picture on my phone or export it from iPhoto, it goes to Flickr, which publishes it in such a way that my blog can display it. My browser, Flock, can publish all bookmarks to del.icio.us, which then appear on my blog also. These sites become middleware agents that allow data to be liberated in exciting ways.

So forget about any feelings that if you use a social site that you need to be commenting and participating in that community. Find a way to contribute to the larger community of the internet. Use these services as a way to save time, to work contribution to the internet into what you are already doing, and to perhaps without even knowing it, help somebody out.