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Refueling the Engine

March 10, 08 //
11

It’s been sev­eral months since I’ve writ­ten on here, since August of last year in fact, which equals to roughly 5 years in Inter­net time.

What have I been up to since I last mashed my fin­gers across the key­board and pub­lished some­thing of worth? Well, I was offered and accepted a posi­tion with AOL/Weblogs, Inc. as a designer for their net­work of sites. My first thought was; they pay peo­ple to design blogs? It’s become more than a dream job for me and I couldn’t be more thank­ful for the friend­ships I’ve formed and lessons learned.

There’s that, on the job end of things, and as a far as my per­sonal life is con­cerned we’re plug­ging along quite nicely. My daugh­ter Zoe just turned 4. For those of you who’ve fol­lowed this site for the 4+ years I’ve been main­tain­ing it this is a huge mile­stone. My son, Quinn, is now 2 and between the two they man­age to keep us busy, thanks in part to how often they annoy each other. We are expect­ing another child as well so there are more adven­tures to look for­ward to.

Speak­ing of which, this site, my favorite pet project has become more stag­nant than ever. You could search the archives… oh wait, no you can’t because that’s yet to be fixed, but hey, if you could you’d find plenty of posts describ­ing some sort of post-mortem. Mov­ing on from here I’ve finally decided to use Expres­sion Engine to use as the engine of this site. One rea­son for set­tling on EE is because I’ve used it spar­ingly in the past for projects and the road map of fea­ture addi­tions & inter­face enhance­ments (as show­cased at SXSW ’08) looks pretty fantastic.

The other rea­son is I had din­ner with Michael Boyink, recent hire of Ellis Labs (the team behind EE), and through his own artic­u­la­tion and excite­ment I myself became utterly con­vinced this was for me. He’s also the man behind Train-EE which is both an incred­i­ble and infor­ma­tive resource on all that is Expres­sion Engine, oh, and he offers train­ing course ware on it. How cool is that?

It’s been awhile and I real­ize that and it both­ers me, but, it’s clear to me that the pro­gres­sion of this site is to become some­thing more than a blog, but also it needs to be fun again for me.

Hacked!

June 6, 07 //
17

For those who aren’t aware Dreamhost expe­ri­enced a secu­rity breach. Accord­ing to Dreamhost, approx­i­mately 3,500 accounts were com­pro­mised, the hack­ers tak­ing note of FTP user accounts, user names and passwords.

With this data the hack­ers, using an auto­mated script of some sort, added SEO links/inframes to every instance of index.html or php.

This is the last straw. I’ve been with Dreamhost since mid-2004 and rec­om­mended them on more than one occa­sion and even went so far as defend­ing them when oth­ers com­plained about slow ser­vice or half-baked cus­tomer sup­port, the lat­ter being some­thing I never experienced.

Not any more. It’s time to look for a new home.

Over the past two hours I’ve had to comb over my files, look­ing for any­thing that could have been stolen and to my knowl­edge some files might have been removed.

Not only that, but the pass­word I used was one of the best pass­words I’ve used in a long time and now, thanks to this, I have to piece together a franken-mash of numbers.

It’s sad because while I rep­re­sent, accord­ing to DH, only .15% of the cus­tomers whose data was changed in some way, I just wish some­thing could’ve been done to pre­vent this.

Yet, who am I to say that web host­ing is safe from this kind of thing, which appar­ently it isn’t. I sup­pose I wanted to believe that they were impen­e­tra­ble, even if that was a pre­ma­ture wish.

The cul­prits added inframes and link­age point­ing to off­shore sites dis­play­ing gar­bled infor­ma­tion; SEO tac­tics indeed.

On the bright side of things, my entries are safe, every one of them accounted for since 2004. This wasn’t an issue really con­sid­er­ing I’ve kept back­ups of my DB since the begin­ning and make it habit to do it frequently.

I’m also plan­ning on mov­ing to a new CMS and will be tak­ing the entries with me to pre­serve for the future, when robots make swiss cheese sand­wiches with George For­man machines.

Does any­one out there have any sug­ges­tions for a new host?

Joost!

April 24, 07 //
122

Update: Thanks to the gen­eros­ity of Joost allow­ing unlim­ited invites every­one who added a com­ment and those who leave a com­ment from this point on will receive an invite.

Joost [logo]For weeks on end I’ve been patiently wait­ing for a Joost beta invite. Why am I so excited about some­thing that on the sur­face seems like Tivo™ for the web?

There’s an easy answer for that, so let me spill it. Before I do that how­ever, I’d like to thank Paul for send­ing me the invite.

Joost Oozes With Quality

It doesn’t take a spe­cial decoder ring to fig­ure out what Joost does. The offi­cial site describes its func­tion­al­ity quite perfectly:

The magic of tele­vi­sion, with the power of the inter­net built right in. Joost puts you in con­trol, and TV will never be the same again.

This could be con­strued as a bold claim, as if the creators/developers/masterminds (the peo­ple respon­si­ble for Skype and Kazaa) behind this oper­a­tion could not pos­si­bly con­vince them­selves otherwise.

Yet, when you con­nect the dots, eval­u­at­ing the whole enchi­lada for a ser­vice like this (brand­ing, web site and tech­nol­ogy) you can’t help but be enthralled by the polish.

Spec­trums, Rain­bows and Magic

Have you ever looked through a spec­trum? There’s a infi­nite amount of col­ors that appear if you hold one up to a light source. It’s inter­est­ing that the cre­ators of Joost chose to theme their ser­vice around the con­cept of spec­trums and color vari­ety. Although, I must admit they do look a bit like col­ored Kryp­tonite, not that there’s any­thing wrong with that.

Ear­lier today I was doing my best to describe the pro­mo­tional video on the What’s Joost? sec­tion to a friend. Halfway into explain­ing how cool it was I real­ized it’s just one of those things you have to see for yourself.

At first glance the demon­stra­tion video seems a bit awk­ward, or at least it did to me. After watch­ing it I real­ized it seems famil­iar and that’s because it’s some­what like a med­ley of Bat­ter­ies Not Included, Cocoon, The Last Starfighter and Tron. Like I said, you need to see it first­hand because my descrip­tion just won’t cut it.

Beta Means Slim Pickings

I would say that my only beef with the ser­vice is that the chan­nel offer­ings are slim at best and the video out­put ranges from near DVD qual­ity to sub par Youtube qual­ity. One moment it looks great, the next it just dis­tracts from the over­all expe­ri­ence but I’m sure in time it’ll improve.

As far as the con­tent is con­cerned other than watch­ing some “vin­tage” Ren & Stimpy car­toons with my daugh­ter and a cou­ple Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel spe­cials on lions and pyra­mids, there’s noth­ing else that peaks my inter­est for the time being.

That will change as Joost con­tin­ues to sign con­tent providers but in the interim there just isn’t a lot to con­sume at the moment. Although, this is still in beta so that’s just par for the course. Joost has promised to con­tinue sign­ing con­tent providers; for instance, they just added a vari­ety of shows from providers like Com­edy Cen­tral, VH1 (the chan­nel you switch on when you’re bored, or, at least I do) and MTV.

Beta Invites

If you haven’t expe­ri­ence Joost yet, well, that’s just not right. I’ll tell you what, leave a com­ment and I’ll use the magic of the inter­nets (and a handy script to ran­domly select a num­ber) to choose three lucky peo­ple to send an invite to.

Ready, set, go!

The Influence of Art in Design

March 2, 07 //
9

Over the past cou­ple of weeks I’ve eluded to the fact that I will be par­tic­i­pat­ing on a panel at this year’s SXSWi called The Influ­ence of Art in Design.

Here’s a descrip­tion of the panel (straight from the horse’s mouth):

Fine arts have long held a sub­tle, yet influ­en­tial grip on both infor­ma­tion and design. From car­toons, illus­tra­tions, dig­i­tal art, pho­tog­ra­phy and more, you’ll hear first­hand from some of the best in their fields, have a chance to explore the past, present, and future of the tech­niques that you see around the web, and how it can improve your own work and get both sides of the brain work­ing bet­ter together.

Turn­ing Thoughts into Reality

To backpedal a bit, before I made the com­mit­ment to go to last year’s SXSW Inter­ac­tive con­fer­ence — my first visit — I made a promise to myself that come the next con­fer­ence I would be on a panel. Cer­tainly it’s fun to actively par­tic­i­pate as an observer, but to present your thoughts to peo­ple, to engage them, to make them think and all said and done, if they can get some­thing out of what you’re say­ing, well, that’s say­ing something.

I kept that thought in the back of my mind, that I would some­how, using some force of nature have the oppor­tu­nity to be up there amongst a group of my peers and share some­thing, even if at the time I hadn’t any idea of what that might be.

Months later dur­ing a late night IM con­ver­sa­tion with Anton Peck he men­tioned the con­cept of the panel to me and it didn’t take much con­vinc­ing on his part, I was hooked..

The Dream Team

Next week I will be shar­ing meat­space with the fol­low­ing creative-minded people:

Come join us on Sat­ur­day, March 10th (11:30 – 12:30pm) and be sure to mark it on your SXSW cal­en­dar.

It’s a win-win; you’ll have a blast, learn a thing or two and I can gen­uinely promise your cre­ativ­ity will kick into overdrive.

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