by R.I. Pienaar | Oct 7, 2004 | Front Page
I have deployed a new site menu on this site, at the moment it will be shown to all browsers matching /MSIE|Gecko|Opera|Konqueror/ in their user agent string, this ensure that older browsers and stuff like Links, Lynx and search engines can still see my old static menu and navigate with that.
The menu is from visualmenu.com and I can highly recommend it, it comes with a very nice desktop based menu generator that makes it all too easy. With this new menu I will be able to cram a lot more in there, already I now have a sub menu for the photo collections that I put up periodically which I could not really fit into the old menu.
Next I will need to investigate mod_gzip since I think things are getting a bit top heavy for modem users.
by R.I. Pienaar | Oct 7, 2004 | Uncategorized
Today in an email announcing the new issue of 28mm.org the site owner said it will be the last issue. This issue is packed with work from a whole pile of artists that has taken part in previous issues, it is well worth checking out.
Apparently there will be a book coming out soon, it should be fantastic.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 30, 2004 | Usefull Things
Till now I have been using Remind for a simple daily reminder system. It relies on simple text files and sends me daily emails notifying me about stuff.
This works fine really and I didn’t think I will need much more. Then comes the news that Mozilla has released a standalone calendar app called Sunbird. It is early days for this project but it is already very usable. It uses iCal format files which is compatible with all sorts of other applications and most importantly supports storing its files on WebDAV servers.
A quick install of mod_dav on my Apache web server and a bit of setup using authentication to keep things private got me going. Sunbird has some strange things related to blank files on WebDAV servers so you need to put at least 1 entry into a local calendar then publish that calendar to the WebDAV server to create your new calendar. Once that is done you can just subscribe to it.
This was nice, and I was happy, but I got thinking that I would need to sometimes access this stuff without being near my desktop computers – another great thing about WebDAV, multiple desktops all sharing the same calendar – so I thought it would be nice to get this stuff visible on the web.
A quick search around found PHP iCalendar that can view multiple iCal files in a very sexy looking web interface. So I had remote access to the data all sorted.
The problem with all this is of course were notifications, Sunbird seems to have issues sending mail – for me any case – and I don’t fancy keeping it open forever just to get notifications. I then noticed that PHP iCalendar can export your iCal files as RSS! For each iCal file you can get a day, week or month feed. Pop this into your aggregator and you have a nice place to get notifications as well. This leaves Sunbird only to edit the entries really and keeps things nicely integrated into what is quickly becoming the killer app on my desktop, my Newzcrawler.
Once everything was iCal enabled I had a look at iCalShare.com where there are 100’s of iCal files that you can just subscribe to or copy onto your own server. I got UK and SA holidays from there and will be investigating some other stuff.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 29, 2004 | Usefull Things
Scoble blogged about Blog Catalog which is a kind of yahoo/DMOZ directory effort for blogs, very nice.
On the general usefulness of RSS, reading Scoble’s site again made me realize just how much RSS has changed the way we use the web. Scoble says he is subscribed to more than 900 feeds and has some ideas about information overkill.
I remember my life before RSS aggregators, I managed to read a small amount of sites regularly, perhaps 10 at most, simply because going to each one was just a pain in the behind. I never read peoples personal pages and I never knew half of what is going on there since my main source of information ended up being slashdot. These days it is different, I keep up with around 90 feeds during the day they offer a good 2 minute distraction from work every hour or so. I am also finding myself much better informed about general happening because I can subscribe to a wide variety of feeds.
The fact that one person can have 900 feeds shows you just how far aggregators and the whole RSS technology has progressed and what it has enabled us to do. Yes RSS has flaws that is being worked on, but so far it has done a great job. I think it also says something interesting about the mental stability of someone who wants to subscribe to that many feeds, but that is another discussion ๐
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 28, 2004 | Usefull Things
Via boingboing comes a link to a good article on places to look for malware on windows machines.
