Big Board is People
The photo stock on Big Board is really coming along. With no configuration from me it grabs the photo and video thumbnails from all the people I know through Mugshot and runs them as a small slideshow.
Later we can work on adding information if a photo is new, people had commented on it, a slideout to see a larger version of the photo with description, and maybe a control to set a photo as your background.
Mugshot, Big Board, and the Online Desktop
Tomorrow night (wednesday the 18th) Havoc and I will be talking about Mugshot, Big Board, and the Online Desktop for the NYLUG.
If you’re in the area stop by and say hi. And anytime you can still talk about Mugshot, Big Board or the Online Desktop by hopping on our mailing list, IRC, or Community Group. Check out the contact page for all the details.
Getting feedback early on
Reading Alberto’s recent post let’s make it easier made me think of last years New York Times article A Star is Made.
The article mentions computer programming and I do think it applies well to GNOME. Some people have been practicing (contributing and coding for GNOME) more than others and many of those people were probably able to get lots of positive feedback on their early work which encouraged them to continue working more. And thus a GNOME contributor is born!
I don’t think I would have started with GNOME had there not been such a quick feedback loop for working on the project. Luckily for me, friends of mine and I had created a group at school called the Open Source Institute where we could get course credit working on lots of different Open Source projects to learn about the software creation process. Beyond our small group of GNOMErs meeting other GNOME hackers at GUADEC and the Summit was a great way to feel more connected to the people responsible for all this cool work.
Just a small suggestion to not only focus on making getting started easier but creating a good feedback loop for new people. Perhaps using communities like GNOME Love to share patches made between new contributors.
I am Jack’s Web 2.0 Blogger
I recently switched over to wordpress, as much as I loved pybloxsom I wanted blog comments and web access to writing new entries. I could have done that all with pybloxsom, but I was moving hosting providers and I’m lazy and knew that wordpress has those things in by default. Sorry Will!
So I’ve been in the process of getting my blog into shape for this brave new world of blogging. Going over each of the Twenty Usability Tips for Your Blog and trying to make sure that I have them covered in mine. I covered the sections that apply to my blog interface and not really my blogging style.
Interaction Design, though I don’t actually do much blogging about the topic in the general sense as much as I blog about the experiences and designs I’m working on. Perhaps my topic should be My Interaction Design…
I spent a good part of last night getting my comments system up to spec. I have the math plugin and the subscribe to comments plugin enabled. Most of the time spent adding these things is actually spent mucking with your theme afterward. Why aren’t these themes incorporating these kinds of plugins?
I personally doubt that adding the RSS button to my page will make it easier for anyone to subscribe to my blog. I think anyone who wants to subscribe to blogs needs to use an application that knows how to find the RSS links in the blog page.
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I don’t have an about page yet, but I’m working on that. I’m probably just going to finish up my portfolio and use that as an about page since I don’t think I could find enough interesting stuff to say about myself that would fill a whole page.
I’ve got Categories and a Date Archive, a bit of a cop out but I think they both have their uses. I made sure my categories are listed above the date archive.
The related posts plugin is a little too manual for me, but at least it does a nice job of adding in related blog entries near the bottom of each entry. I’m not looking forward to going back and adding keywords to all of my posts though, perhaps this will be a thing I do from here on out.
Adding an “Email Me” blurb to the sidebar is a really simple way to solve this, though I think my future About Me / Portfolio page should have the contact information instead of cluttering up the sidebar with it.
I like the WP-PostViews plugin for listing my most popular articles. Though since I haven’t been running it for very long it doesn’t really reflect the actual popularity of the articles.
I’m not sold on the Index page, a classic feature where I don’t have a strong objection. But just because I don’t feel like it will hurt doesn’t mean it won’t have a positive effect; my gut says the likely effect would be clutter.
I don’t really understand the point of adding a list of recent posts to my main blog page. It seems that if my main blog page is showing all my most recent posts that displaying just their titles in the sidebar would be superfluous. I did want to add this element to the single post view sidebar. My thinking is that if you’ve arrived at an individual entry in my blog you might be interested in the latest entry as well. I found a recent posts plugin from the wordpress plugin repository.
Now that I think I’ve improved the blog reader experience for my site it’s probably time to do some testing of all my assumptions. In the mean time I’m looking at Luis’ post on codes of conduct and trying to keep up with that.
Big Board and Your Personal Stock
Big Board
The Big Board isn’t a panel replacement, it probably doesn’t do half the things the current GNOME panel does and I wouldn’t imagine it would ever match all of the functionality. There’s lots of areas the panel handles like task switching where Big Board doesn’t want to touch, it’s out of the scope of the project. The intention of Big Board is be an connected companion to the online desktop. Connected meaning not just online but available locally as well.
There are lots of mockups of the board available on our developer wiki, but some are out of date and some are just ideas that haven’t been fully looked at yet. Right now this is what Big Board is and where those pieces are going.
Stocks
The Big Board is made up of different applet like things we call stocks. The stocks are pretty easy to write in python and can access account information through mugshot to grab feeds of the online services you use. The first stock on the board (located on the top) is the Personal (or self) stock.
Personalization
I covered a lot of this in the Big Board Design but most web sites make it immediately apparent when you log in that it knows who you are, while our desktop doesn’t naturally do this. Sitting down at another person’s GNOME Desktop doesn’t give me a hint who’s machine it is unless I start searching for their username in the home directory. (f-u-s-a being a possible exception that isn’t on by default, perhaps until recently)
Display the logged in users photo and name. This not only helps for the person to be sure they are logged into their Desktop correctly but it also helps us to encourage them to set an appropriate name and icon. Further down the road making sure people have set the correct name and icon helps with fast user switching, gdm face browsing, offering a decent default for buddy icons, and some other ideas we have about local network browsing. Currently this personal stock reflects your Mugshot image and name and will keep in sync with the site accordingly.
In the future we’ll be looking into using this personal area for the start point to editing personal preferences and logging out or switching users. You can see in this mockup the idea that clicking on the personal will give options related to either you or the computer you’re using.
Just below your picture and name we’re listing the we accounts you use. Currently these icons will take you directly to your account or profile page for the site it represents. The icon list serves as a decent starting point and begins to show how we’re giving web applications a similar presence to local applications on the desktop.
Search
Next up is the Search stock, where we took advantage of the awesome Deskbar applet to handle the “quick search” input and results display. The interesting twist mugshot gives to deskbar is that we can have the information necessary to search all of your online accounts (assuming they have feeds or web services) like delicious, digg, flickr, and others but we could also be searching your friends delicious, digg, and other accounts as well. Having the collective bookmarks of all your friends and colleagues at your finger tips might be a nice way to quickly find that thing you were looking for. More later…
I was tempted to write a post where I could give my side of a story and mis-quote and mis-characterize a person whose work I admire but I’m going to just talk about our prototype and it’s ideas so we can remain friends and find a way to work together. Plus I personally prefer ad hominem attacks opposed to that baby killing Gravely’s methods.
The Doctor is In
I broke a rib or two over the weekend playing rugby. Just before passing an assist that scored I bounced off a gentleman who was a bit bigger than me trying to spear my kidneys.
I haven’t gone to the doctors yet since there’s no treatment other than taking pain killers and the pain isn’t getting worse than when it first happened. According to medical student friends and webmd’s fractured rib article I need to breath in deeply every hour to reduce the risk of contracting pneumonia or a partial collapse my lung.
At work I’m using DrWright (now a part of the Control Center and known as “Typing Monitor”) again. Every hour it tells me to stop typing and I use the time to take a very deep and painful breath.
Gardening Your Library
The LibraryThing article that Luis linked to really stuck with me over the weekend. And luckily I was in the WUNC radio area to hear this story about the book BookMarks: Reading in Black and White. In it Duke University professor Karla Holloway suggests that your reading list is a projection of your own identity, which is perhaps a strongly related reason why people on LibraryThing want to tag and organize their collections (or online projections of themselves).
Now I’m off to Florida for the weekend to play in the Ruggerfest 2007 tournament, the weather down south has been great so far and I hope it continues for the weekend.
And so it is
I caught an excellent Damien Rice concert last night at the Orpheum. The Swell Season were a funny and great opening act and Damien rocked out to a heavy metal version of The Blower’s Daughter that I thought was amazing. However by the look on the faces of most everyone else in the audience they seemed shocked by it, I think most people came to hear him play The Blower’s Daughter just like it was in Closer.
Last.fm and Tourb.us are doing a pretty good job of letting me know what shows are in town. Plus they don’t spam me with emails I can’t opt out of. Tonight I might catch Cirkestra playing at the Middle East Upstairs, they were also featured on WBUR this morning.
Both last.fm and tourb.us give RSS feeds of your “Events I’m attending” list which I’m hoping Mugshot will hook into soon so friends can swarm around interest in going to a show they might not have know was happening. I clicked that I was a maybe for the Damien Rice show months ago but didn’t know who else would be interested in going to see him.
Mashing Google Calendar and GNOME
I never used to be much of a calendar person, usually I’m late to everything and never know if I’m free for a weekend or not. But since Google calendar came out I started using it pretty regularly and I think it’s actually improved my ability to be punctual and organized… well probably not, but anyway.
One major benefit I find to using this calendar versus one on my local system is that I can have GNOME import my calendar locally via the iCal and still access and use the calendar via the web interface any other time.
To set it up I went to the manage calendar page for my personal calendar. I had to right click copy the link location since they don’t give the iCal link in webcal: url format. Then open a terminal and type this, replacing $URL with the url you copied for your iCal.
/usr/libexec/evolution-webcal $URL
And that’s about it, the little webcal dialog will ask you silly questions about your web calendar settings and it’s imported into evolution-data-server. I don’t even use evolution anymore, but the calendar portion works just the same. I only ever view my calendar out of the calendar widget, all my updates and additions are done in Google calendar.
A Premium Night at the Movies
Miguel: There’s possibly an economic solution to avoid your movie watching problem.
Those are students who don’t have money and you’re a working professional who does. You might like to try the Premium Movie Theater out in Framingham. Ticket prices are 13 and 18 for Matinee and regular respectively. You need to be 21+ to get in and they serve food and drinks you can take into the film with you. Plus it’s outside the city where no student would really travel for a movie.
I don’t go there very often because the overall cost is pretty expensive, but if I really want to enjoy a movie quietly (i.e. you’re not watching snakes on a plane) it’s a good place to go. Of course they do only have a limited selection of movies as well as often require reservations. Not worth quitting your spy job over, but it’s still good.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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