Henry's blog

Recently, I’ve been reading a few different webcomics, which are prime examples of self-publishing and cutting out the middlemen (syndication companies, publications) on the web. In doing this, you are thus delivering your content directly to your readers and, in a sense, are creating a relationship of sorts with them. I think that’s pretty cool. If you’ve never read any before, some of my favorite webcomics worth checking out include:

• A series as odd as its name, Toothpaste For Dinner
• The long-running Joy of Tech, featuring witty commentary on the world of technology
• “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” as its description reads, the hilarious and quite topically random xkcd is probably my favorite out of the three

Now that I’ve shared my list, what are your favorite webcomics, if any?

Whether a current user, or unaware of its existence, now’s a better time than ever to check out the social news site Digg.com.

Today the site rolled out a slew of new features. There’s an interesting refreshed/new design with added color and a reconstructed layout, a podcast section, and a built-in video player to display linked videos from select providers directly within the site, among other things.

For a video explaining and demonstrating everything, check out this post on the the official Digg blog.

In case you haven’t been aware of it these past couple weeks, there’s been an awesome “American Idol meets Mac shareware” type contest going on, over at MyDreamApp.com.

To quote the site, My Dream App is “The event where 24 finalists compete for a chance to have their dream app made into reality.” I thing I’ve really liked about this contest is that just like in American Idol where the judges critique the singing, over these past several weeks various celebrities of the Apple and tech worlds have served as guest judges to comment on what in this case are software ideas. This week, among a few other judges (Amber MacArthur included), both Guy Kawasaki and Steve Wozniak are judging, as well as J Allard, creator of the Zune and Xbox! As cool of judges as there may be, the power to decide who wins ultimately lies in the users’ hands, and voting for my different faves has been really fun.

Now, what would a contest be without prizes? As the site description says, the last three remaining contestants, in addition to receiving a bunch of awesome Apple gear, will amazingly get their ideas developed by some of the most well-known Mac shareware developers into actual applications. But, for the winners, the fun doesn’t end here: they’re guaranteed royalties from sales of the apps, which will be shareware, for life.

The ideas submitted have been really creative, and most of them are apps I’d love to use. And even if you’ve missed out on voting so far, the final round isn’t over ’til Wednesday so there’s still plenty of time to sign up. So, what are you waiting for? Get to it

I have something really exciting to announce today: after applying a couple days ago, I just became a member of the awesome teen blogging network, Random Shapes. This is a great opportunity for me to connect with other bloggers my age and of course also have more people read my blog. Thanks so much to all the members who approved me, I look forward to getting to know all of you.

You can definitely expect a more regular update schedule now,

-Henry

If there’s one video blog worth checking out it’s Ze Frank’s The Show. With its tagline of “Thinking So You Don’t Have To”, The Show is almost like hearing someone’s snarky, strange, and sometimes down-right hilarious thoughts and rants that they would otherwise keep to themselves. But beyond this, most of the time Ze’s commentary on the news (though often masked with humor) is almost chillingly dead-on, and he has a way of really grabbing your attention. Then again, the exclusively close-up camera angles (which provide an interesting touch) might attribute to this! If you haven’t already seen it, then I definitely suggest you watch an episode or two.

No, not that kind of 404. I’m talking about the first, much needed update to TextPattern–the content management system that powers this site–since December ‘05, now version 4.04. Usually “point releases” are largely insignificant, but in this case several things were fixed and changed. The only visually noticeable changes are on the admin side with the UI, and those are a refined control panel which has a better-kempt design than the previous. There’s also some other admin-related changes, but I won’t get into that. If any thing this just means the site will run a little more smoothly. For instance, the RSS feed is now version 2.0 and actually works (the previous didn’t insert any timestamps)!

If you’re looking for a great CMS/blogging webapp and aren’t afraid to get your hands a little dirty (though less dirty now with 4.04), then I can now definitely suggest that you download the awesome and free TextPattern.

In case you’re wondering, in no way am I endorsing Godaddy (not that I would mind doing so if you guys are willing to give me a buck or two). Rather, I’m endorsing Gomommy (for free!), which is … totally the same.

Just check this out:

www.gomommy.com

He he he

When talking about internet radio, for me at least, ad-ridden audio with a little music on the side (much of which is seldom what I’m looking for as the genres are far too broad) comes to mind. Folks, internet radio is so 2001. Say hello to Pandora. Pandora is internet radio meets Web 2.0., and as has been the theme of Web 2.0. (a near second bubble), it’s all about the user. Unlike many Web 2.0 sites which are dependent on user-created content, Pandora does not feature user-created music, but rather lets users craft their own radio stations. How is this done? It couldn’t be simpler. You go to pandora.com, type in a song or artist you like, and then instantly Pandora creates a playlist of similar music to that of the artist or song you specified. Like the song you hear? Give it a thumbs up (really like it? there are links next to the song info to buy it on Amazon/iTunes–unfortunately many of the more obscure artists aren’t available, at least on iTunes). Not so crazy about it? Give it a thumbs down, and Pandora will skip to the next song (you can skip songs 6, or 7 times per hour, I believe it is). You see, the point of rating each song is, based on your feedback, Pandora further tailors your station to fit your musical taste, and at the same time tries to expose you to music you may otherwise not have the opportunity or knowledge about to explore. Pandora’s a really innovative site, and I definitely recommend that you check it out.

…this is supposed to be a massive insult (no joke):

“You’re just jealous because no one goes on your myspace and you have no pic comments and no one ever talks to you.”

This was taken from an actual AIM conversation. I empathize for the youth of America. Actually, no I don’t.

My first impression of Textpattern has been quite a good one. For one thing, it was really easy to install, and was all graphical, which definitely was a plus (uncommenting lines in cryptic config files isn’t nearly as fun!). But the biggest thing for me, seriously monumental, was the way in which Textpattern handles templates/themes. More or less, you code the HTML skeleton, sans content, with no Textpattern standards to conform to, and then you merely insert special commands, almost like server-side includes where the various bits of blog-goodness should go. For instance, all the blog posts have a command (txp:article form=”default” limit=”15″ listform=”default”, which spits out a max of 15 articles per page, and compared to other CMS’ templating formats is elegant), and I just inserted that into a Div, and voila, a blog! MovableType is similar to this, but more complex, and don’t even get me started about WordPress. You see, WordPress has a templating language (!) written in PHP, which is hardly easy to learn (let alone use).

As you may notice the blog part of this site is directly tied into the rest, as far as design goes. To sum it up, in Textpattern it took all of 2-3 minutes to copy in the HTML/CSS from the main page and adapt it to the blog by inserting those special commands I talked about. It would have taken me–you know what, I was gonna say 2-3 hours to do in WordPress, and then I thought 2-3 days, but you know what? Even for a simple design like this, I doubt I could even do that in WordPress. And you know what’s crazy? I had used TextPattern for all of 10, maybe 15 minutes before setting up this template, and yet I’ve been using WordPress for months and it’s far more cumbersome. But in WordPress’ defense, I would definitely say that there are developers who use WordPress, and then there are the end-users.

Aside from templates and the like, there aren’t any huge distinctions between WP and Textpattern. From an administrative perspective, I think Textpattern has a much cleaner interface, and WP’s is just too busy. But on the other hand, I do kind of like WP’s admin design a tad more. Another big thing to note is the actual blog entry form, you know where you type in your article. What about it? Well, Textpattern is really lacking here. WP has a full-blown WYSIWYG editor, with ‘Bold’ / ‘Italic’ buttons, things of that nature–rich text editing. Textpattern? Um…no. That’s a bummer. Textpattern does support Textile, which is some sort of mark-up, but that’s just one more thing to learn, and I prefer nice little buttons anyway.

So, who wins this vicious, bloody war of the CMSs? Oh man, I don’t know–download both and see which one you prefer! That’s the beauty of free software. Woohoo @ FLOSS!