From our director of Purchasing:
DO NOT CREATE ANY REQUISITIONS ON MONDAY JUNE 30. Any requisition created on June 30 will be canceled by Purchasing and you will need to recreate it on July 1 with new year funds and your name will be removed from the book of life.
I just returned from the 2008 Portlets and Consortium conferences for the CampusEAI Consortium. I participated in three presentations (more on that later), stood up and talked a lot, and showed how Wii bowling both helps and hurt you when you go to a real bowling alley.
Gravatars – Globally Recognized Avatars – may be the coolest thing since MU*s. Yes, I’m showing my age. I was a text-only geek. It’s how I learned to roleplay. It’s how I learned to program/code. It’s how I had my first social-networking interaction via the internet. This was back in the day when people were trying to get all sorts of “universal” ideas going. Every web site (that I was interested in) seemed to be a new kind of trinket you could add to your internet satchel. I thought all of that was gone with the dot.com bloom and bust, and the web 2.0 age of slick social services.
But thanks to WordPress, I find out (belatedly, of course) about Gravatar. You upload your avatar – a small photo or icon – to a central place, and the icon will auto-magically appear next to your name the next time you comment on someone’s blog. Of course, it only works with those blog sites that are using compatible blogging tools or plugins (WordPress now supports it natively).
But what a great idea! And they’ve implemented it in true web 2.0 style – not AJAX for AJAX’s sake but a clean and simple interface that lets you do exactly what you need and then gets out of the way. Bravo!
It’s official. FormPress is now live at wordpress.org.
The second update for the beta of FormPress has been released. This version introduces a new “Required Fields” feature as well as many maintenance updates.
Yes, I know. Five+ years of development. An approach to open-source content management that is at the same time refreshing and inspired. One of the top blogging tools in the world.
And now, WordPress processes my forms for me.
My jaw rarely drops when I happen upon another web professional’s blog. This article entitled “the problem vs the answer” made my jaw drop because it is something I have been ranting about for the past two weeks. I have been stumbling over the explanation; I couldn’t have said it better than Tom Knoll did:
Why is everyone more interested in the answer than the question?
When you have a problem that needs to be solved, you should be more interested in the questions than the answers. Solutions come from good questions, not prepackaged answers. I know you are pressed on every side and feel like you do not have enough time to worry about good questions. But good questions now, will save you exponential time in the future. If you allow many small under-pressure-solutions to stack up, you end up with a building that cannot be repaired, but can only be torn down and rebuilt.
There is a tendency in my field to provide a set number of answers, rather than taking time to consider the questions with people. I look forward to the day when we feel like we have time to ask the best questions and consider the best answers.