The Progress Bar

I love this simple example of an interface for gathering issues, bugs and questions from members.

Bob Lefsetz has the answer. Everyone has their hand in the cookie jar. TicketMaster rebates, groan.

I’m coming down off a one-hour radio interview after a fast 6 mile run, legs are burning and I’m listening to the Betahouse In Abscentia Mix. I was at the Betahouse one year anniversary party last Friday but it was early, before it got sardine-like. I had drinks with Stowe Boyd before heading to the ‘Hause. Stowe and I worked together at Corante and hadn’t seen him in a long time. Corante was the first blog network back circa 2000, years before Denton and Calacanis got into the game, just sayin’. Have you seen Jason’s Mahalo? Fascinating! (In a Shel Israel kind of way, watch the video.)

High points: Finetune DJ Matt Mascolo was manning the decks. If I could stream his brain into my playlist, I’d be all set. Its like if RadioParadise mashed up with Soma.fm. Looks like he’s back. The fact that Matt played Burial by Archangel is just too much. Speaking of Soma, remember Swedish Egil?

Last week I wrote about Fluidapp which I used tonight to create a standalone Firefox application to play the In Abscentia Mix. Fluid is fantastic, it took me not time at all to make any web page into a FF app that’s lightweight and doesn’t get memory-slammed. It’s like Leopard/Safari “Open in Dashboard”, only better, except for a crash, but as the last remaining Powerbook user on the planet, I’ve grown accustomed to the Intel-centric world we live in now.

Go check out Muxtape, it’s going to be big. It’s what we thought Hype Machine was going to be, although I like the Hypem redesign, it’s basically over, especially sporting the Cheapflights.com banners at the top. Then again, Peaches was the top hit when I logged in tonight and the ads are more like hipster blog entries, hard to tell. Peaches is the best getnasty singer out there right now, blush and crush all the way.

Funny how the simple stuff like Muxtape beats out the complex (HypeMachine) *almost* every time.

Dataportability Project – check it out, logo competition happening now.

Today’s post centers around how difficult it is to customize blog templates.

I have built blogs for SixApart customers, and my person and business blogs are currently running on WordPress, so I know a little about about how blog systems work.

Back in 2002, I would install plugins, tweak templates and spend hours getting my blog looking just so. Sidebars looking pretty, heavily customized archive pages, I spent too many Friday nights obsessed with making my blog look and function properly.

These days, I upgrade my template once a year or so. I look forward to the dentist more. I’d rather focus on writing than customizing my blogs.

The nightmare called the WordPress Codex is bogged down in unanswered questions, questions answered 23 different ways, or answers which are out-dated, or just plain wrong.

When will templates be as easy to customize as sidebars in the WordPress Widget admin screen?

After several years and at least 100 hours of configuring, upgrading, customizing and maintaining several blogs, I’m about read to move to a hosted solution and be done with the whole “roll your own” situation. Ok maybe not, but it’s frustrating!

And about widgets and plugins, authors, VALIDATE YOUR CODE. The majority of widgets fails validation. I don’t mean throw a few warnings, I mean they fail badly enough that it’s said Google will down-rank you, although I’m not sure if this is true.

I spent 2 hours cleaning up sidebar and widget code. It’s a mess. If everyone did their job right the first time around this wouldn’t be as much of an issue. Centralized plugin management is a step in the right direction, although the process is still buggy.

Now that I’m done ranting I’ll go back to picking out a new widget theme.

Gmail is set up to harvest all incoming emails and add them to your Contact list by default. I found this out when I went into my Gmail Contacts and saw hundreds of malformed email addresses, including many entries for driving directions. Turns out Gmail turns this function on by default.

I just spent an entire hour removing all contacts and carpal is setting in. Why, you ask? Because Gmail doesn’t let you delete more than 20 contacts at a time. FAIL.

I’ve been getting a kick out of Muxtape, a simple way to create and share mp3 mixtapes.

Muxtape can run as a standalone Mac application built on Fluid.

Using Fluid, you can create SSBs to run each of your favorite WebApps as a separate desktop application. Fluid gives any WebApp a home on your Mac OS X desktop complete with Dock icon, standard menu bar, logical separation from your other web browsing activity, and many other goodies.

Fluid does Greasemonkey, tabs, feeds, Growl and more. Cool stuff. Not that I want another 15 apps running but this is a nice attempt at a solution that doesn’t require rebuilding websites and services to run as AIR/Sliverlight applications.

Quick video demo of setting up a Fluid app. I made one for Theprogressbar in 15 seconds. I always check where a video is hosted from. The Fluid demo video is on Blip.tv. I talked to the Blip guys last year and was very impressed. I’m doing my own show at ustream, which syncs with Blip, nice.

Mozilla Has other desktop-based application in the pipeline as well, called Weave.

I am surprised that there is not an established open format for data exchange between wikis. Over the past few months I’ve consolidated hundreds of Microsoft Word Documents into VoodooPad, a nice desktop wiki for Mac.

I had some data in MediaWiki on a server, which took me several hours to bring down locally, total PITA.

At one point, the Flyingmeat folks who are behind VoodooPad had released a synchronization tool to keep local VoodooPad docs synched up with remote wikis. Unfortunately, the feature was removed at some point.

I hope someone runs with this, maybe a subgroup of the Data Portability folks. At the same time VoodooPad needs a general refresh and a better way to find out which pages are not in a category. One you have 100+ pages it gets to be time consuming to find what I’m looking for unless it’s in a category.

Founders Brunch is a great idea, is there something like this in Boston?

I had a great at the Betahouse party last night after having drinks with Stowe Boyd, who I worked with at Corante. I only lasted an hour or so before I had to go off to another party, and it was great to run into Dave Cutler and everyone else.

Met with Chris Brogan this week, what a nice guy and totally connected.

I de-activated SezWho and am trying out the Disqus comment system. The import comments feature is coming soon, or so they say. This blog doesn’t get a lot of comments so that shouldn’t be a problem.

Can I just say that I am totally over my iPhone? They virtual keyboard is not doing it for me at all.

BTW I’m daveevans on Twitter.