From the monthly archives:

February 2008

Local Development: Installing Mambo

by Shane Perris on Friday, 29 February, 2008

in how-to, tutorials

Mambo is an open source Content Management System (CMS) that was originally developed in Australia as a commercial application in 2000 and was subsequently released to the open source community.  It takes advantage of the traditional Apache/MySQL/PHP stack which makes it perfect for use locally with XAMPP.
Mambo has a checkered past and has suffered from [...]

{ 0 comments }

The problem with AIR

by Shane Perris on Wednesday, 27 February, 2008

in opinions

I got carried away last night commenting on this Read/Write Web post about 6 new Adobe AIR apps.  For anyone unfamiliar, AIR or Adobe Integrated Runtime (so that’s Adobe Adobe Integrated Runtime, really) is Adobe’s effort at bringing Rich Internet Applications (RIA) one step closer.  RIA, for those increasingly unfamiliar with my jargonistic babblings, is [...]

{ 5 comments }

The Week That Was – the "Well, DUH!" edition

by Shane Perris on Monday, 25 February, 2008

in news

… Is Facebook doomed? – Scobleizer
… Facebook fatigue – visitors level off in the US – Techcrunch
… Facebook’s UK usership drops . Just temporary? – Mashable!
… Like, Facebook is so over, dude – mathewingram.com/work
… and the article that started it all, Facebook. Back to the kids? – BBC News
Hmmm. Shiny new thing not so [...]

{ 0 comments }

Movable Type is a blogging engine developed by Six Apart (other notable Six Apart products are the hosted blog solutions Typepad and Vox).  The latest version, MT 4.1, is available under a range of licenses including free for personal use, education and non-profit licenses and commercial licenses depending on the number of users.  The release [...]

{ 6 comments }

Virtual time – the trap of social networking

by Shane Perris on Wednesday, 20 February, 2008

in opinions

Socialising and networking takes time. A lot of time.  The more friends you have, the more time you need. There are phone calls, emails, letters (honest-to-god by hand, on paper letters – they do exist – look it up if you don’t believe me), catch-ups, dinners, chats over coffee/tea/beer/protein shakes – it goes on and [...]

{ 0 comments }

The year that will be: a closer look at predictions for 2008

by Shane Perris on Monday, 18 February, 2008

in news

Part way into the new year is usually a pretty good time to reflect back upon the predictions made for the upcoming months.  With a bit of luck last year’s hype has begun to fade away and some patterns of how things will pan out begin to emerge. 
A great weakness of the internet [...]

{ 0 comments }

Local Development: Installing Wordpress

by Shane Perris on Friday, 15 February, 2008

in how-to, tutorials

Wordpress is a free (as in beer and speech) open source blogging engine originally built upon the code of the b2 blogging engine.  In time it has become one of the most well known and used platforms in the blogosphere (and is the platform of choice for techwhimsy.com).  Wordpress comes in two flavours – WordPress.com, [...]

{ 0 comments }

A first look at Second Brain

by Shane Perris on Wednesday, 13 February, 2008

in reviews

The brain child of Norwegian entrepreneur Lars Teigen, Second Brain bills itself as a “social content aggregator that helps people collect, organize, search and share content from multiple online services in a single library“.  In short, Second Brain is yet another “lifestream” service in a growing market populated with the likes of aggregators and micro-blogs [...]

{ 6 comments }

m.theWeekThatWas – the mobile edition

by Shane Perris on Monday, 11 February, 2008

in news

The Commentariat can’t decide if Google’s Android mobile phone operating system is gathering steam or lagging behind.
Warfare is declared between a mobile browser that doesn’t even have an alpha and a much loved but cut down version of a market leader (and the video of the latest version of Opera Mobile makes it look [...]

{ 0 comments }

Local Development: Installing XAMPP

by Shane Perris on Friday, 8 February, 2008

in how-to, tutorials

There will come a time when the beginner blogger wants to take more control and choose to host their own blog. When it comes to development, testing design tweaks, different templates, plug-in compatibility and overall usability, nothing beats having a version of your blog sitting on your very own desktop (or laptop) computer. [...]

{ 57 comments }