I have been asked this question on many occasions and my response has varied and often fallen short of best describing what all the twitter is about.  So finding this video gem was very nice.

Apple Wiki Logo

So the new Apple wiki server is hot of the presses, feature rich, and really slick overall.  The problem is that there are very few steps to walk in and those using it are more like explorers hacking at jungle vines that tourists enjoying a well marked, scenic drive.  I’ve been charged with building a new wiki page for the Arizona State Mac Users group so the new WikiServer was an obvious choice.  Also obvious is the fact that we wanted to have our own look and feel and branding.  There is a very good document out called Extending Your Wiki Server, but it falls short in walking one through some of the hurdles in branding the wiki.  One wall I recently ran into was customizing the XSL files.  The wiki uses XSL files to format the xml data the server renders as the page loads. There are the default XSL files, and based on the PDF mentioned above, one could copy the XSL files to a new them directory and the wiki would read those over the defaults.  If only it were that easy.

Many times I’d copy the files and instead of showing the updates it either

• Still used the defaults, if I was lucky
• After a small delay ignore my custom theme all together and change the site to use the next in the list.  (Note: if your theme has error, or files within the theme have permissions issues then the Wiki Server appears to ignore your them and used the next working theme.)

There were a few gems I found after 3 or  4 dayst of WikiServer enduced torture.  First, hidden files were sometimes introduced to my theme folder by my editor, Coda, which was causing the theme to be deemed unworthy and ignored.  Secondly, thanks to this thread I found the XSL files were loaded with include statements, all of which weere hard cdoed to the defaults.  It did not matter how many times I changed the deault.xsl file, when the other XSL files on the playground were ignoring him.  Poor little default.

I changed the includes, cleaned up the hidded files and all seems(for the moment) gravy.  Now onto the 15 different hieracical based CSS files.

Radio button method always presents the choices on the screen, which is nice, unless there are 100+ choices. Select saves some screen room but unless the choices are sorted in a logical manner(alphabetically, etc) then finding your choice is not always intuitive. So after a bit of Googlin’ I’ve decided that for items less than 10 (radio), over 10 (select – but pay mind to the sort).

A good resource I came across:
Jakob Nielsen – http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040927.html – point 8.

Will report back if feedback is good or bad.

This event was started two years ago by Dustin Diaz, and for one reason or another I would miss it. This year I am embracing my nudity(with ease thanks to the CSS Naked Wordpress plugin by Aja Lorenzo Lapus.)

Included in this post is a little graphic I came up with to celebrate this prestigious event. Any one interested is free to lift it from my site and display it at will. (PS. Naked Juice I love your product and would have no money with which to by it if I had to pay your lawyers)

If you are of the web standards persuasion or are just interested in seeing what happens when your site is stripped of its CSS head over to the CSS Naked Day Site, sign up and prepare to disrobe on the 9th.

The result is my newly added Sociable Time Line section of the site. My plan is to migrate much of my web wander logs into this section and Dipity has an excellent interface to bring meaning to those wanderings. Example: say I write and post a really jaded, disenfranchised entry on the site you can correlate it to a last.fm scrobble of Rage Against the Machine on the time line. I also noticed the Dipity folk are already working on integrating with facebook, which is awesome.

Overall awesome tool. If you get stuck with some app weirdness, first remember this is the alpha release and take two breathes. As a pioneer you will lose a wagon wheel or two. Second use the feedback forms or jump on Get Satisfaction as BJ and crew will be there for ya.

Some tips:

Micro vs Macro:You may want to craft timelines as either macro or micro level. What I mean here is if you bunch all you sites together chances are you will be like me where one social network will track your birthday, so unless you have been blogging/twittering since you were 3 there will be a vast amount of empty space. So my plan is to create a macro_Me_timeline and a micro_Me_timeline, and spread my feeds between the two.

Think about your audience: you may not want to post all you delicious links if you incessantly bookmark NSFW content. For my current employer I set up a feed that outputs every news release ever posted on the site, then routed that to a private time line. The result is The Biodesign Institute time line.

Moving forward:

A couple of things I would like I have on my wish list for Dipity:

1. Be able to see the feed details after I add them. Example: Deli.cio.us(http://del.icio.us/rss/riseofthephx)
2. Be able to sort feed priority, so those with greater weights are shown higher up on the time line, it looks as though the blog entries are positioned high now which is nice.
3. Dipity time lines have their own RSS feed that can feed additional time lines. A few examples: One family member’s time line could feed the time line for the entire family, a subsidary group can feed a corporate parents timeline, etc.

I am new to the tool so if this functionality is in place please be kind in your RTFM rants please.

Big bonus to Dipity creating the tool sans(w/o) Flash as the end user can easily modify look and feel via CSS and the information is much more accessible.

Some books get read sporadically, as reference. Others are completely devoured. We had to purchase two copies of some books based on demand, namely the new Agile Development with Rails and Dom Scripting. To stay in the know of current trends and upcoming technologies, blogs and namely RSS feed aggregation is the way to go hands down. But if you want to unify your development/design staff around best practices and methodology, nothing can beat solid book. So what is on your book shelf that makes you the ‘The Smartest Man Alive!’

Google Maps now allows you to correct the pointer when it is pointing to the wrong house. When you are in the maps view with an address being displayed in a bubble, there is now an option to ‘Edit’. Just drop and drag the arrow. Great for giving solid directions, bad if you are being stalked by a crazy person.

Now that the info is correct, it won’t be long until…

Tomorrow…

…as seen on blogoscoped.com