Well, I think this is it.
The last post I will make in movable type.
Why?
There is nothing wrong with movable type... its just that I need to move on.
So most of you know that I monkey around with Drupal. Build sites, themes and generally tinker with the guts of the CMS... I even write about it sometimes... but I found it a bit odd that for all the praise I bestow on this great CMS... I don't actually use it for my own personal blog. Seems silly to me.
So I am going to migrate this site to Drupal.
Migrate is actually the wrong word. I want this to be a quick transition with as little time spent on moving as possible. SO - I'm not actually going to migrate the content in the MT database to the Drupal database... I'm just going to keep the HTML archives and feeds from MT and link to them from the new version of the site - and then start fresh.
When? Soon... perhaps by the end of the week if time will allow.
andyway... enough talk - lets get down to work.
andre
SAJAX is:
... an open source tool to make programming websites using the Ajax framework — also known as XMLHTTPRequest or remote scripting — as easy as possible. Sajax makes it easy to call PHP, Perl or Python functions from your webpages via JavaScript without performing a browser refresh. The toolkit does 99% of the work for you so you have no excuse to not use it.
Well I'll be! A long time ago you might recall me talking about building a word 'radar' screen which uses 10x10's data about words in headlines. The back end programming was done AGES ago... it was pretty straight forward - but I needed a slick front end. Flash seemd like the way to go (for obvious reasons - i.e. its built to animate things), but I am no flash guru... I pondered a pure CSS and DHTML solution - but i didn't want to constantly have to refresh the screen just to get an animation of constantly changing data to show up... Well - SAJAX might come to the rescue... I'm going to have let my 'discovery' of SAJAX sink in for a minute... because I am sure I have plenty more useful applications of this tool in my brain...
andre
Here's a really cool 'tool'.
I was poking around James Walkah's blog and he pointed me to the folks over at UpComing.org.
Upcoming.org is a social event calendar, completely driven by people like you. Manage your events, share events with friends and family, and syndicate your calendar to your own site.As Upcoming.org learns more about the events you enjoy, it will suggest new events you never would have heard about
Well I've signed up...
You can have XML or iCal feed you info on events that are a) near you b) your friends are attending. Or if you are just interested in getting events by type (say concerts) you can grab an XML feed... or if you like going to events at a particular venue (say the Opera House) grab that feed.
There is an API for easy integration into your own site... and a pre-built module for Drupal powered sites (beta). The API is a two way street... Not only can you download events from the site - but you can add your own events calendar to upcoming.org via the API... YUP - that's right... if you maintain your own events calendar for your organization why not let the WORLD know about it (or at least many many many more people than normally would have heard about it).
Sound a bit like meetup? Well it is a bit - but doesn't offer all of the same features... but this is 100% free and, according the website, will remain free! and FREE is good.
In the future they say that they will support Sunbird (iCal) syncrhonization... right now you can already grab events to Sunbird (or other iCal programs) - but you can't publish events to upcoming.org from Sunbird... Now when and if that happens THAT would be amazing!!!
Upcoming seem to be relatively new and there are still a few quirks - but I still give it a 10/10.
andre