shawn rider dot com

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

Carlo, our new team member at TeacherLine, just forwarded me this XKCD. No matter how much you mine through the archives at XKCD, there is always another funny episode you missed. It’s incredible.

This comic does pretty much sum up the experience of moving to Python for us. It’s been great to work with, and Carlo is finding it rewarding after just a couple weeks of messing with it. We have a joke around the office whenever somebody pulls off something cool in Python and is asked, "How did you do that?" We always answer, "You just have to import awesome at the top of your code."

I stumbled upon (not using StumbleUpon, just the regular way) a thing called Swicki. What is a Swicki you ask? Good question. Turns out a Swicki is a particular kind of search engine which returns results based on a preference profile it generates from user-feedback. And the Swicki site allows users to create their own search engines, which can be customized to return tailored results on any topic or agenda.

There are a lot of these already, probably too many to be useful. Some have cool names and topics, like Systemic Unlearning Meme, which is a Swicki dedicated to learning contemporary web design. If it returned better results… This is an example of a Swicki-in-training, as most of these Swicki engines are. A search for PHP on the Systemic Unlearning Meme Swicki yields a list of results that places PHP.net (the main hub for PHP information online) in 6th place, while Google puts PHP.net at the top of its search results (which are, albeit, preceeded by some ads and book search plugs). But I suggested a promotion for PHP.net, and PHP is a popular keyword for the Swicki, so hopefullly others have found more useful content at PHP.net than 43Things.com (which ranks second in the list of results).

On the other hand, the #1 All Hip Hop Swicki manages a bit better. On a search for Sovereign, the top results are all from major Hip Hop information outlets, and result number two mentions Lady Sovereign, my hoped-for reference. I suggested to the moderator to axe the results for Sovereign Financial and Sovereign Restaurant, so once again, I have something to come back and check on. Let’s see how this thing learns…

Along these same lines, I recently discovered Ning, through a link from BoingBoing to the CC Hits site, which lists Creative Commons-licensed music releases. The CC Hits site is very well-done and definitely on my watch list. I hope CC music isn’t all dominated by electro-remixes by kids with Acid…

Ning, however, is even more interesting. Like the Swicki site, Ning allows users to create their own user-driven websites. These are “web 2.0″ in the most conventional sense of the term (although that doesn’t make them necessarily unattractive or less useful). The CC Hits is really a standout from the browsing that I’ve done so far, integrating a media player and featuring a complete redesign of the site. Most Ning sites allow users to approve and/or disapprove postings in a Digg or Videobomb fashion. With CC Hits, this user-based evaluation should be very useful in wading through the many tracks available. Some of the other sites are, well, less obviously useful.

Ning allows users to either clone the Ning site they come across or create a brand new site based on a template. There are many different templates available, from photo and video sharing sites to social networking sites for clubs, dating sites, or even social networking sites for any member of the animal kingdom. Users can create their own Craigslist style “marketplace” site, for trading goods or services, as well as traditional blogs and discussion groups. Even more advanced sites based on or integrated with Google maps can be created.

These are two services that allow users with little to no knowledge of web design to create sophisticated websites. In a way, they are the ultimate epitome of how O’Reilly envisions Web 2.0: These sites not only allow and leverage user-interaction, they are literally skeletons for users to build their own applications that allow and leverage user-interaction to create valuable content. There is some level of meta-removal here that is pure poetry. And from a web design point of view, Ning and Swicki are examples of the beautifully modular web application design. Not only can one rework the visual, procedural and data components of the site individually and at-will, but one can completely spawn new sites and applications using a common codebase.

I’m excited to keep watch on these projects and see what develops…

I just started a new webzine called Alternative Games. You can view it at Alt-Games.com and I welcome you to be among the first to browse around and offer some feedback. It’s up and public, but we’re still getting going, so bear with us if there’s any oddness that crops up in these early weeks.

I created Alt-Games because I really want to read a publication focused on the non-conventional, experimental, fine arts, and indy / student games that are continually released online. It is very easy to find mainstream gaming coverage, and occasionally those outlets cover all kinds of things I’d personally classify as “alternative” (Katamari Damacy is an obvious example, as is Shadow of the Colossus, Seaman and any of the other “cult” mainstream games).

As a gamer, I feel a bit torn. On the one hand, the conventionalization of gaming genres and forms has really done a lot to solidify the form, providing a transparency of convention that allows certain elements to be explored. However, I also don’t think we’ve really scratched the surface of what is possible in the game medium, and I’d rather play a dozen “kinda-crappy” experimental student projects over a single “pretty good” sci-fi FPS any day. But give me excellence in either category and I’m very, very satisfied.

So here we have Alternative Games, founded in May 2006. We’re currently looking for writers. Several of the GamesFirst! staff have signed up to participate, so I know there will be a core of some very good writers. We’re pioneering a new idea in shared ad revenue: Each author directly earns a portion of the ad revenue generated by their articles.

I’m hoping this revenue-sharing proposition, along with a general love of games and interest in the less orthodox elements of game culture, will entice some great writers to step up and get published.

If you’re interested in writing for Alternative Games, contact me at feedback@alt-games.com or send a writing sample to submissions@alt-games.com

Google Web Toolkit - Build AJAX apps in the Java language
Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatabilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

The Google Web Toolkit is a resource for developers. I haven’t gotten to play with it much, but I’m very interested in some of the things it offers– it provides a framework for AJAX-based Web app development that is very robust. It not only helps make portable, reusable code, but also helps avoid AJAX-issues such as Back-button state management and whatnot. I’ve been using Paul Visco’s Surebert class for my AJAX needs, but this might be suitable for larger app projects. I’ll get to it as soon as I can…

All comic creators: Here is a super-useful tool. I was just talking to my friend David Hohusen, and he was looking for a good way to handle his comics on Wordpress. Dave has been making these awesome “gamics” that he generates using Garry’s Mod and Half-Life 2. He started playing with Mambo to manage his comics, but I think Wordpress and this ComicPress theme would be perfect. Here’s a bit from the ComicPress site:

ComicPress 1.5
This is a theme for WordPress that will help you publish your Webcomic. I wanted something very simple that would use WordPress the way it was without hacks, mods or a separate comic archiving system. This is just that.

Now, does anyone know of a Wordpress design customized for running a gaming website? I’m curious…

A quick look through some of the stories listed in any current Google News search for “tiered internet” reveals that there is plenty of interest in recent legislative activities surrounding the issue of multi-tiered internet services.

What’s going on? Earlier this month, the US House of Reps rejected an ammendment that would have prevented lobbying actions by AT&T, Verizon and Qwest. A group of internet providers, led by AT&T, are pushing to introduce tiered internet services for internet content providers. According to the companies, nothing would change for consumers (as long as your favorite websites cough up the extra cash to fund high-speed transfers). That means that if Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft maintain their positions and refuses to pay extra fees to these internet service providers, they could find their sites being maliciously throttled back, likely driving users to other (paid up) outlets.

The argument from AT&T and friends is that it costs money to maintain the network lines that connect node to node. They do not intend to charge customers different prices for access to individual sites; rather, they will charge the sites themselves for faster access to browsers.

One major flaw in this argument, of course, is that there is precedent in the phone system for companies NOT charging to access lines. After all, it takes a lot to keep traditional telephone systems online, and that is all, presumably, factored into our montly phone bills. Why internet access charges would only apply to the “last-mile” of the network (that is, the part that goes from the Internet Service Provider to your house) rather than some fraction of the entire network is a complete mystery to me.

The much larger issue is the significant decline in quality, quantity and variety of online content that would no-doubt follow this change in billing practice. I think of this in relation to GamesFirst!, which we’ve had online for ten years now. It predates me, even, and it has always been a small, independent website. It might not always offer the latest or greatest material, but I think it’s unarguably contributed in some quality way to the growth of the Web. We’ve published short films, comics, podcasts, and thousands of articles.

If we were forced to pay extra (beyond the hosting fees we already pay) to run GF!, it could realistically put us out of the biz. If users found that our site loaded slower than another game site, they would not come back. And in the world of gaming websittes, there is plenty of competition. In the face of monoliths like Ziff-Davis, Imagine Media, and IGN, we would be simply buried in a pile of marginalized sites.

The infinite shelf space of the Internet is one of the qualities of the network that make it so worthwhile to engage in online production. If tiered internet service billing for online content providers became the norm, the Web would be forever altered in a negative way. It would probably feel a lot more like cable television…

Development on the new site proceeds. I am very close to making this active on the main page. I just have to settle down to do the style, which will be no small feat, I’m sure. I have a couple ideas beginning to rumble around, so I’ll try a few things out and see what happens.

Today I managed to get some comments spam protection (the little Math quiz), although I think there are better ways to handle that. I’d like to try some new things I’ve seen out there, such as asking people to recognize certain images. It seems like it should be easy enough to implement. Then again, it’s not much of a problem for me now, so I think I’ll content myself with the math questions and see how things go.

Not much new on the site, but I’m pretty much done converting the old work pages into the new site. For future projects I’ll blog more about them in-progress, so they’ll have accompanying postings, but the main pages will remain pretty lean listings of my major projects. Although I can already feel rising issues of genre and formal classifications…

I did add in a Gravatar feature that will automatically link in people’s Gravatar’s based on their email addresses. I think it’s a cool idea, although I once again blanked on what to make for my Gravatar. And as I was implementing it, I realized that Wordpress is not using the comments.php file in my theme directory, but rather the comments.php file in the default theme dir. Weird, eh? I found the line in wp-includes/comment-functions.php (line 36 if I remember correctly) that defines the template to be used for comments, and, assuming that code works OK, I imagine it must be something with my environmental variables? Or maybe a setting the theme would have set? I am stumped, but it’s not such a big deal for me now.

I have downloaded the Cloudy Plugin for WordPress, which does a little dynamic analysis to generate a keyword cloud. I have been excited by these clouds since I saw it first on Tim O’Reilly’s Radar. So I had to modify it a little bit to get it to work with my modified WP table names, but then I started looking at it, and I have done a good amount to optimize the layout for my site. I can now style the whole cloud as well as each word. I think I will re-work the plugin to add two things: First, to add a time-based fading to the words I will modify the formatting to utilize a set scale of size and opacity. Second, I will implement time-based fading, which will cause the words to fade as they are not used (i.e. if I don’t write about Google for two weeks, then the Google keyword in the cloud fades out and eventually disappears). I think this will help with optimization of the analysis, too; it seems like it will slow things down as the site gets larger and larger unless there’s some kind of date-limit.

Like the headline says. I’m in-progress on a new version of ShawnRider.com which will unite my blogging habits with the stuff that’s already available. It should be amazingly wonderful. I’ve finally settled on WordPress for the site, which is so far working out very nicely. I am digging the PHP base of WordPress, and it’s amazing I haven’t heard more raves about it from friends. I can see already that the themes setup and whatnot is a bit wild — I’ve seen people doing things in a couple different ways already — but I like that it’s all so transparent and very easy to hack-in different elements.

I’ve already managed to accomplish a lot by just perusing existing plugins, and I’m well on my way to having this theme completely customized. I’ve already got the bulk of my construction working. I am very happy with things so far.