Hey I noticed something, Google Chrome seems to add resize handles to formfields by itself. Interesting, but I'm not sure if it should do that?

How to install ELGG on dreamhost

ELGG is a pretty nice open source social networking package. But it's relatively new, and installing on Dreamhost causes problems, I got an error message saying that it doesn't support PHP4, even though Dreamhost runs PHP5.

It seems that the check for php5 is done in the .htaccess file, and somehow it doesn't recognize that Dreamhost runs PHP5.

To fix the problem, comment out these lines in the .htaccess.



# php 4, apache 1.x

#<IfModule mod_php4.c>

#    ErrorDocument 500 "Elgg error: Elgg does not support PHP 4."

#    RedirectMatch 302 .* index.php

#</IfModule>



# php 4, apache 2

#<IfModule sapi_apache2.c>

#    ErrorDocument 500 "Elgg error: Elgg does not support PHP 4."

#    RedirectMatch 302 .* index.php

#</IfModule>

An oldie but goodie.

A pretty good overview page of SEO tools (and yes, linkbait in itself).

Great post on group activities around usability and design.

The Vimeo plus package looks pretty sweet.

This is too funny.

Fliggo is like Ning for video. They're in private beta, but I can get you an invite if you want.

John Cleese on Sarah Palin: "She's like a trained parrot."

"Observing these tests was more than a bit frustrating for the Yahoo!
OpenID team, and the test subjects may have been distracted by the
sounds of the groans and head-pounding coming from the other side of
the one-way mirror."

"In South Korea, where Park is building a new kind of music-business
model, 80 percent of households have a broadband connection; downloads
via both PCs and cell phones make up an overwhelming share of the
nation's music market. Download revenue there has soared 422 percent
since 2000, to $366 million, while CD sales have declined 83 percent
over the same period to just $70 million in 2007. And because almost
all digital music is purchased on a song-by-song basis, to the general
South Korean consumer, albums have become an irrelevant—even
alien—concept."

Fascinating article on Obama's organization.

The technology sector seems a lot more ready for hard times this time round. Presentations, blogposts and stuff all around. It seems we really learnt. Here's a video as an example.

The big Drupal.org redesign: "If we're going to do it, let's do it right the first time."

I don't have to point out the fallacy in that, do I? Apart from that, I can't wait to see what they come up with.

Scapetoad looks like a friendly way to generate these maps.

Got some good answers on my question about making size-adjusted worldmaps. http://people.cas.sc.edu/hardistf/cartograms/ has a java tool (that I couldn't get to work for some reason), http://www.santafe.edu/~mgastner/ has the really nice visualisations that I want, with a link to this guy http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/ who made the book "The Atlas of the real world". And then, software!

I'll post a post later if I get this stuff to work.

Finally a competitor for Google analytics: Yahoo web analytics. Slowly rolling out, no idea if it'll be any good. They seem to want to be more customizable than Google analytics (you can drag and drop to create data filters), plus real time (Google analytics isn't real time). Good, competition!

I want to be able to make reshaped worldmaps like this! Any tips?

Good article on Chinese censorship from the ground.

Using Adsense to get beta testers: "You can pay peanuts to have people come to your website. In a mature company with a mature product, the goal is to pay for lots of people to come to your website. But I think the genius of Google's innovation is that it allows you to pay for just a few people. Think of it as micropayments for beta testers."

Lou Rosenfeld: "An unfinished book is one huge, pointy Damocles' Sword to have hanging over one's head. In fact, I'm sure if he was around today, Damocles would be an author."

Lou was writing the book together with Rich Wiggins, who has now left and Marko Hurst took his place. Writing a book together with someone else is hard!

So this is good news: we can hope to see Lou's book on search analytics next year!

I'm still proud we did the Colombia migration video project :)

Victor has the best writeup I've seen of the EuroIA conference. I only saw 1 talk, John Ferrara's on game design, and I agree with Victor: it rocked.

1-page websites. Yea. Although I just added 3 pages to my personal website, it now has 4, because I wanted a dedicated consulting page.

A bit of Livejournal history. Classic stuff for anyone who runs a community site.

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

How Flickr does community management.

Does anyone know of any software or something that would let me make worldmaps with adjusted country sizes like this?

I've been using the empty Inbox system for a few days now. LOVE. The "archive" button in Gmail is now my favourite button. It means: "I don't have to worry about this email anymore."

That *is* a cheap way to print a book, from about 2.50$ per boo (order 250, shipping not included).

Good presentation on bias and social design:

Good post by Raymond about evolving the workshop model.

I've made it so my blogposts (which tend to be short anyways) go to twitter too now. I just prefer posting on my blog. It's mine, twitter isn't, it's theirs.

I removed over 11,000 messages from my inbox today and now I'm using the empty inbox system. So far: I'm LOVING it. Somehow it just feels like I'm in control now or something.

I updated my personal website with a consulting, presentations and a writing page.

And I love using petervandijck.com as my openID by the way. OpenID rocks.

Ah, the old days of blog conversations. What happened to that? Are they really all on twitter now?

A jQuery plugin that copies something to the clipboard (like doing CTRL+C). It seems that, to get this to work cross-browser, you need to fallback to a Flash script.

Slideshare is great. From my slideshows, the Social networks going global one (for an upcoming talk) has had almost 300 views, the older the Global Information Architecture workshop one (from the beginning of this year) has had over 3000 views. That's great promotion.

I love sharing slides in this format - I remember when Rashmi told me about the service, and I just thought it was brilliant. And it is.

(via Simon) Google's usability research on federated logins.

Lieve jongens?

My EuroIA slides

Next Saturday from 12:15, I'm giving a presentation on Taking Social Networks Global, at the EuroIA Summit in Amsterdam. I was working on it the past days, and I'm pretty happy with how the talk is turning out. As a preview, here are my slides (so far, they might still change slightly). See you there!

Hey, useful!

"We have a patent!" Cultureshock.

The email feature I always wanted is now in Gmail!

The only IA Summit that is free (I have no idea how they do it, because the organization, space and food are top), the Italian IA summit, is planned for December. They're accepting proposals now.

I have created a really short and quick survey about IA-related workshops. If you could spend a few seconds to fill it in, I would really appreciate it. Click here to fill in the survey. (Only takes a second.)

Fascinating for IA's: "Now Iyengar has published a new study
showing that one way to combat the effects of excessive choice is to
group items into categories. It turns out that even useless categories
make people happier with their choices."

A must-read for anyone interested in the IAI (Information Architecture Institute).

Anthropology of objects

Cellphone polishing services. Jan Chipchase's blog is fascinating.

An example implementation of the MetaWeblog API in PHP.