blog.paulgueller.com

What with history being made today, I thought I would take the opportunity to share an article that provides insight into the recent administration’s two terms of office.

In the article Farewell to All That, Vanity Fair recounts the past eight years of our government’s legislative branch as told through excerpts from interviews with those close to the events.

At 14 paginated screens, it’s well worth the read:

The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming. Economic disaster. How did one two-term presidency go so wrong? A sweeping draft of history—distilled from scores of interviews—offers fresh insight into the roles of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and other key players.

If you’re reading this, you probably have them: social networks. Del.icio.us, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Virb, and countless others that supposedly keep us in closer contact with those close to us. A quick Google search returns over 34 MILLION results for the phrase, and it’s the holy grail, golden hammer, or panacea depending on who you talk to. But once you’ve decided which to participate in, how do you update them without wasting oodles of time?

Reviewing my Recent Posts, I have tried many times to begin a posting regimen to share information about my personal life as well as topics and links for fellow web developers with limited success. I attribute it to a combination of a lack of blogging discipline (as well as time and content) and the intimidation of having to post and update to the various services that I belong to. After performing a little research, I think I may have  painless solutions to connect and cross-link them. WordPress is the blogging software this site uses. The features that drew me to it are that it is open-source (free!), has regular updates, and is fully customizable. There is a vast library of themes and plug-ins to extend the functionality of application, and here are some of the ones I am utilizing to work toward my goals:

• WordBook notifies Facebook whenever a new blog article is published. With an easy-to-integrate API, it creates a wall post with a distinctive icon to inform all my friends.
• Twitter Tools not only lists recent tweets in a sidebar widget, but also provides the option to send post headlines to Twitter.
• FlickrRss displays photos from your profile or recent items from your photostream RSS feed.
• Digsby is not just the best new multi-client chat application that monitors e-mail and social network accounts, it also lets you create customized live chat widgets that can be placed on the page with WP-Digsby
• BONUS: If you are looking for a social network aggregator check out netvibes, which features innumerable widgets and views to keep on top of all the feeds, posts and entries on your social network. It doesn’t have a WordPress plug-in that I am aware of, but it does a kick-awesome job of being the one-stop-shop for  information updates.

Addendum: WordPress 2.7 was released today, and in conjunction with the BuddyPress plugin, appears to give developers a framework to create their OWN social network tools. Facebook beware!

I posted a link to Getting Real About Agile Design to the studio message board recently, and it set off quite a discussion internally. A number of people were hung up on the phrase “software development” and weren’t able to see the applications of planned flexibility for the greater business model. Admittedly, it is quite challenging in contrast to the waterfall model of project workflow, but Agile practices seem more fitting to the attitude and goals of this business.

From the article:

Agile is here to stay. The economic difficulties of the past months have finally put waterfall out of its misery; now more than ever, long requirements phases and vaporous up-front documentation aren’t acceptable. Software must be visible and valuable from the start.

No, I’m not talking about this ThinkGeek item, I just installed the ScribeFire extension (or add-on, if you’ve never worked with the older versions of the browser) for Firefox. Hopefully this will help me to actually create some of the blog postings that I set out to when I was envisioning these pages.

I don’t think of myself as on who frequently uses trendy catchphrases or jargon excessively (and I can’t stand those people who use the word “blog” like the Smurfs use “smurf”) but I hope that through this channel I can accomplish the following things:

1. Improve my own style, grammar and vocabulary through writing on a more regular basis, though I will try to avoid too many obscure esoteric references
2. Provide interesting links and useful resources to others in the web development field
3. Rant/vent about things in life unrelated to my workplace or personal relationships (I can’t exactly be anonymous about these things people)

So, with this in mind, stay tuned and feel free to comment or contact me if you have suggestions. (or complaints!)

Thanks to some DOM-magic and a little help, the ThickBox iFrames on my portfolio are opened with dimensions relative to the size of the browser window. Check it out!

I think that title is pretty appropriate; considering when a person learns a new programming language, the first attempts usually involve outputting the text ‘hello world.’ So this is me learning the language of blogging. <blog on>

I hope to use this forum to share resources and links about web design, programming, and general geekery, as well as to talk about things going on in my life (sorry no sex or violence here). I will try to keep this regularly updated, and we’ll see where this all leads!