links for 2005-10-07

  • Web 2.0 is a near-meaningless term. Means whatever the listener thinks it means. But we’re clearly in the midst of a sea change in the way people use the Web, and El Reg has an article rounding up some of the major factors that are influencing it.

  • Scott Rosenberg on the danger of another internet bubble generated by all this Web 2.0 hype.

This entry was originally published at my workblog.

Design 2.0

Web 2.0 isn’t even properly here yet, and already I’m bored of the design style. I mean, I know that design goes in trends, and by late 2006, all the new launching stuff will look different, but I’m now heartily sick of sites with a white/cream background, and then pale blue, green and orangeused as colour indicators.

I’m sick of titles being in a slightly oversized blue font. Actually, I’m just sick of everything being slightly oversized. I’m sick of tag clouds, even though I know they’re here to stay. I’m sick of form elements that turn pastel yellow on selection.

One of the things I like about the web is the infinite variations on design, but thanks to the cleverness of a very few sites (Flickr and the 37 signals family of tools, it seems like everyone with a bit of Ajax-enabled software is using the same bloody colours all the damn time. Can we have some web 2.0 things that look different, please?

This entry was originally published at my workblog.

Note to self:

And also to flatmates and anyone else that it might be useful for (Londoners, really).

I have been pointed in the direction of Firezza as a basically fucking excellent delivery pizza place.

Certainly the toppings sound good, but most importantly: a) you can order on-line, and b) by the meter. I mean, come on, who hasn’t wanted to order up a couple of meters of pizza at some point?

I’m Going To Take Revenge

Specifically, I am going to exact horrible and bloody vengance on arachne and budgie_uk.

The former for saying “Oi, you, Nanowrimo”, and the latter for having been doing his (bloody good) fast fictions for the last horrifying length of time.

See, I have no intention of writing a novel next month. I’m not mad, after all, and there’s no way I could write a novel.

But produce 50,000 words in a month?

I might manage that. And if I work really hard, it might just tie in to the whole LJ as art-stunt thing I’ve been thinking about.

So: you’ve got until October the 23rd to tell me what you want me to write. (I want a week to think and plan). Give me words, phrases, titles, topics, forms, photos, names, places, dates and faces. Anything you want. I make no promises I’ll use anything you mention. I make no promises that I’ll use anything you mention in the way you intend it to be used. But you get to kick in to what I’m doing, at least at the start. Feel free to point other people in the direction of this post as well – I don’t care if I know them or not, I want as much crap as possible in the comments here so that I’ve got a broad scratchboard to choose from.

And come December the 1st, I’ll see what I’ve got.

The comments on this are screened, so that no-one but you and me will know what you said or suggested. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, if it turns out there is one.

Links For 2005-10-05

  • Useful tutorial on one company’s approach to maknig sure that AJAX enabled sites degrade gracefully. I’m almost at the point of sacking off support for non XMLHttpRequest clients, but still, it bears thinking about.

  • I’ve got a fair amount of sympathy with this, since I’ve grown up doing webdev rather than appdev – I don’t like putting the business logic elements on the database, I’d rather keep them in the scripting languauge which is generally higher-level and much better suited to complex logic.

This entry was originally published at my workblog.

Time saver…

I’ve been wanting to switch to a better format for my linkdump posts. Specifically, I want to make better use of del.icio.us to manage my bookmarking, and they’ve now got a post-to-blog feature. There’s a how-to guide here.

This entry was originally published at my workblog.