Internet & Platforms

For a little side project, I’m using jPlayer, a nice jQuery-based audio player.   I wanted to skin the buttons a to suit my project, and while jPlayer does support jQuery ThemeRoller skins, I liked the basic look and feel of the standard jPlayer controls.  So, I just traced the default sprites in Il...

I get way too much spam in my inbox, even just counting things I’ve signed up for myself.  Most of it I delete, but today’s email from CoTweet stood out, and is worth mentioning. A while back I signed up for CoTweet, just to check it out — nutshell: CoTweet lets you collaboratively monitor and… Cont...

I can’t say enough about ScribeFire.  It’s a Firefox add-on that gives you an in-window blogging client.  Here are just a few reasons why it’s awesome: You’re blogging from within Firefox, and you can move among webpages while keeping your blog post editing window open.  This comes in really handy w...

If you use Melkjug as a Fluid app, like I do, then you’ll love this: (Melkjug fluid icon) Continue reading

Today, I got my first dose of Twitter smack down, as my account was suspended along with a bunch of others following yesterday’s Gov 2.0 Expo.  Ouch!  Well, at least I’m in good company. As one of the commenters on the Tech Crunch article noted, a situation like this is definitely a bit of a… Contin...

When I couldn’t sleep the other night, I started mocking up a zippy drag-n-drop front end for Trac, based on the snappy UI of tools like Things (working title is FasTrac).  Then, bam! Bitten by a weird, seems-like-a-bug w/ jQuery UI drag and drop.  It appears that droppables aren’t discoverable by d...

A few weeks ago, I created a small web app for scheduling project teams at TOPP Labs.  At any given time, we’ve got anywhere between 10 and 20 active projects, so keeping track of it all is difficult, and planning ahead requires a good clear overview of everything that’s happening. Why create someth...

At work today, we are exploring the process of drawing routes on a map, thinking ahead to a few upcoming projects involving bike planning.  So Sonali set up a Google MyMap and asked a few of us to mark our routes to work.  In a nutshell, it was basically a flop, with two out of… Continue reading

I spent most of this morning looking back through old posts about the Chandler Project and OSAF.  I’ve thought about this a lot, due to the many parallels with my work at The Open Planning Project.  For newcomers, those parallels are: Massive funding from a visionary with a dream (in OSAF’s case, Mi...

­ This past weekend, Phil Ashlock and I headed down to DC to participate in TransparencyCamp, a BarCamp event put on by the Sunlight Foundation.  We spent two days with ~200 open government and transparency advocates from all sectors — government, non-profit, tech, etc.  All in all, it was a pretty ...

Over at TOPP, we’ve been talking recently about the “spectrum of engagement” — in other words, providing a variety of ways that people can engage with a website, ranging from quick & easy (e.g., thumbs-up-ing something) to slow and involved (e.g., writing a blog post or signing up for an account).  ...

This week, TOPP moved into additional, (maybe) temporary office space, to alleviate some of the crowding at our office in the West Village.  We were looking for a place that was convenient, comfortable, and most of all, available immediately (backstory is that we’ve been basically sitting on top of ...