Miro’s New Funding Model – Adopt a Line of Code

This is great – a really clever way of raising funds for an opensource product (probably the cleverest I’ve ever seen). It’s cute, it’s sustainable, it’s absolute gold in the social web (I think it’s more interesting than Susan Boyle – even though hers was a heart touching moment). This is just so much cooler (and certainly a bit heart touching as well).

I’m now a proud new parent of Timbert (see below – at the moment he hasn’t taken my last name as I had to pay through paypal and it didn’t give me a chance to provide my details).

Miro is a great product so I am really happy to see them pull together such a great campaign. I must admit though I would have been tempted to adopt a line of code if the product had been something I thought was ordinary. And now we sit back and wait for someone to start running a similar campaign for some old COBOL banking system – that’d be a laugh

If you too would like to adopt a line of code, head over to the url below and for just $4US/month you can:

https://www.getmiro.com/adopt/

Update:

1. It looks like a lot of people are getting a line of code with the last name of Swartz which probably means a lot of people have having to use paypal.
2. There is an excellent post on the adoption campaign over at ReadWriteWeb

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to feed the little guy…

VoteFlow – A Twitter Friendly Workflow Alternative

There are two things that are true at the moment (among all of the other truisms of the world):

1. Twitter is gaining mass appeal and is going mainstream.
2. Corporates are either looking to use or are already using twitter as a method of communicating with their customers

Which leaves me with a single question:
How are they managing the quality of their communication via this channel?

Read the rest of this entry »

Planning your website with Jumpchart

Starting out building a new website leaves you with a whole pile of stuff to think about and plan. Generally you get drawn to thinking about how you’d like it to look, and maybe some of the swanky new features you’d like to incorporate. Easily the thing that I get bogged down in though, is the content and the information architecture (what goes where). Maybe it comes easy to some, but for me it feels like a real slog.

Read the rest of this entry »

TextboxList for jQuery

Guillermo Rauch of devthought has very recently released a new version of his excellent textboxlist control, and this time he has built a version for jQuery in addition to mootools. This is definitely worth a look.

If you are looking to build an application that uses tagging, then this control will make your application feel very slick indeed. So without further delay, head over to his project and demo pages. I encountered a few issues with IE7 (which I’m sure will be resolved very soon) but it worked fantastically in Firefox.

Prezi – Visually Compelling Online Presentations

This one is a goody, and in all honesty I thought I was on the tail end of find it. Apparently not. I’ve seen both lifehacker and techcrunch blogging on this particular application recently and have to add my two cents.

Read the rest of this entry »

Task Barn for Free Multi-Project Management

If you haven’t seen it already on other blogs around the place (lifehacker or makeuseof) I’d recommend checking out yet another online project management system – taskbarn.

Even though it is entering a pretty overpopulated field in terms of online project and task management solutions, it’s delivery is exceptional (and best of all it’s free). Feature-wise it’s on the light-side, but in many ways that’s a relief. I’m definitely a person with lots of things on the go at any one time, and whilst I’m happy to use full blown project management solutions in my day job, it does feel more than a little over-the-top for my “out of hours” initiatives.

Read the rest of this entry »

Groovy Google AppEngine – Looking towards the GRAILS

Recently I logged into the Google AppEngine dashboard, and was pleased to be greeted with the option to take an “early look” at their Java support. Nice, I thought. Java on AppEngine – that’ll be pretty handy. Didn’t think too much more about it. Then today in my normal web reading time I came across a post on SpringSource about How to write your Google AppEngine applications in Groovy. Now *this* was interesting. Groovy is a language that has caught my attention on more than one occasion, and has actually proved pretty useful for writing small utility applications.

Using Groovy for Web Application Development
Groovy is well suited to the domain of the web programmer. Being fairly impatient types, who would like to produce applications quickly and would rather not write more code than we have to, Groovy is an absolute diamond in the J2EE coal mine. Groovy offers groovlets in the place of servlets, which essentially do the same thing; but some of the syntactic sugar offered with groovy builders make generating HTML pretty simple.

The quest for Grails
As it stands, groovy is pretty useful for building simple scripts, but of course it’s not going to compete with the popular frameworks out there at the moment. Well along comes Grails. I came across Grails a little while ago, but have to admit passed it off as “just another Ruby on Rails clone”, and without being too harsh, it more or less is (with some minor differences). Without having committed myself one way or the other (a bit of a jack of all trades and master of none, perhaps) I could have gone for either RAILS or Grails without caring too much.

The potential (and likelihood according to SpringSource) that GAE will eventually work with Grails applications, really tips the balance for me. GAE hosting is probably some of the most economical and easy to manage scalable hosting environments currently available. With a framework as powerful as Grails deployed on it, I would expect more developers showing an interest in, and migrating to both Grails and Groovy. This in turn, would probably encourage more developers to use AppEngine to deploy their applications.

A note about CRON
Additionally, I noticed today that there is a menu item for Cron Jobs now in the AppEngine management interface. Anyone know when that popped in there? Was it at the same time that they implemented the Java support? At any rate, I’m pretty excited about it – previously I was thinking I would have to run an EC2 instance or something to handle background tasks required by my web applications. Now I don’t think I will have to