Getting Ready for WordCamp Milwaukee 2!

WordCamp Milwaukee 2013

My goodness, it’s less than a month till the second WordCamp Milwaukee!

<puts on organizer hat>

During and after last year’s inaugural event, veteran WordCampers were telling us that WordCamp Milwaukee was one of the best and most informative camps they’d been to. So, of course we had to make it bigger and better for 2013!

First off, we added another half-day to the extravaganza: Foundation Friday (June 7, 2013) is going to be a set of workshops aimed at WordPress beginners: We’ll have WordPress 101 classes for new users — bloggers, business folk, anyone who is making content for the web using WordPress.

But that’s not all! <see, I’ve got my organizer/promoter hat on!>  If you’ve been using WordPress for a while, and wonder what it might be like to design themes or develop plugins for WordPress–come to Foundation Friday! We’re having a development track too!

After Foundation Friday, you’ll still have two full days (June 8-9) of WordPress learning to enjoy! Plus a repeat of the fabulous Saturday After-Party, lunch both days, the Happiness Bar (to get your specific problems addressed), and still more wonderfulness!

<Putting presenter hat on>

Right after lunch on Saturday (June 8), I will be offering a mini-preview of my next book project, talking about “Building Authority – and Audience – with WordPress and Google Author.” Building your reputation and demonstrating your authority as an expert in your particular niche can be a difficult task. Google is trying to help you, though. I’ll show you how to put your high-quality content at the top of the findability charts, with WordPress and the Google Authorship program.

Learn more about WordCamp Milwaukee, and buy your tickets at the website. And hey, if you need some help with the price, type in ‘McCallister’ for a discount when you register.

Look forward to seeing you June 7-9 at Bucketworks!

The future of KDE: Wayland, Qt 5, uniform Plasma shell – The H Open: News and Features

English: Logo of the KDE Project “KDE, K Desktop Environment and the KDE Logo are trademarks of KDE e.V” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

See on Scoop.it – openSUSE Desktop

The road to Plasma Workspaces 2 has been laid out as the Plasma developers recently met in Nuremberg, Germany, to discuss their open issues around future developments – it will be based on version 5 of the KDE platform and Qt…

Mike McCallister‘s insight:

Key points I take away from this: KDE 5 Plasma Workspaces will be designed to function exactly as the current KDE 4 does.

To do that, it will take at least a year of development. Thus we should see a production-worthy release in late 2014.

See on www.h-online.com

Slightly Off Topic: An Odd 21st Century Urban Moment

Normally here at Notes from the Metaverse we tend to the serious, the technical, and the educational. We are veering slightly off-course today because of a unique occurrence over lunchtime. Please bear with me, and know that This Actually Happened:

So I’m walking around downtown Milwaukee after lunch today, when I encounter a large group (perhaps a dozen?) of black-clad women huddled on the corner of Plankinton & Wells, in front of the tapas bar. They’re involved in a bit of discussion about goodness-knows-what.

List of Bohemian Rhapsody cover versions (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As I turn the corner so as not to disturb them, one of the women sees me, comes over and asks “Do you know Queen‘s Bohemian Rhapsody?” Well, yes I do, most of it anyway. “Can you sing it with me?” Another part of the group joins us; one asks “Do you know the ‘Scaramouche’ part?” Well, no (actually should have said “I don’t think anyone really knows that part for sure,” but … I digress).

Anyway, after some additional pleading, I agree to perform, and we settle on the opening part. By the way, did I mention that I had my black jacket on? I did fit in with this ensemble of four or five women in black. Another woman produces a phone/camera (one can never say with certainty anymore). I get my soda out of the frame, and declare “OK, now I’m officially terrified.” The Scaramouche woman tells me not to worry, they’ll delete it right away. We sing (a capella) the opening of Bohemian Rhapsody “Is this the real life, is this just fantasy…” up to “open your eyes, look up to the skies and seeeeee…” when someone calls it a wrap.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I see one of the other women (not part of the singalong) carrying a sign identifying the Sojourner Family Peace Center, the most prominent domestic-violence shelter in our town. I don’t get a chance to ask about that, and the sign doesn’t appear in the video.

The women thank me, and go on their merry way (after taking a still shot of the parked UPS truck a few feet down the street). Yes, I still have my wallet.

So after all this, I can say that I wasn’t ever really terrified. If you see this thing on YouTube, let me know. I’ll be happier if it has a Creative Commons license, but I won’t be angry in any case. Besides, my wife wants to see it!

If you happen to be one of the women described here, I’d love to hear more about this project. I hope you got what you needed.

For the rest of you: Feel free to share your odd urban moments or impromptu public performance stories, or even your memories of Freddy Mercury, in the Comments.

Related articles

• Drunk Man On New York Subway Sings Bohemian Rhapsody [Video] (myq105.cbslocal.com)

Blatant Self-Promotion: New About page, WordCamp MKE coming

English: Flag of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Hey folks,

There’s more information coming to Notes from the Metaverse soon, but this is a short piece to tell you that I’ve updated the About Notes from the Metaverse page to tell you a little more about this blog and its author.

I can also tell you that WordCamp Milwaukee 2013 will be coming on June 8-9 at Bucketworks. The organizing committee is hard at work to bring you the best weekend of WordPress information and discussion possible. Make your plans now, and I’ll look forward to seeing you there!

A techwriter dies and goes to heaven...

Reblogged from Tech Writer News:

Originally posted on The Humane Experience blog; reprinted here with permission. By Michael Hughes.

A techwriter dies and goes to heaven and she finds herself at the pearly gates before St. Peter. He looks over her record and decides she is worthy to enter heaven.

"We've upgraded our services recently," he tells her, "so that you now have access to a more personalized heaven experience.

Read more… 677 more words

While I don't do theology on this blog (or much of anywhere), and I definitely would replace the coffee with Diet Mountain Dew Code Red... I'd be pretty comfortable in any of these scenarios. Don't want to brag (OK, maybe I do), but I have actually heard some of those words from devs! Happy New Year to all!

Storifying openSUSE Summit

Are you wishing (like me) that you could be at the openSUSE Summit in Orlando, Florida this weekend? I’ve been gathering the best tweets and images from the conference at Storify.

 

Facebook, WordPress and HTML5

 

Last month, Facebook updated its iPhone/iPad mobile apps, opting to create native apps instead of the new HTML5 standard. Users (this one included) complained about the painfully slow loading app, so Facebook engineers solved the problem using a different programming language. Some saw this retreat as “a blow to HTML5” as a standard. This week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg reinforced the meme when he declared that “betting on HTML5″ was the company’s biggest strategic mistake.

If you ask me whether the HTML5 standard took a blow in this affair, I’d have a fairly unqualified ‘no.’ My reasons are both technical and philosophical.

From a technical, practical standpoint: Well, first, it’s really unfair to call HTML5 a programming language. Let’s be real–we’re mostly talking about tagged text here! I don’t know how much Facebook relies on the rich media pieces of HTML5 (video, audio, and animations). I will suggest that the terrible performance of the Facebook mobile app is more about browser support in the early days of the standard, and browser support, even on mobile devices, will always get better. (In the short-term, some have also noted that Apple doesn’t allow the “Nitro” JavaScript library that might have speeded things up.)

This brings me to the more philosophical reasons that underlie everything Facebook does, including dissing HTML5: Why does Facebook even matter to supporters of the open Web? Facebook is creating a walled garden that is designed to control its users’ experience, and force them to stay within its borders, where all the fun happens. Oh, and provide its advertisers with the appropriate number of eyeballs.

What you need to remember is that people have always chosen the open Web over walled gardens. The last company that tried to defeat the Internet was America Online (AOL). Like Facebook today, AOL in the 1990s was a place where people got their feet wet with electronic communication and entertainment. They built their membership base so well that AOL actually bought Time Warner (perhaps you thought it was the other way around)! But the more people heard about the Internet and the World Wide Web, the more they clamored to get access to it. Today AOL is little more than a purveyor of free email addresses.

I’m no business analyst or pundit, but let me suggest that there’s a real reason walled gardens fail in the end: The Internet generally, and the World Wide Web specifically, was built for three fundamental purposes: to allow human beings to get informed, communicate and collaborate with each other. HTML5 and other web standards continue to further these goals. To the extent that Facebook, or any other company, puts those goals first, they will prosper in the long run.

One reason I’ve been a WordPress supporter all these years is because this community has always been a backer of the open Web. It will prosper too.

Climbing off my high horse now to deal with more mundane issues. This rant was partially sparked by the research I’m doing to prepare for Tuesday’s Milwaukee WordPress Meetup on WordPress 3.4 and Web Standards. We’ll be at Bucketworks September 18 at 7PM. Paul Sanchez will also be talking about WordPress accessibility. See us if you’re in the neighborhood.

Related articles

• Zuckerberg’s Biggest Mistake? ‘Betting on HTML5′ (mashable.com)
• Facebook’s Zuckerberg: ‘The biggest mistake we’ve made as a company is betting on HTML5 over native.’ (venturebeat.com)
• Facebook never bet on HTML5 (groovecoder.com)
• Everything You Always Wanted To Know About HTML5* (*But Were Afraid To Ask) [Slides] (techcrunch.com)

 

So, That's It For Thunderbird

Reblogged from TechCrunch:

Mozilla is not "stopping" Thunderbird development, it has just decided that: "continued innovation on Thunderbird is not the best use of our resources given our ambitious organizational goals." And it's pulling people off the project. But it's not stopping? Right.

This, according to a letter shared with "Mozillians" ahead of the official announcement to be revealed on Monday. Recipients were asked not to share the letter, blog or tweet about the news until then, but obviously someone out there didn't agree with that plan.

Read more… 665 more words

Initial reaction is disappointment, but I do wonder (a) who besides me still uses a desktop email client, and (b) if email itself is (as I've heard) "something for old people" and "how I reach grandma." What do y'all think about this development? Do you use Thunderbird? KMail? Evolution? Or just read your mail on the web? Oh, don't overlook the link to Mitchell Baker's blog post at the bottom of this story!

No Longer Fun to Develop Free Software?

Sorry to hear that Peter Penz is leaving the Dolphin project in August, with the release of Dolphin 2.1 (and KDE 4.9).

KDE-Dolphin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Penz originally wrote Dolphin in 2006 as a “small and fast” version of the Konqueror file manager that shipped with KDE 3.x and earlier (as he explains in this blog post announcing his “retirement”). The KDE development team soon invited him to join them in working on KDE 4.0. Since that release, Dolphin has been the default file manager for the KDE desktop (now known as the KDE Software Collection).

In his June 26, 2012 post, Penz offers a few reasons for leaving the Dolphin/KDE project:

• He really wasn’t expecting to be working on this project for six years running (always a fair point)
• “The time required to keep Dolphin in good shape increased during the last years. I’m doing this project in my spare-time and usually have spend around one evening per week on Dolphin. Especially during the last 2 years this time has increased.”
• As a user, he suggests that desktops from Apple and Microsoft have now become at least as “efficient and comfortable” as the KDE  desktop. KDE is “not competitive anymore.”

In reporting this story for Phoronix, Michael Larabel focuses on the latter point, and his story falls into the “dying KDE” trap I’ve discussed here before.

To my mind, however, it’s the point about the complexity of development that may prove more significant for the free/libre/open source model generally, and certainly not just KDE. He writes:

• The user interfaces tend to become simpler and easier to the eye, while the functionality of the application itself has increased. Hiding a complex functionality behind an easy to use interface are not known strengths of “typical” developers

• The complexity of the non-user-interface-parts of applications has increased a lot. Web-browsers are a good example: While the interface got simplified during the last years, the engines showing web-pages got really complex and are maintained mostly by fulltime-developers in the meantime.

Now beyond a little PHP code now and again, I’m no software developer. I just explain the fruits of software developers to the rest of us mere mortals. But it’s long been a truism in the industry that “the simpler the interface, the more complex it is underneath.” Penz is restating that truism here.

Earlier in the post, he talks about the next big project he sees for his brainchild: giving Dolphin a face lift using a new “view engine” called QtQuick2. The problem is that “porting Dolphin to this components will be a very time-consuming and boring task: All the settings-pages, the URL-navigator, the information-panel, the search-interface, the tooltips, … – this is just not doable anymore in my spare-time.”

Maybe what he’s really trying to ask here is whether there are any more “fun” projects for the volunteer developer. If there aren’t any such projects, there’s a reason to worry about the long-term health of the “scratch a personal itch” FLOSS model.

Working on the non-user-interface parts of applications can be challenging and this is not something that most freetime-contributors are striving for. But if there are not enough contributors for the complex stuff behind the scenes and if no company is willing to invest fulltime-developers to work on this… – well then we are losing ground.

Penz admits that “Probably my explanation/guess/theory is nonsense and utterly wrong.” Maybe I’m reading too much into this as well. One reason to doubt the theory from the beginning is that one reason that openSUSE 12.2 is going to be late is that more volunteers are showing up and making contributions.

As a user of free and open source software, I hope there’s still room for the coding hobbyist in our movement. Please tell me I’m wrong, or losing my mind. Or answer these questions in the comments:

• If you participate in free-software development, especially for desktop apps, is it still as much fun as when you started?
• If you’re just starting out in free-software coding, is it easy to find a project that’s both fun and challenging?

Related articles

• Are Open-Source Desktops Losing Competitiveness? (developers.slashdot.org)
• KDE No Longer Competitive? Developer Calls It Quits (phoronix.com)
• Dolphin 2.1 (ppenz.blogspot.com)

Attend WordCamp Milwaukee 2012 for Just $10

If you read this blog at all, you probably already know that WordCamp Milwaukee is coming up real soon now. June 2 is just a week from Saturday, and the weekend after a big US holiday.

Maybe you also know I’m working on a presentation for Sunday, June 3 about what YOU can learn about WordPress just by wandering around WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

A bunch of other WordPress gurus, nearly all from Wisconsin and Illinois, will be putting on a terrific program for both extraordinary users and extraordinary WordPress developers (and by “extraordinary” I just mean YOU).

Anyway, if $20 for a whole weekend’s worth of inspiration and practical help for your WordPress site is still a little tough to justify in these hard economic times, what if I can make this weekend cost just $10? Did I forget to mention that includes lunch on Saturday and Sunday, and a fabulous after-party on Saturday night?

So how do I get this deal? Go visit the WordCamp Milwaukee ticket window, and type (or paste): wcspeaker in the Coupon Code box. And you’re in!

I really hope to see you at Bucketworks in Walker’s Point on June 2-3. You don’t have to thank me for the sweet deal, but I’ll be happy to talk to you anytime over the weekend.