I’ve toyed with the idea of posting more multimedia content (ok, any) here over the last while with the thought that this Notebook should be equal parts content generated by us and content from others that we’ve discovered or been led to in our interweb travels.
To that end, this inspiring 2008 TED Talk from well-known designer Paula Scher provides food for thought by looking at how the best design work is “serious” and the implications of when work becomes “solemn”.
Nearly a year ago I started working on a simple iPhone-optimized version of the notebook. I was tinkering with this for a few days in-between other projects or late at night until I accidentally wiped out the stylesheet. Oops. It wasn’t under version control because, well, I was tinkering.
It’s taken me until this past weekend to get back to doing something about that though my approach ended up being a bit different this time around.
This time instead of using a stylesheet-only approach, I’m employing three simple templates in Movable Type along with a customized stylesheet from Joe Hewitt’s iUi (we’re not using the Javascript bits at least for now).
On the server, mod_rewrite takes care of the magic of automatically redirecting requests to the mobile site — there’s no need to visit a different URL when browsing from either an iPhone or iPod touch. I believe this will also work on an Android device though I don’t have one and have not actually seen one so I can’t confirm that.
To some degree this is a stop-gap solution, particularly since not everything that should be there is available in the mobile site yet (eg. no commenting), but it makes for a good prototype and gives us somewhere to start making improvements.
Recently there’s been some chatter from other folks about amalgamating various bits and pieces of content from other sites such as Twitter, Flickr, delicious, etc into their blogs.
While the idea itself is not entirely new — I think we all like the idea of our own sites being something of a central hub where people can go to get an overview of what we’re up to wherever we happen to be at any particular point in time, this formerly supplementary content has over the last couple years grown to comprise a larger percentage of our content publishing lives.
To that end, a little while ago I quietly updated the less than prominent Elsewhere section to periodically update/cache the latest from our delicious feed along with making the Flickr photo feed refresh automatically instead of us having to manually publish changes.
The long-term plan is to eventually integrate this content into the notebook itself, giving it the same level of prominence; but we’re not there yet. We’ve got other fish to fry first.
Tonight during my daily 2.5km uphill walk home from HQ, someone turned on the proverbial light and a critically important question was answered.
This particular business matter has been giving me the evil eye for nearly six months but because everyone here has all been so heads-down in getting things done for other people, no one noticed it standing there until today when I apparently had a moment to pull myself away from the screen and put down my mouse.
This lightbulb moment will ultimately play a crucial role in one of our not-insignificant internal projects which is tentatively scheduled to be put into the blast tubes sometime around SXSW Interactive. We’ll have a lot to say about it at that time or whenever someone hands me the launch codes.