Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

I’ve been neglecting hypothecate recently because i’m forging ahead with the magazine idea. I’ve recruited Iain Claridge (netsight designer/ photographer) to do some design, and i’ve stripped back a basic plone install ready to skin. I’ve done this by seperating all the CSS used by plone for admin (i.e. all the tabs/menus used when editing) into a file called ploneAdmin.css and then the site styling will go in a seperate file. Other than that i’m trying to leave the plone HTML as standard as possible, although inevitably i’ve moved/removed a few things.

We are still short of a name (suggestions welcome!), and we haven’t got any content yet either - I want to have the site up as a "pilot issue" even if it has dummy content, to help recruit contributors.

Also, I emailed Andy Budd recently to ask advice about setting up a Bristol version of skillswap. I got a reply saying that he has had similar enquiries from people in other areas and had been thinking about setting up a central site/ database. I’ve offered some of my non-existent free time to help with this

i’ve started catching the shuttle ferry across the floating harbour from the end of gas ferry road to the new development at the bottom of jacobs wells road. This cuts about a mile and a half of my route (including the worst and best bits so a mixed blessing). It doesn’t necessarily save any time though, as the boat (the tiny white blob on the right of the photo, not the grand brown blob on the left) is usually across the other side when I arrive and you have to wave for them to come over and pick you up.

I knew it existed because of word of mouth, but had trouble finding any information about it on the net, and even though I used to pass it every day, the pick up point on the town side is hidden away behind the yuppie flats. Eventually I just went down there and had a look and found information in chalk and blackboard format.

I help look after the forum at middle-age-shred.com (website for old/ old skool skateboarders), which has proved to be a victim of it’s own success with loads of traffic., and hence swelling of the MySql database. I’m not sure where the database is hosted but they don’t allow much disk space for the package so it is important to keep an eye on it. Despite "pruning" of the forum (e.g. removing posts older than x days), the table sizes didn’t seem to be reducing much, so I wondered if they behave a bit like disk storage where deleting information doesn’t always free up space. This turned out to be the case so I did a bit of googling and found this:-

Running the optimise command reduced the tables by about a third

I’m seeing a lot of happy, almost ecstatic accounts of how good SxSWi was. Seems the social side of it is becoming legendary, if you happen to be a web designer/ blogger/ mac owning/ mexican food loving geek. so that’s me then

I get the feeling that next year it will be even more popular - but will it be like the glastonbury overhype, where the original crowd start to feel that "it ain’t as good as it used to be"?

is a grower. listened to some more of it on the way to work (on the treo, now downgraded to purely an mp3 player).

appeared on my radar today, at least the buzzword did, I already knew about the concept. I have also been assured that AJAX technology has been making its way into Plone in various places.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while - I am in the process of redesigning this blog and migrating it’s content to plone, but I have a love/hate relationship with my site - I hate the word “blog”, and I hate the fact that I have no focus to it. I sometimes hate how it’s all me, me, me. other times that has proved to be a good thing. Either way i’d like to start something fresh.

I’ve actually discussed with a couple of people the idea of a collaborative online magazine, and I think this is the way to go. Therefore the migration of this site to plone will probably be put on the backburner*, in favour of putting together a CMS ready to be used for a collaborative online magazine. That bit is easy - plone is ready to do this out of the box, even without installing third party add-ons.

The tricky bit is what subjects? Personally what I would get out of this is dealing with the technical side on both the back and the front end - using it as a showcase, but I may want to contribute to the content too. So assuming that I might talk about (guess what) digital media/web designy stuff**, the other topics need to at least be able to coexist with this without looking irrelevant. Having said that, I can think of several (paper) fashion/lifestyle magazines that I have read over the years that have no problem dropping seemingly unrelated articles in, so a broad mix of stuff could possibly work well in this context.

I want the site to work like a blog for contributors - they could log in and edit through the web, or use a desktop client to post and submit content, but what appears on the front page would be decided by reviewers/editors. Overall I want it to be percieved as an online magazine rather than a blog.

So anyway, i’m looking for potential contributors - drop me a line with a brief outline of the type of subjects you would want to cover if interested.

*not that it has ever been anywhere but the backburner
**done as non-techie as possible - any specific technical stuff would be posted to this blog instead

I’ve been reading Andy Budd’s ongoing account of his trip to SxSWi (south by southwest interactive) festival in Austin, Texas. It seems that there is a massive british contingent there, most of which are speaking/ sitting on panels while they are there. Earlier this afternoon it seemed that every other word I read about it was linked to the site of another British designer who is over there. This is good, but I can’t help but feel a little left out!

Next year maybe?

On the plus side I managed to install the ZMySQL adapter on mac osx - to do so I followed this how-to. Haven’t actually tested it or done anything with it mind..

On the downside we are still having problems getting Zope to run as a service on one of our clients servers (windows 2000). It runs fine if you run it from runzope.bat, but when you try to run the service it fails with no error message. It usually runs fine on windows - just run the installer and it works, but not on this machine for some reason. I also can’t register pythonservice.exe, which may or may not be related. I’m not the only one having this problem.

was held last night in aardman animations conference room (cheers Jon). The meeting was constructive and I think we managed to reign in a bit more tightly how this thing is going to/ should work. More words to follow, when things have been wriiten up. I am chairing the next one in two weeks (for further details, subscribe to the underscore mailing list)

more words:
We meet regularly to quickly discuss issues arising in our fast-moving dynamic industry, and devise effective collaborative ways to address them.

The group is pragmatic, informal and open to anyone who’s interested in contributing. Our simple constitution keeps things fair and aims to cut a swathe through boring red tape.

even more words:

We want more:
Money
Exposure
Recognition
Reputation
Clients
Work to stay in the region
Novelty
Collaboration
Positivity
Solidarity
Support
Beer
Fresh meat

We want less:
Work going to London
Strings & bureaucracy
Inertia
Ego
Synicism
Whinging
Whining
Clients who don’t pay
Red tape
Trying to please all of the people all of the time
Work done as freebies
Misunderstandings about the type of work we do
Bad legislation in our sector
Software patent issues

As a group, we are a…
(some of the things we might do)
Lobbying
Force for good
Networking
Collaboration
Evolutionary
Self interested
Profile combining/ PR (Cambridge Technology network model)
Forming companies around projects (Zope model)
Changing group
Addressing issues
Forming subgroups (spawning ground)

and Alex’s favorite:-

…group that holds short and regular meetings!