More Technology
A few things that I have seen lately in the technology sphere of things that I have found interested and thought I would share. I think I have about three of them that I am going to note here. Enjoy if you like this kind of stuff, and if not, my apologies, but sometimes this blog is just as much notes for my own feeble mind as it is to disseminate information to everyone.
First, I am going to mention Ping.FM. The idea is kind of odd, but it works in a way. Lets back up and go so yesterday and talk about Twitter. The basic idea of Twitter is that I, as a user, maybe on several different social networks or similar kinds of sites. It would be nice, if when I made an update on MySpace my friends that do not normally visit there could know about. Twitter basically allows the user to set up and gather short messages from all of those social network sites (and even things you send from your mobile unit and such as that).
Ping.FM basically the opposite. Ping.FM lets you the user set up everything so that you can set one “what I am doing” right now message and have it go out to just about every social networking and mini blogging site you are on. I think it is a neat concept, but I find it a bit limiting. To begin with, I kind of being able to set on one “what I am doing” to a quote or song lyric that has struck me and the other one to be set to either what I am doing or what I am feeling at the moment. Beyond that though what I would really use a tool like this for is push a post out to all the social network sites about the latest post that I have made. I think there is some very limited function to do that with Ping.FM, but when it grows up a little bit to handle such things I will be onboard for this one.
Next up is a CMS (Content Management System) called Joomla. I used Joomla back a couple of years ago for a couple of different websites. It was pretty good back at that time. It did have issues though. Namely some of the better functions that I personally wanted in the content management system were not native and required patches, special bridges, and things that really required a pretty good deal of hacking together pieces to make them work. That was not a problem in and of itself, but it did get tedious when it came to doing an upgrade on either the plug-in component or Joomla itself – as it was almost assured that one or the other was going to break and require a good number of hours to resolve.
In the past couple of years though Joomla has matured even more and is probably, from what I have been reading, amongst the best community building based CMS systems. Lets hear it for open source and GNU/GPL licensing and development processes. In addition, the things that I would most like in a CMS as a native component, like really awesome bulletin board/forums, photo galleries with major display flexibility and processing, and things like really nice event calendars are there as native Joomla based plug-ins (extensions in Joomla nomenclature). Anyway, look for an upgraded installation of Joomla and a bunch of stuff going on over on eligius.org (yeah, that is the neglected, non-updated jousting/medieval site) very soon – maybe this eve, but also check again in a week or so too.
Last thing – ever heard of carjacking? That is so 20th century. We now have clickjacking (okay, I admit when I first read it I smiled too). Anyway, there are apparently about 1000 different variations and pretty much every web thing is vulnerable to it. Though I am not sure the hype that is presented in the articles is really worth it all. It really just looks like sophisticated phishing attempts to me. Anyway, here is what yahoo had to say about it today.
That clickjacking is unreal isnt it ?
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