News Challenge says no, but life goes on
I actually received the “thanks, but no thanks” e-mail a couple days after my previous post, but have been too busy to mention it. I knew my application was a longshot, so I’m not too terribly crushed by this. And I have so much going on already that maybe this is a good thing. Anyway, there it is. It was worth a try at least.
Sphere: Related ContentA modest proposal to the News Challenge
A couple weeks ago, I received word from the Knight Foundation that my News Challenge proposal is “progressing to the next round of judging.” For those who don’t know, the Knight News Challenge is a contest that awards grants for “innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news.” Please feel free to read more about the News Challenge and have a look at last year’s winners.
Being plugged into the new media blogosphere like I am, I’ve already heard of other applicants being asked for proposals more than a month ago. My modest proposal is “not at that stage, yet.” I’m not quite sure what this means, but I’m guessing that I’ve been placed in some sort of pool of alternates just in case there’s any money left over after funding the top projects. Naturally this is quite all right with me as I felt all along that my application was a long shot at best. Although I’ve worked in Web development for more than five years, I’ve only worked in journalism for about seven months… and I’m not even a journalist! We’ll see what happens.
It occurs to me that somebody out there may actually be curious about my proposal. I applied for the minimum - a $15,000 blogging award - to blog about “creating a virtual community united by a passion for Malawi.” Here is an excerpt from my proposal:
Third world countries around the globe are slowly entering the digital age. One of these countries is Malawi - a place where I lived for two years as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer. Internet access is becoming gradually more commonplace and several Malawians are now blogging from within the country as well as from elsewhere in the world. In addition many travelers and expatriates (including current Peace Corps Volunteers) are blogging about their experiences in Malawi. Thousands of other people around the world - Malawian and otherwise - seek out current information on the country each day.
As it currently stands, no central online meeting place exists for the many people blogging about Malawi and those simply seeking out information. I plan to use open source software (primarily Drupal) to create a central meeting place anchored by forums, but also including blogs, photo galleries, videos, links, news summaries, and maps. With the exception of the forums which will be hosted on the site, the other information will be imported and aggregated via RSS using a collection of external sites. This “mashed up” data will be gathered from individual blog feeds, Flickr and Picasa tags for photos, YouTube and Metacafe for videos, del.icio.us for general links, Google News for news summaries, and Google MyMaps for personalized maps. All of these services are relatively mature with stable API’s. The aggregation of relevant data from so many external sources will add significant value to the site with very little impact on the bandwidth and disk space needed to serve the site to visitors. The main source of disk space will be the Drupal database holding all of the forum data.
It is my sincere hope that this approach will succeed in building a thriving online community of people passionate about Malawi and that it will be easy to replicate and apply to other third world countries in the future.
There’s quite a lot more in my proposal, but that should provide the gist of what I’m looking to do. It’s a project I would love to take on, but I really need the funding in order to invest the amount of time it would take to have a chance at succeeding. I’m not sure when I’ll get another update from the Knight Foundation or what the news will be, but I will be sure to let everyone know. Thanks for reading.
Sphere: Related ContentOpen source roundup
It’s been a great week in the world of open source. Here are some highlights for you.
Zend Framework 1.0
The excellent Zend Framework project just reached their 1.0 milestone release and got a lot of good press. Personally I have a lot of hope for this project and plan to use it extensively in the near future. If it’s good enough for IBM…
jQuery gets 800% faster
This is almost too much to believe, but John Resig has the benchmarks to prove it. The 1.1.3 release of jQuery is 800% faster than 1.1.2 for many common operations. Upgrading is a no-brainer, but make sure you get the latest point release (1.1.3.1 as of this writing).
Firefox releases final alpha of 3.0
Mozilla just sent Firefox 3.0 alpha 6 out to the masses and it looks like a good one. Look for the first beta release around the end of the month. The best browser on Earth just keeps getting better.
Go PHP 5
The long overdue movement starts to gain some momentum with pledges from Drupal and phpMyAdmin. For those who don’t know, PHP 5 is not offered by many Web hosts and a lot of open source projects continue to maintain backward compatibility with PHP 4 for that reason. The Go PHP 5 movement is looking to change that in one fell swoop. Excellent idea. I just hope they can pull it off before PHP 6 is released. I also hope to see MediaWiki and WordPress get on board with this.
Sphere: Related ContentFirefox extensions that I use
Not that anyone has any interest in this, but it’s a quick and easy Sunday post. Here are the Firefox extensions that I’m currently using:
- ColorZilla 1.0
- del.icio.us Bookmarks 1.5.29
- DownThemAll! 0.9.9.10
- Firebug 1.05
- Firefox Showcase 0.9.3
- Forecastfox 0.9.5.2
- Launchy 4.2.0
- LinkedIn Companion for Firefox 3.0.1
- Linky 2.7.1
- Mouse Gestures 1.5.2
- Nightly Tester Tools 1.2.1
- Organize Status Bar 0.5.2
- Resizable Form Fields 0.2.4
- Sage 1.3.10
- SearchStatus 1.20
- Smart Digg Button 1.01
- StumbleUpon 3.05
- Tab Mix Plus 0.3.5.2.070525
- Twitbin 1.1.2
- Update Channel Selector 1.0.1
- Web Developer 1.1.4
Looks like 21 to me. Maybe I should cut back…
Sphere: Related ContentAlimadzi reboot underway
If you saw this site last week, you’ll probably notice that it looks different today. I’ve been installing several plugins and managed to find an excellent theme (at least in my humble opinion). My choice is the Silhouette 3-Column theme by Brian Gardner. I like that it’s simple and flexible since I plan to make several changes in the next few days. These will be mostly color and font changes for now and then I’ll add a few images here and there later on. Yes, the site is finally taking shape.
Sphere: Related ContentRebuilding from scratch
So after a longer than usual hiatus from blogging, I’m finally back and starting from scratch. No, the old posts are staying, but I started over with a clean WordPress installation after running into a couple upgrade issues. You’ll probably notice that I currently have the default Kubrick theme for now, but that will change shortly. Stay tuned for more. It’s good to be back.
Sphere: Related ContentFirefox unofficially passes the Acid2 test
Following a massive trunk check-in by David Baron that has been two years in the making, the latest trunk nightlies of Firefox finally pass the Acid2 test. Most people will not see this until late next year when Firefox 3 is released. The nightly trunk builds are code-named Minefield and that should give you an idea of what to expect from them. Nonetheless this is great news for people like me who believe in the importance of Web standards to advance our craft into the future.
In a related note, the first alpha of what will become Firefox 3 was released a few days ago. This one is code named Gran Paradiso. Confused yet? Here is the Announcement on Mozilla DevNews and an article on CNet.
As for Microsoft, they’re apparently working on something called IE.next. I wouldn’t hold my breath for it to pass Acid2, but they are soliciting recommendations for changes that should be made. That’s certainly a step in the right direction.
Sphere: Related ContentBrowsers battle, you win
As you may know by now, Microsoft released the final version of Internet Explorer 7 a week ago. Likewise, Mozilla released the final version of Firefox 2 yesterday. Naturally a lot of people are saying that the so-called Browser Wars have begun again. I would have to agree, but not in the way that most people are thinking. These new Browser Wars do not pit Microsoft against Mozilla (or Opera or Safari either for that matter). Rather this latest round pits Web standards (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.) against proprietary technologies, garbage markup, browser sniffing, and mountains of needless hacks. In this round the browser makers (at least for now) are on the same team. Read more
Sphere: Related ContentAlimadzi now built for speed
Yes, I’ve changed the theme of this site again. Since I started using Google Analytics, I’ve noticed a surprising number of international visitors to my blog from places such as Saudi Arabia, India, Singapore, Peru, Russia, and all over Europe.
My first thought was how great that was, but my second thought was how my current theme (Lush) was slow as molasses. I ran a speed report on my homepage and found that the total size was a dialup-killing 280KB!! So I switched to a nice lightweight theme called Blue Moon and chopped my page weight down to a measly 27KB. People browsing Alimadzi now will be consuming about 9% of the previous bandwidth required. Not bad, eh?
Being an “under the hood” type of guy, I plan to tweak this theme over the next several weeks. I might even add a custom logo. In the meantime, I hope everyone enjoys a speedier Alimadzi. This is actually quite ironic considering the meaning of Alimadzi. Heh.
Sphere: Related ContentSpam, spam, comments, and spam
Back when I upgraded WordPress to version 2.0, I enabled the Akismet plugin to block comment spam. It basically sat and did nothing for about four months. Then last week, it suddenly leaped into action and blocked 55 spam comments in one day! I have no idea why the torrent of spam landed on my doorstep all of a sudden, but I’m really glad that I had the foresight to hire a bouncer.
So the spam blocking is working great. Now all I need to do is attract some legitimate comments. Hint, hint…
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