Evan Sims

Blog Day 2008

As my buddy Brian pointed out to me, today is Blog Day — a once a year event where bloggers are encouraged to share their favorite finds from the blogosphere.

First, I would feel neglectful if I didn’t reference my closest friend’s blogs. In no particular order we’ve got Ryan O’Sullivan’s personal site, Jim Weinhart’s got two now, and Brian has just started a new one. They’ve each got their own flavor, so check them out.

Now, the point of Blog Day is to reference 5 blogs that you’ve discovered that fascinate the crap out of you, so let’s do that.

• Massively — A gaming blog focusing on MMOs. This one is stuffed full of great tips, awesome opinion pieces and breaking news. It’s by far my favorite gaming site at the moment.
• CleanTechnica — As you might guess from the name, CleanTechnica is devoted to news and information about technologies and products that help to reduce humanity’s impact on the environment. There are plenty of “green blogs” out there, but I like CleanTechncia because it has a high quality-to-noise-ratio and, as a geek, I appreciate a peak into the technological breakthroughs happening that sector.
• Smashing Magazine &mash; Great blog for web development nerds. Covers a lot of topics, from design and scripting libraries to blog engines and programming languages.
• Webmonkey — Yes, that Webmonkey. Relaunched a few months ago, Webmonkey has quickly regained a position as one of my top 5 sites to follow for web development info.
• Typesites — I admit it, I’m a typography nerd. That isn’t to say I’m all that talented at it, but it’s one of those topics that fascinate the hell out of me. Typesites is one of the best blogs I’ve come across that discusses the issue in relation to the web.

I’d also like to give a shout out to Jake and Amir, Tiki Bar TV and Garrett Murray’s Qwick Reviews for consistently make me giggle.

PHP is dead, long live PHP! (Finally.)

8/8/08 marked the final day that PHP4 would receive support from it’s developers, and 4.4.9 marks the final update it will receive. It’s an end to an era, really; the first version of PHP4 was released in 2000. Even while PHP5 was released 4 years ago, and PHP6’s release is looming on the horizon, web hosts have been slow to adopt the new versions due to concerns of compatibility issues. I don’t think they’ll have much option, now.

That’s a good thing, in my book. PHP5 introduced a whole slew of great new features, and PHP6 is shaping up to be a wonderful upgrade as well. The only loss over PHP4 is limited compatibility with old scripts, but to be quite frank the scripts that break under that upgrade are ones you should be concerned about using in the first place. Namely, much of the methods PHP5 revokes that breaks those PHP4 scripts are due to security and performance concerns.

PHP5 has improved OOP support, better security and better performance. Do yourself a favor and upgrade already.

Brightkite is Slick

Finally got an invite to Brightkite tonight (thanks Jeff!), and I’m pretty damn impressed to say the least. The best way to describe Brightkite is something like a mash-up of Plazes, Twitxr and to some degree Twitter itself, though it’s much more of a companion to the former than it is a competitor.

Basically, you decide to broadcast that you are at some geographical location using your laptop or cellphone (i.e. The Starbucks on Green); you can see who else is there right now or has been in the recent past, and you can share photos and notes during your time there. It’s sort of an ad-hoc virtual community based around physical locations. The best thing? It all integrates with Twitter and FireEagle, so now your “I’m at Barnes and Noble” messages can actually have some useful metadata attached- who else is there? Where is that Barnes and Noble located? What does it’s interior look like?

So, it’s essentially a stalkers best friend, right? Well, luckily the Brightkite team was smart enough to impliment some decent privacy controls- you can define how much information you want to give out to the public, your friends, or your “trusted friends”.

I really love Brightkite; it’s not just a great idea, but their implementation is brilliant. The UI is responsive and sleek, and it doesn’t feel like a chore keeping it up to date, a problem I always had with Plazes. My only complaint is the lack of an API right now. I’d love to hook a certain GPS project of mine into this bad boy and have it automated some of the aspects. But, like all things 2.0, I’m sure they’re working on it.

Greatest. Rock. Video. Ever.

Robert Scoble rocking out in a feather boa? Pretty sure I had a dream about that awhile back… best not to ask.

Animoto

Alright, so I came across this rather interesting new service called Animoto this evening. Playing with it just a bit, it seems pretty nifty; it’s a Flash-based music video (slide show) creator that lets you upload your own music, and either upload photos or import them from Flickr. There’s not that many customization options, which is kind of disappointing, but I think a lot of people will find some fun uses for it. It’s easy, anyway. That’s what matters most. One downside I see immediately is that you can only produce 30 second clips for free… they’re not going to attract too much attention with such a limited constraint. Expect that to get increased soon.

That was a quick video I made from a song I ripped out of my iTunes library (non DRM, obviously) and imported from my EverQuest 2 screenshots set on my Flickr account. Pretty nifty. Check it out.