c. scott andreas

This evening, the leaders of my small group announced that we would be disbanding as a community in favor of informal get-togethers with three or four people for the summer. I’ll not offer my thoughts on the switch - instead, I’m intrigued by the new plan. We’ll be reading through the New Testament over the summer and meeting to discuss it once a week (this breaks down to a very reasonable four chapters each day).

“This isn’t about formal exegesis or study or anything like that,” he said. “Just let it wash over you.”

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WebWorkerDaily tipped me off about a new tool put out by a Swedish non-profit organization called Barnraiser. Barnraiser aims to build free collaboration tools that create spaces for groups to meet and get things done for the good of open society. It’s a pretty cool vision.

I tried a quick demo of the software and wasn’t immediately blown away, but it’s worth noting that you can integrate Google Maps, Flickr albums, YouTube videos, and a Last.FM player into your group space.

As I often spend weekends playing with new technologies, I’ll mess around with this a bit and offer some thoughts. This could be handy.

Terrible news from The Simple Way in Philadelphia:

This morning, a 7-alarm fire consumed an abandoned warehouse in our Kensington neighborhood in Philadelphia. The Simple Way Community Center at 3200 Potter Street was destroyed as well as at least eight of our neighbors’ homes. Over 100 people were evacuated from their homes, and 400 families are currently without power. Despite this developing tragedy, we are incredibly thankful to share that all of our community members and every one of our neighbors is safely out of harm’s way.

The Simple Way is an intentional community that found itself famous following the publication of The Irresistible Revolution, an excellent book by Shane Claiborne.

Photos and more info at http://www.thesimpleway.org/.

37Signals has a brilliant post on their blog called “I Wonder.”

My son loves toy catalogs. He’ll turn the pages and just imagine. He drinks the koolaid, and loves every minute of it. I love to watch him.

I hope he never gets to the point where he thumbs through a catalog and scoffs. Where he reads the descriptions and cynically dares them to be true. I want him to always retain his sense of wonder, his desire to believe the best.

What has happened to our optimism?

I tried with all of my might to conjure up this sense of wonder while watching Teh Steve’s WWDC Keynote…but it was just so tough. I’m not really exited. I want to be – I want so badly to believe.

I want to believe in iPhone, too. But with no SDK, no support for Flash, and limited availability at present…I can’t. It’s an amazing phone - positively groundbreaking…or “revolutionary” as I’m told to say. But I just can’t do it.

And I want to believe in Coda by the amazing guys at Panic who work a few blocks away. But without great support for content management-based development, I can’t shell out.

I admit that there is a cynical spirit at work in me. But at the same time, I feel let down by these amazing companies to whom I’ll gladly surrender my bank account in exchange for outstanding hardware and software.

The developer in me still has faith. I’m working on a project that has me tremendously excited at the moment - a project that could revolutionize the way churches come together and actually serve their local communities. May you find a project to ignite your undying work-til-3-am-and-sleep-til-7 passion as well.

The bar has been set really, really high, and the web has never been better than it is right now. But that’s no reason to stop making really great tools. I hope. We can keep this up.

Because underneath all of this beautiful code lies the passion.

 UPDATE:  I just bought Coda.  Played around with it for awhile.  It’s cleverly.  Thanks, Cabel and co.  Enjoy my $79…and maybe a cup on me in a couple weeks.

For those of you lucky enough to live in the Bay Area, there’s a party tonight hosted by Delicious Monster called “The Delicious Generation.” According to the invite, a frustrated developer recently declared the present state of coding - especially on the Mac platform - “All sizzle and no steak.”

As any Mac user will tell you, the steak is definitely there and it’s filet mignon. But it’s the sizzle that makes you smile and say, “Oooh!”

I get a lot more use out of apps that are fun to use (and much to the chagrin of my clients, Billings 2.5 is wicked beautiful). If an app is a pain to work with, I avoid it at all costs (sorry Peachtree - never going back).

Here’s one developer proud to be a part of the Delicious Generation.

Because great software is fun(ctional).

If you subscribe to my RSS feed, you probably noticed a lot of noise around these parts yesterday. I’ve been working to tighten up my presence around the web – I write for about three different blogs and maintain profiles on a few different social networks, but they’re all very loosely connected.

Now, Paradoxica, Conversatio, and Facebook synchronize my blog posts by displaying local entries in their entirety and brief summaries of posts pulled from my other sites. Handy!

I’ve been wanting to do this for awhile and spent some time thinking it through on Sunday afternoon. Drop me an e-mail if you’d like some help doing something similar. If you feel like giving it a go, here’s what got me started.

After a little Googling, I found a (somewhat-buggy but functional) plug-in called FeedWordPress that imports items pulled from RSS feeds into WordPress’s local database as if they were posted locally.

Since I didn’t want full posts being displayed from the other blogs, I set up special feeds over at Feedburner that exclude previously-syndicated content to avoid a nasty infinite loop and trim posts to about 200 characters. Then, I pointed each blog’s FeedWordPress plug-in to the other’s and cranked up the juice. Voila!

Thanks to Forrest for a ton of swell icons (like the big [!] above). You might see them popping up here more often these days. Drop by his site and download a pack or three, then read a bit about the foods he fears. I’ve been meaning to teach him the error of his ways (there must be something redemptive about “Pork Brains with Milk Gravy,” no?)…but that’s low on the list.

Today, Apple released a public beta of Safari 3.0. Before the pages announcing it had fully updated, I was already downloading the browser on my beloved PowerBook and the chunky Gateway laptop I use for IE testing.

I’m not sure what’s changed under the hood, but the Mac version is about 50% snappier™ than its predecessor on my system. Previously, I could hardly watch episodes of LOST using ABC’s full episode player. Now, the quality is outstanding and the CPU load light. Handy!

On the other hand, the PC version is ultra crashy. Clicking “Bookmark,” then “Cancel” took it down. Ironically, so did trying to submit a bug report! I’m excited by the idea of Safari for Windows (or more appropriately, the demise of IE - ask any web developer), but pretty unimpressed by the implementation so far.

Update:  Safari just crashed on the Mac while I was away from my desk.  Betas are betas, but they tend to be a lot more stable than this - especially when released by serious developers.

How’s your experience with the new betas?

About a month ago, I submitted a proposal to write a chapter for a collaborative publishing experiment called Wikiklesia: Voices of the Virtual World, edited by John La Grou and Len Hjalmarson. …



(This post is published at Conversatio.net, Scott’s academic-ish site.)