Rodent Regatta

Some of the brightest developers I know about are doing open source coding for the Textpattern content management system. They are continuing to improve and extend the capabilities of that software.

One challenge involves properly providing RSS 2.0 feeds from Textpattern-based sites given a rather wide variety of site designs. My own RSS feed was once described as funky. That saga dates to the summer of 2003. 1 – 2 – 3 – 4. Absent solid, understandable answers at that time, I went about my business. I actually believe that around the time of those links, the Atom initiative was getting off the ground. It gave birth to another syndication technique. Many sites now provide both RSS and Atom feeds.

With the request from the Textpattern developers comes an opportunity to solve the RSS 2.0 problems once and for all. I’m no developer, but I’m a cheerleader for bringing some resolution to the entire debate. The call is out for a who’s who of (apolitical) developers to answer the questions raised here. Maybe those who write the feed readers could weigh in as well.

Then we spent a day building a dead-simple shop in Rails that would take $19 from your credit card and give you a PDF.—David Heinemeier Hansson

The shop he refers to should be put on sale. Joel should put Ship It on sale, too.

One challenge that extremely bright, young people face: knowing what is marketable in spite of their own view that it seems so mundane or simple. ERP suites that have been revised over a period of ten or twenty years sometimes lack the brilliance of these simple tools.

Writers who have spent dozens of hours searching for a way to get published would happily pay for a simple tool that could be dropped into their website to sell a pdf file.

Joyent’s weblog is on my morning reading list. This morning, Dean Allen dropped a little entry out there that provided fodder for the Web 2.0 fires.

He linked to an entry about fonts and colors in the logos of web 2.0 companies. If the logos don’t get your attention, a museum of beta sites might.

Three things continue to bother me about the concept of software as service, web 2.0, software on demand, utility computing or web applications. They are:

1. Can I back up my data to a local PC or device?
2. What happens when the application(s) are down? They will be.
3. Who will win among the contenders as populous as in 1999?

Yesterday’s Order II has met this morning’s reality. Origami is not the answer that a mobile business professional seeks. The Reuters story reveals many of the reasons why Microsoft’s UMPC just won’t serve the converging needs. At a minimum, you’ll still need your phone. Worse, you may also need to hang onto the phone and the PDA—whether those have converged for you or not.

About a month ago, we discussed Order. Bringing order to life in an orderly way seems to get more challenging each day. I’ve never spent much time using Outlook Express, but I have been a long-time user of Outlook.

Because my life (and work) are about projects, I carry a Treo 650. Before that I carried a PDA of one type or another. For a Palm, palmtop or Treo, the synch between the device and Outlook has been flawless for a decade or more.

Weaknesses remain. These devices are too small to browse the Internet, research articles, write and do web design work. Weaker still are the techniques for managing projects at such a small scale. I have a rather finely tuned project management methodology that has served me well for a long time. Documents, spreadsheets, project management applications, email, contacts, calendars and prioritization tools are all part of the suite. Currently, a laptop is the only tool that really makes that suite mobile. When collaboration leading to a launch date is essential, the tools cannot be weak.

Alternatives to my trusted methods are creeping over the horizon, but what will they really permit? Will one of them emerge or will you still need a meshed suite of hardware and software? Here’s a glimpse of my radar screen:

• Joyent – can one web app do it all?
• Origami – is this a WinTel wifi viewer to web apps?
• 37Signals – is this where collaboration is headed?
• Google – Google this and Google that
• Strongspace – part of the suite or its foundation?

What do I really want? It may boil down to a lean, light Mac of some (upcoming design) with one or more web apps at the core.