nick has a blog!

So I’m pretty sure I’m done with my transition from godaddy to Bluehost. I just need to wait for the DNS changes for nickpeters.net to propagate across the internets. Anyways, GoDaddy was slow, didn’t allow SSH access, and just not cutting it for me in terms of features, thus the switch.
So here’s a recap of the past few days.
On Saturday I attended SuperHappyDevHouse14 at David Weekly’s (CEO of PBWiki) house in Hillsborough, CA. It was about a 3 hour drive, and felt even longer by myself! I arrived at around 2:00 to the filming of a segment of a documentary on the history of the internet for the discovery channel. It involved David Walking out of his house, inserting a tape into a walkman and putting on his headphones. I later learned this footage was for a segment on MP3s.
My time at DevHouse was spent on a greasemonkey script called I named “Social xFolk.” This script adds two buttons below bookmarks with the xFolk microformat. The buttons allow you to bookmark the URL in either ma.gnola or del.icio.us with ease. I was excited that I made my first greasemonkey script and that I also was able to contribute to the microformat community.
My time was also spent conversing with some of the attendees. Highlights include Jeff Lindsay, David Weekly, Tantek Çelik, and Tom Harrison.
I talked to Jeff Lindsay about systems theory and its application to programming and business management. I even plan on picking up a book he recommended called “Ackoff’s Best” that talks about the subject matter and it’s application to business management. I spent most of the time listening, but it was a damn good conversation.
I casually talked to David Weekly while he was BBQing some hot dogs, but he had some thought provoking things to say nonetheless. Two of the things I found most interesting is his take on SVG and measuring how much of the internet visits your site. First off, SVG is an XML vector-based graphical format. Because it’s XML and vector based, they are lightweight and scale very easily. However, who cares if the majority (IE users) of your potential visitors don’t support it. Even with the release of version 7, Internet Explorer DOES NOT support SVG. Firefox on the other hand does have native support. When designing websites, you need to think about your entire visitor-base and take into considerations of what works on what browsers and what does not. This discussion led to his idea of measuring how much of the internet is visiting your site. If you look at statistics and see most of your visitors are using firefox, what does that say? Most of the internet is using Firefox? No…according to W3Schools, around only 20-30% of the internet is using firefox, thus less than 20-30% of the users on the internet is visiting your site. Once your visitor-browser ratio closely reflects actual browser usage is when you know you are getting a larger portion of the internet visiting your site.
I talked to Tantek about…you guessed it…Microformats! I brought up some issues I had with hCard that could extend to Microformats in general (which I might leave for another post) and the project I was working on. He inspired me to contribute to the microformat wiki and check out the IRC channel, which I plan on doing in the near future. Also, while talking to him I learned about this really cool Firefox plugin called “Operator.” I actually plan on writing a very positive review of the plugin (maybe with the hReview microformat!), so look for it soon!
Tom Harrison, among David Weekly and Jeff Lindsay, is one of the planners of DevHouse and also held the first DevHouse I attended at his parents house in Los Gatos. One of the things he did for this DevHouse was he made a linux-based gateway that prompted you for your name email address, and zip code when you first went online. On his end he could see a list of attendees and their corresponding Mac Addresses. This information was used in the past to see the distribution of machine types at DevHouse. In addition, this time he plans on making some sort of graphical representation of where everyone comes from (using the provided zip code). In the near future Tom plans on making n Linux ISO that can be used to aid in setting up your very own DevHouse. The ISO will be a Linux distro that has the above stated features as well as Squid (for caching) and some more features that I’m currently not aware of. Besides the ISO, Tom plans on providing information on marketing your very own DevHouse, how to setup and tips he has learned from his own personal experiences. This project has been dubbed DevHouse.org. I’m personally excited about this because Joel has talked about wanting to setup a DevHouse in San Luis Obispo. Now that I won’t be leaving the area anytime soon, I’ll be here to help facilitate this idea if it ever does indeed get kicked off.
As always, DevHouse was an educational experience and well worth my time. I plan on attending many more DevHouses in the future and working on more projects.

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