Archive for the ‘Web’ Category

Topix, is a site that displays lots of local information to people all around the US. However they also put a lot of US and World News. I personally think the site is becoming too cluttered, even more than a local newspaper site. There are tons of portals out there that do what they do already, so why not focus on becoming the lighter, faster local portal? They have already gone after many of the “verticals” that newspapers use (real estate, classifieds, jobs).

• Feature local data more. Don’t just show you have events and classifieds, tease some of that information.
• 1 day of weather teasing is worthless, give people more of reason to check the city page
• Make one of those 3 columns with a different color, everything looks the same, meaning people are less likely to pay attention to it.
• Add autos
• Get a designer and start uncluttering the website

Topix has the ability to become a unique nationwide local site with tons of local information, but they keep shying away from it trying to be just another portal with some local content. If they want to be serious about local information they need to display nothing but local information on the homepage. Otherwise I don’t see their site taking off in local markets around the US.

I recently saw a website do this on the weather page.

If you’re users are clicking on the weather page, give them the weather. Why does anyone have to choose between 2 TV stations? I guess this was a political decision, because Nexstar Broadcasting owns 2 different affiliates in the same city. But the user can care less about what station gives them the information, besides both stations already share the same website.

I was searching Yahoo Pipes and ran into some spam on it. Why would anyone bother spamming up Pipes? Just so someone might click on one of them? I guess spammers will junk up anything they can.

Added auto-numbering, auto-play option and next and previous buttons. Removed rewind button.

I originally wrote this to play just one MP3, but added the List component to it so it can play a whole list of MP3s. It reads an XML file, has a optional path, optional autoplay, features a loading animation while the XML file loads, playhead, volume slider, mute button (that remembers where you last muted), download bar and progress for each mp3, play button, previous track button, next track button and a time index. I saved it as a Flash MX 2004 file and it will work with Flash Player versions 7 and above.

It’s released under a BSD license, so feel free to use it.

Here is a sample XML file

<mp3s path="subfolder/" autoplay="false"><!-- optional path needs trailing slash, autoplay should be set to true or false -->
<mp3 mp3_title="Track One" mp3_filename="audio.mp3" />
<mp3 mp3_title="Some Song" mp3_filename="surf.mp3" />
<mp3 mp3_title="Audio File" mp3_filename="yhj.mp3" />
<mp3 mp3_title="Sound Effects" mp3_filename="fx.mp3" />
</mp3s>


Download the mp3scrollplayer.

I plan to add the following features in future versions:

• Optional citation (by so-and-so)
• Build my own list and scrollbar (rather than relying on a component).
• Ability to customize colors and hover color

Is this a repeat of what happened to Mambo and Joomla!?

Awhile back the rights to PunBB were sold to a company.

Apart from sponsoring the project, they wanted to later down the line offer paid-for web services in relation to PunBB (for example commercial grade PunBB hosting). We decided we liked the idea and sold the rights to the project.

Then a recent switch to a new domain occurred.

Moving the PunBB website under the informer.com domain is a way for our benefactors to promote their other services to the PunBB community and to promote PunBB to users of their other services.

Today many of the active developers mentioned they were forking the project into what they call FluxBB.

Some of you may have been wondering about the future of PunBB and the current development team following Rickard’s announcement that he will not be actively involved with PunBB, at least for the time being. … Now that circumstances have changed with the inevitable shift of power within the project, we all feel that we need a degree of control over future development which is no longer possible. We all share a desire to develop software for the benefit of the community and ourselves, without commercial concerns influencing the final product. This is not a condemnation of PunBB’s current owners: we simply feel that this change is necessary so that we as developers can maintain full control over the development process.

It didn’t bother me they had sold the rights to PunBB as long as it remained GPL, but what this split means now, I’m not sure. How many people will now abandon PunBB for FluxBB? A lot depends on how active the FluxBB project becomes and if the new PunBB development takes off.