Sky’s Blog

About the WPtouch Mobile Plugin— I ran across this in the news sidebar on a blog I was editing this morning. It’s a WordPress plug-in (yes, it’s not actually a theme even though they refer to it that way sometimes) that converts a regular WP blog so that it reads nicely on a small/narrow screen (like that of an iPhone or iPodTouch). Using javascript (which does work on iPhones, unlike Flash) it lets you see first the titles of articles^[1], then you can click a triangle to expand and see the short description, and click a triangle again to read the entire article. I had one problem^[2] (so far) but I love what it does.

[If you’re reading this on an iPhone you’re already seeing how it works, if not you should feel free to pull out whatever your smartphone is and go to my blog home page to see how it works.]

When you visit a blog that has this plug-in enabled, if you’re on an iPhone (or some other smartphones) you’ll see a concise display of the most recent entries in the blog. It includes titles, dates, and categories only. [Illustration left.] My blog theme is white type against a black background, but the plug-in takes just the pertinent information and displays that using a substitute theme that looks fine on the iPhone screen.

Then… (continue reading…)

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I had a meeting with Alex Polvi (a founder) and Bob Hrdinsky of Cloudkick today. Over a Thai lunch. And then we followed up with a short discussion-demo at their office at the foot of Potrero Hill where I met most/all of their US tech experts.

Cloudkick runs a slick service that lets you manage your Slicehost and Rackspace/Mosso cloud servers (both brands are owned by and housed in Rackspace facilities), providing some data visualization in addition. Of course you could manage your servers using the control panels provided by Slicehost and Rackspace, but Cloudkick’s one-layer-removed management adds some unique extras. And they can “automatically” migrate your Amazon EC2 servers over to Rackspace if you’re interested in that. I have nine virtual servers on S&R (as I’ll call the two services) and signed up for the free Cloudkick services almost three months ago. They were voted Best in Show at Under the Radar (see Cloudkick writeup and video). The company is a little under a year old. It was kick-started by a seed investment by Y-Combinator, and recently obtained an angel round of investment. (continue reading…)

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Unbelievable how much time it takes to keep a “live” blog functioning properly when you’re working with new software.

It’s after 1:00am and I’ve just finished wrestling with the day’s blog entries. Reformatting them to make them look better, and making sure that the feeds of more than a dozen geeks are coming in and being handled properly. (And here and there a little bit of editorial work.)

I’m afraid this is what is known as the Real-time web. [See LeWeb] (continue reading…)

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I had run into GapMinder some time ago, but was reminded of it when I encountered this talk that Ola Rosling^[1] gave at Gov 2.0 Summit^[2] that really makes it clear how the visualization of data — especially visualizing data over time — can give us valuable insights into trends in the physical and social world(s). Their Trendalyzer software is used by Google…as you’ll see in this presentation. (continue reading…)

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