ode - a simple personal publishing platform for the web

I'm not the biggest Jamie Oliver fan, but I think he has done a great job at making his point in the video below.

I'd seen this before. This post for example from Gizmodo titled "Chicken Nuggets Are Made From This Pink Goop". In fact at one point, this story, and 'mechanically separated chicken' (pink goop), was widely circulated. However it was a little too easy to dismiss it as not necessarily an accurate portrayal of the process. But here we have Jamie Oliver demonstrating just how it's done from chicken to nugget.

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Some of your assumptions (the things you accept as true or certain) are nothing but mistakes you made in the past that you didn't catch, and so never learned from.

For this reason, it's a good idea to questions your assumptions as often as possible.

Well that's a pretty short post for me.

Let's see what others have to say about assumptions. Here are some random quotations I pulled from the web:

One of the prevailing sources of misery and crime is in the generally accepted assumption, that because things have been wrong a long time, it is impossible they will ever be right. - John Ruskin

We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them. - Stephen Vizinczey

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This post was inspired by a comment on the forum. I'll quote the short bit of that comment that's relevant to this post. As I have a tendency to do, I've sort of gone off track a little bit.

I am visually oriented ... having everything out were I can touch it feels better. (as opposed to it disappearing into a database)

I think there are a lot of us like this and for good reason too. We (i.e. people) are tuned to be 'visual thinkers'. Why fight it?

That question is not entirely rhetorical. There are lots of good uses for what we think of as databases BUT I would argue that there are fewer good ones than would be suggested by the number of databases in use.

Databases are like taking all of your stuff and putting it in a separate room. Next you hire a person to stand at the door and, when requested, go get stuff for you and put it back.

All of your stuff is available to you, but not directly. It saves you from having to arrange all of your things, because the person at the door handles that, but is that nec a good thing? After all, you don't get to arrange and interact with all of your stuff.

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for the first time since I was a little kid.

This is not in any way an endorsement of services like Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon's 'Prime Instant Videos' service, or any of the other alternative subscription type video services. (Services that let you buy or rent movies and TV shows aren't much better.) I wish I could at least say that the reason I can't recommend these services is limited to the fact that content rights holders make it virtually impossible for anyone but established cable and satellite companies to create compelling offerings. That's certainly true, but it's not the only reason why these services are terrible.

They're also awful because the companies responsible for them have done an absolutely abysmal job with the implementation of their services including just about everything from the basics of navigation, categorization, and search, to the user interface design and buggy code. To anyone who would suggest that these services are anything but miserable, I'd ask you to take a deep breath, maybe go for a walk, and clear your head of the bias you hold in favor of anything that isn't cable or satellite. That those companies are virtual monopolies standing in the way of progress does not make every other thing somehow good. On the contrary, with a DVR (or 2) and a decent amount of storage, traditional cable is so good in comparison to the new crop of 'alternatives' (ahem) that they might as well come from the future, or have been given to us by some more advanced alien civilization. Is it perfect, no. But it is so much better that there is simply no comparison.

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The problem with this story from gizmodo, "China’s Pollution Is So Insane You Can See It From Space" is that it really doesn't make much sense to call this "China's Pollution".

For one thing, wherever you live, you're breathing the same air. I won't pretend to be an expert on global air movement or the spread and dispersion of airborne pollutants. But I do know that we share the same planet and so the same environment. Inevitably, things that we do to it in one place have repercussions everywhere else - be they environmental, political, economic, etc. We see all kinds of artificial differences and boundaries that simply do not accurately reflect the realities of what it means for 7 billion people to all share a planet together.

Secondly, they are not creating all of that pollution just meeting the needs and wants of China. To no small extent, we're encouraging literally paying them to do it.

(If I paid you to commit a murder, is that your murder or our murder?)

Picture living in a delightful little house a on hill next to a beautiful lake, or maybe overlooking the ocean. Now imagine that a factory opens up right next to your house, polluting the air and the water, and generally disrupting your life. How would you feel about that?

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I'm not going to tell you much here that you can't learn from the project page for 'Zoom' at jacklmoore.com. But I'm going to be a little more explicit about, and my instructions will be Ode specific. (Though honestly there is really nothing Ode specific about this.) Maybe reading this will cause you to give it a try and add another tool to your toolbox.

Zoom is a lightweight JQuery script that does a super useful thing. It allows you to display a reduced sized version of a larger an image and yet allow users to zoom in to see a much larger version of the image in place. Rather than showing you the full image, it displays only the portion of the larger image that fits within the same sized box as the reduced size version. Does that make any sense? If not an example should make it perfectly clear.

Click and hold the image below to see what I am trying to describe.

Click the image and hold to zoom

This lets visitors closely inspect a large image within the normal page layout. Something that wouldn't be possible otherwise. That's not to say that there aren't other approaches. You could instead link a reduced size image to a larger version, such that clicking on the small image would open the larger one outside of the context of the page. This might be a new window or, as is increasingly common, 'floating' in front or on top of the page. Just linking 2 images together doesn't require any scripting at all. A simple anchor tag with an href attribute will take care of that. And there are quite a few different tools to that allow you to enlarge images in more sophisticated ways. I like zoom in some cases because it emphasizes that the image is meaningful within the context of its place on the page.

So enough of that. How do we implement it?

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Photos are a important part of just about every site, and a great thing to include on a blog. There are probably many ways to include photos. I tend to think broadly in terms of two:

• Photo galleries
• Individual photos

We've probably all seen plenty of both. There are many different ways to create photo galleries and just as many ways to present individual photos. This post a post about where to keep photos on your server and how to keep them organized. It's not a post about various applications, scripts, and styles for displaying photos. I do hope to write those posts too but this isn't that.

A flat file site like the kind you create with Ode is good for a lot of reasons - everything from flexible content creation to backup, moving your content from one hosting provider to another (or even moving to a new platform should you decide that you no longer want to use Ode), and for many other reasons as well. However, you should be careful about how you organize your content to avoid eventually running into problems.

Photos are a good example of something that you will either grow to love or hate about using Ode and for reasons that have little to do with Ode itself. If you keep things organized as you go, you'll love it. Of course the same thing could be said about managing the rest of your digital content from documents to music and video, and for that matter keeping your home clean, managing your finances, and much of the rest of your life as well. One of the more subtle advantages of using Ode is that it encourages to think and act in a way that is beneficial far beyond this project.

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Ode is very open-ended. That's one of it's great strengths.

• How/where you will host your site
• Transferring content to your public site
• Organizing content
• The tools use to write and edit posts
• The appearance and behavior of your site
• 3rd party services you use to enhance your site

These and many more choices are yours to make. Choice is in a lot of ways a very good thing. It means that you have the flexibility to do things in a way that makes sense for you and your unique set of circumstances.

When there is less flexibility then someone (whoever is in the position to make the decision) has to decide what is the best way for everyone. That may sound like a good idea, i.e. having someone who is very knowledgeable about a particular thing (an activity like posting to a website for example) make the best possible decision, and then push that well-informed choice out to everyone else. It would be a good way to do it, even the best way maybe, if it weren't impossible (and even nonsensical) in many cases.

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After my last post 'Insurance co. driver monitoring programs and Ginger.io :\' I want to leave a note for whoever might be reading this in the future to clear up any uncertainty that may result in 'intervention'. Here, goes...

That should do it. I hope. (Some of the stuff going on scares me half to death.)

:)

I've wanted to write a post complaining about Progressive's driving monitor program/device called 'Snapshot' for a while now. It's an incredible invasion of privacy in exchange for a few dollars off your car insurance bill.

The thinking behind it is almost perverse. It can't do anything to make you a better driver. It does reward you for following patterns that are consistent with good driving behavior. But do we need to allow insurance agents into our cars to be good drivers? The best reason to drive safely of course is prevention of injury to yourself or others, and to avoid the significant costs and inconvenience that come from being involved in accidents.

Without the data collected by this sort of device, insurance rates are determined largely by historical driving record. Get into fewer accidents then the average person, and stay out of avoidable accidents, and you'll pay less.

What do we accomplish by adding this new layer of monitoring? If you do get into an accident, this device will not lower your rates. If you do not meet the optimal driver profile then this kind of program will not significantly lower your rates.

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