by gregoryheller | Jul 31, 2008 | Uncategorized
Owen put up a website that uses a math problem to get people to think about a very important number, 350ppm CO2. I just turned is math problem into a short animated video using a website called GoAnimate.com. Watch my video below: It took me about an hour or so to make this cartoon animation, and it was basically the first time I used the system. The implications of GoAnimate.com are enormous. Non profit organizations, and ordinary people can spend a little bit of time and create an animation that could go viral. Of course you still need good material, some patience, and a little bit of skill with GoAnimate. I don’t expect that my cartoon will be the next Meatrix, or that I’ll be snatching any work away from Free Range Studios anytime soon. But this animation tool puts potentially viral animations into the hands of just about...
by gregoryheller | Jul 30, 2008 | Uncategorized
A few months ago I joined a new coworking space in Seattle, Giraffe Labs. Giraffe Labs grew out of a Seattle group called Saturday House. Well both got a mention on John Cook’s Venture Blog over at the Seattle PI. As founder Anders Conbere was quoted: “We believe that more collaboration will make all of our projects more successful and we’ll be smarter and happier people…” We (at CivicActions) share this belief, and it is one of the reasons we love Drupal, the casual collaboration on making the Drupal platform better will makes all of our projects more successful, and we learn from each other and the community. The other tag line that sticks is: “A club house for big people.” And that is really what Giraffe Labs feels like. Some interesting people getting together, working, and hanging out. So far I have had some productive work sessions down at the Lab, and some good client meetings too. Last Saturday we had a small party and I met some interesting people working on cool things like socially responsible consumption (dollar voting), participatory democracy, and social media...
by gregoryheller | Jul 16, 2008 | Uncategorized
Yesterday while waiting at the Cancun airport with Aaron, Henry, Mirasol, Nedjo, Owen and Justine, a few of us got to talking about FriendFeed, Twitter and del.icio.us. Aaron and I are avid del.icio.us users, tagging all sorts of interesting sites. And we follow numerous lists and feeds thus pulling together some great information and redistributing it through the company. Aaron asked me why I used Twurl (aka Tweetburner) with Twitter. I explained that it allowed me to easily post interesting links directly to Twitter, but that I had recently figured out another hack that integrates my tagging workflow to include posting to Twitter. Tagging bookmarks on del.icio.us with “tweet” Pull the RSS feed of your bookmarks tagged “tweet” Set up a Tweetburner account Add the del.icio.us feed to tweetburner and have it post to your twitter account. So now if I want to bookmark something and share it on twitter, I need only tag it with “tweet”. I still use Twurl for things that I don’t want to bookmark but do want to share. In other news… I’m on FriendFeed now, and slowly rebuilding my “network” on indenti.ca. For those who don’t know, Identi.ca is a micro-blogging service based on the Free Software Laconica tool, licensed under the GNU AGPL. The idea behind Identi.ca is that you, the user, control your data and can download it if you want, and take it elswhere if you want (read their privacy policy). This is all fine and well, but the system doesn’t seem to have a critical mass of subscribers, nor does it have the eco-system of associated applications yet. Hopefully...
by gregoryheller | Jul 1, 2008 | Uncategorized
A few months ago when I started using FF3 beta I was being driven mad by the default behavior of the browser when you clicked on the url in the address bar, a single click would highlight the entire url. Typically I click on the url with the intention of appending the url with something like “admin/build/views” and the entire url would get wiped out. Well, Owen heard my plight and taught me out to change this behavior: Visit about:config in the browser, filter for “browser.urlbar” and click on “browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll” to change the behavior for single click from value=true to value=false. You may also want to change “browser.urlbar.doubleClickSelectsAll” from false to true. Thanks...
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