Technology
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The Importance of Documentation > Elementary School Websites
Last summer I created a pretty big weblog network for a Catholic elementary school here in Chicago. I also documented my work pretty heavily, showing why I did things certain ways, showing css snippets, and generally laying it out so that people who come in later can see what’s going on. When my friend Cliff…
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Why The CTA Alerts Isn’t Customized
Splitting up alerts is the most common feature request we’ve gotten from the start. I know why it’s appealing– it would be a cool thing if you could get a simple answer to a simple question: Should I take my normal public transportation route or should I alter it? Should I descened these subway steps…
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History of Citizen ICAM
Lots of people know & love the Chicago Crime website, the innovative early Google Maps mashup by Adrian Holovaty. Less well-known is the Citizen ICAM database run by the Chicago Police, which is the goofy-interface, balky, and hard-to-use lookup engine upon which the Chicago Crime website is based. As Adrian notes on his site, without…
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Sample Feedburner BuzzBoost CSS
Feedburner is an excellent (Chicago-based) service that is providing a huge bump for how RSS feeds are shared, tracked, consumed, and monetized. One of the best features is BuzzBoost, which allows you to render RSS feeds in HTML– headlines, full posts, whatever you want. The instructions for how to get past the default styling (indented…
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PBWIki
While weblogs have enjoyed a meteoric rise in use and pop culture attention, another powerful and easy-to-use class of software hasn’t gotten the same mojo. I speak here of wikis. The wikipedia pops into consciousness every once in a while, but when it comes to broad acceptance and use, wikis aren’t there yet. I think…