Another of my early morning illustrations with a toddler driving
("pink ears!" etc.)
Lucky Rabbit
Introducing Caboodle
I've been working for a while on a replacement for my personal Wordpress blog.
Why? Mainly because it kept getting hacked and I'd end up unwittingly promoting various brands of viagra in the footer of every page.
But also because I got tired of all of the features, the quite frankly nasty php hacks involved with all of the plugins I was using, copying and pasting files into an FTP client to make a change to the site, manually changing all the permissions to stop the site getting hacked, only to find out that _another_ upgrade had happened and starting the process all over again. It's all a bit much for a mini little site.
For many people, Wordpress is great, but I'm picky and I wanted a change.
So I started from scratch by asking some questions: how do I want to appear online? What should a personal website be? Who is it for? What's the minimum I could offer visitors to the site to answer their questions or do what they want to do?
When it came down to it I had the following criteria for my new personal website:
- It should be a mashup of the various things I do elsewhere online.
- It should look beautiful, and all of the content from other places should have a consistent look.
- It should be totally unhackable.
- It should not require upgrades and updates.
- I should be Ruby.
- I should be able to use Git to manage it.
- No FTP.
- It should have no media on it to get lost.
- It should have no database to get corrupted.
- It should be search engine optimised.
- It should have lovely microformats on it.
- It should be sociable.
- It shouldn't rely on iframes and no javascript widgets.
- It should scrape information for other places and make it look great.
- It should be expandable as new things I do online become mashable.
- It should use HAML and SASS.
- It should be fast.
- It should be lightweight.
- It should be built in a way that lets people make their own in the same way.
- The end result should look so simple as to be unsurprising.
So, I give you this new website and I give you Caboodle, which hopefully fulfils all 20.
Caboodle is a mashup framework. It is a neat way of putting together a simple website that combines content from multiple sources in an elegant way.
At the heart of Caboodle is Sinatra, the beautifully simple Ruby-based framework for the web.
Caboodle is based on the idea of "Kits" (Kit and Caboodle anyone?), and each Kit provides everything you need to interact with a particular web application or service (Flickr, Twitter, Linkedin, etc.) as well as handling displaying it on-screen.
The cool thing is that each Kit is actually a Sinatra application itself, so all Caboodle does is chain the applications together and provide some shared logic to make for a neat user experience.
So if you have a small Sinatra application you've already made, turning it into a Caboodle Kit could be as simple as extending Caboodle::Kit instead of Sinatra::Base.
Migrating from my existing site was easier than I thought, thanks to Posterous, who offer a new Wordpress import service. Caboodle just pulls in the posts once they are on Posterous, and it means I can then blog just by sending an email. Perfect for the tube-ride to work.
Help out!
I'm looking for alpha users to help with the development of the site, especially people who'd get excited by the following, which is how I have deployed this website (assuming you have git and heroku already set up):
> caboodle create mynewsite
Please set a value for title:
> My New Website
(... and set a few more variables...)
> cd mynewsite
> caboodle kit:add Flickr
Please set a value for flickr_username:
> aeioux
> caboodle kit:add Linkedin
Please set a value for linkedin_url:
> http://linkedin.com/in/steflewandowski
> caboodle deploy
mynewsite.heroku.com has been deployed
If you're interested in having a site like this, even if that looks like gibberish, I'll put one together for you just to test this out.
And if you're a Rubyist, I'm looking for people to collaborate with on this! Fork Caboodle on github.
Plzen
I'm just returning from an inspirational three days in Pilsen (Plzen) in the Czech Republic after taking part in a British Council project called the Urban Ideas Bakery.
First, some photos:
The idea behind these 'bakeries' is that it is an opportunity for a group of interesting people with a wide background and range of experiences to come to a city, and come up with ideas for ways to tackle particular issues that city might be facing and work with local people to see the ideas realised.
Pilsen is a city of 165,000 people and sits as the first major town on the Berounka river. It's a beautiful place in many areas - there are well renovated 15th century buildings and the area by the river reminded me of the Norfolk Broads, even though it's in a semi urban environment.
But one of the main issues that the city faces according to the local people we met is that while the city has these fantastic assets, the people who live there take them for granted and don't make use of the public spaces as much as they could do. And with the city having the title of European City of Culture 2015 within its grasp ( it's down to the last three ) we were asked to look at some short, medium and long term solutions to freeing up these amazing spaces and inspiring or encouraging them to be used.
So on day one we experienced the city at its best, arriving as we did during the Czech equivalent of Birmingham's Arts Fest - a community organised free event of performance, art, theatre, music and so on. Many roads were closed and the city was full of surreal and surprising culture clashes round every corner.
One minute it's Gypsy beatboxing, the next a choral rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody... in the capital of Bohemia... by Bohemians. One minute breakdancing to nineties Ice T played not on vinyl but on latest laptop DJ software, the next Norwegian-inspired black metallist lookalikes playing what sounded like Reggae.
But it all seemed to be perfectly normal, so we accepted it at face value and the newly arrived "international bakers" got to know each other over an equally surreal dinner at a restaurant that was channelling the famous Meaning of Life Mr. Creosote restaurant scene mixed with faded-glory photographs from the thirties.
We had a diverse group - artists, designers, architects, academics, political policy experts, teachers, planners, trouble makers, students... and the following day we were set the challenge of how we might go about addressing this issue of the public space of the city.
In Czech language.
In retrospect it marks a lot of sense - despite English bring spoken by most of the people there, it would be quite rude to arrive in a city and expect the event to be run in a foreign language. So we had translators, earpieces and we had to navigate difficult and complex conversations with a certain level of mutual misunderstanding. I was impressed we didn't get frustrated with it, and worked with the limitations.
We came up with some great ideas, many of which I'm sure won't see the light of day, but here are a few of my favourites from my group. I was the only international baker round the table, so I put myself in the role of "hey, how about..." and trying to get everyone having 'yes and...' conversations. I fact - We had a few rules, but a 'yes and...' rule would probably trump the lot.
Here are a few of my favourites:
Skoda Drive-In
Pilsen is dominated by a large Skoda manufacturing plant. They don't make cars, but parts for trams. It employed 20,000 people, many of whom are migrant workers from the countries. Pilsen also has a long love affair with American culture after the liberation by Patten, even naming one of it's main steets after the USA.
So, we suggest organising a Drive In Movie night with a twist. All of the cars are examples of all of the different models of Skoda that have been made by the company and they are parked in rows in one of the main squares in front of a screen. People can walk up, buy a ticket, popcorn and a drink and watch one of the recent Oscar-winning Czech films from the comfort of the car. Simple, fun, and a talking point for years to come.
Rabbit Hutch Lights
I was sad to hear that the nickname for some of the housing areas on the outskirts of the city is "the rabbit hutches" - people living there work all day, just go home to sleep and many don't have a feeling of pride about their local area.
Inspired by larger scale artworks some of us had seen in Berlin (?), we wanted to do something interesting using these stark brutalist tower blocks and create an animation in light of one of the disused ones. Space invaders, Tetris, the numbers 2015 being made up out of the pixellated grid of the windows... we were quite sure it would make for something interesting.
Other ones that emerged:
- A ferris wheel with a twist
- Barbigloo - barbecues in an igloo in winter
The bakery is always structured to offer short, medium an long- term solutions. And one idea that popped up in all four of the groups was "how about an interactive map?" - We were thinking of it as a psychogeographic online artwork collecting ideas, thoughts, emotions about the place. Others wanted a map that could visualize the potential of the river side, others still wanted to make a map that would store everyone's opinions on how to regenerate the city or report problems a-la fixmystreet, and there was a more ambitious aim to somehow geolocate pretty much anything that anyone might want - kids activities, things to borrow, art closers.
Whilst I'm not sure that a map is going to solve all ills or to really help people find things they are looking for specifically (a blog does a good job here - hint!) I volunteered to create a quick web mashup of Google Maps with a simple database to store "stuff".
That idea became mapilzn and we had it online in about 8hrs worth of work.
The source code, as usual is on github.
As @mikesten pointed out, what we've put together is a lightweight "locative notes" app that any city could now use for similar things. There were requests for videos/photos and so on which would be easy to add. But the issue here is - will people use it? For that it's up to our local "bakers" and if they can keep up the momentum....
It sounds like cash won't be the issue - the local council just committed to a nine percent annual spend on 'culture', but I'm not sure what that includes.
The Riverside
In the medium term a team of more planning-oriented people decided to put a plan together to demonstrate the possibility of what the city's riverside areas could be. There're lots of similarities to Newcastle - iron bridges, brownfield sites to reclaim and the potential here is huge go create amazing public areas by the river.
We presented all of our ideas in public in the evening of the second day and again al lunch on the third. The deputy mayor particularly liked our ideas about the riverside but it looks like there some long running issues behind it that will take time to resolve. The map idea went well and it looks like our prototype might lead to something in future too.
There are more ideas that I haven't added - I just want to get this up online, and I'm very tired after all the mental exercise!
For me this was a really inspiring few days that was hard work and good fun in equal measure but best of all I now have a handful of new friends from all over Europe.
I hope that in time we will see one or two of our ideas turn into real things and good luck to Pilsen in the Capital of Culture bid.
Urban Ideas Bakery - Pilsen
I've been invited over by the British Council to Pilsen in the Czech Republic for an Urban Ideas Bakery.
We're looking at some of the issues the city faces - transport and public spaces being the ones that have emerged as the main ones - and finding short, medium and long-term solutions. Which means I'll probably end up doing a quick web mashup or two prototyping some ideas.
There's a Posterous where we're putting our ideas - videos, photos, text; a liveblog and a facebook group (not that I really hang out there much any more!).
So far - a very inspiring project!
Random Play
I dipped back into that world today and I'm really quite surprised at how easy it is to do things like this:
I used Structure Synth and Sunflow (both open source) to do this, with a little post-processing in Photoshop.
There are a bunch of other tools I'm looking to get back into and/or try out:
- Processing - pretty much the winning generative art tool. Requires Java. I did some stuff with this for the Big Picture a few years back.
- Processing.js - a javascript version of Processing for doing things like Algorithm Ink in a browser (not IE, though).
- Nodebox - a Python generative environment.
For some great examples of what you can do, there's Flickr, openprocessing.org and Generator.X, which shows what this stuff looks like as an output from a 3D printer.
Get geo-position coordinates from a UK postcode with Ruby
Introducing Pat, au ultra-lightweight Ruby gem for postcode->geolocation in the UK.
It's easy to install:
sudo gem install pat
And easy to use. (Try it from the command-line with irb -r rubygems -r pat)
postcode = Pat.get("SW1A 2TT")
postcode["geo"]["lat"] => "51.502308" postcode["geo"]["lng"] => "-0.124345"
Source code for Pat here.
I hope someone finds it useful.
Email your candidates
Well, here's a web application that does just that. It's "beta" at the moment (took me 4hrs on a sunday night) and will be improving over the next few days:
Debillitated
It's called Debillitated.
Here's a screengrab:
I've posted the source code (which is a bit messy in places), and there are links at the bottom of the site to all of the tools I used to build it and get it online. Make your own!
A letter to David Burrowes
debate yesterday on the Digital Economy Bill. I noticed you didn't
attend. Maybe these letters are not reaching you? I've made a 'mashup' which shows how it looked to all of us online who
were watching the debate and commenting on how it made us feel as
'digital natives'. http://debillitated.heroku.com So far this has had a lot of people looking at it today - maybe you
could take the time to read some of the feedback on how we all feel
about web blocking and the government monitoring every single
individual's internet connection in order to protect the interests of
large media companies. There is one thing that you can do for me - sign the early day motion
which already has 17 MPs supporting the following: "That this House believes that the Digital Economy Bill [Lords] is too
important to be taken further in the last days of a dying Parliament;
and considers that a bill with so many repercussions for consumers,
civil liberties, freedom of information and access to the internet
should be debated and properly scrutinised at length and in detail,
with a full opportunity for public discussion and representation in a
new Parliament after the general election and not rushed through in
the few days that remain in this Parliament." http://www.edms.org.uk/edms/2009-2010/1223.htm It so far has support from Labour and Conservative MPs. Please - sign it. This is the single issue I and many others will be
voting on in this election. Yours sincerely, Stef Lewandowski
I'm disappointed
those supporting government measures to introduce compulsory
monitoring of each and every person's internet connection in the UK
and to introduce the first steps in censorship at a government level
over what sites we can and cannot view on the internet. I'd have thought that someone in your position would value free speech
and freedom of expression, but instead you have given your name to a
movement which will see important websites such as Wikileaks be
subject to sustained attacks over copyright infringement, the internet
connections of free wifi providers like museums, libraries and
colleges put under risk of being closed and young people criminalised
for enjoying music. I think it's a shame that organisations such as yours do not think
beyond the old models which we have been working under for the last
few hundred years and begin seeing the wider possibilities the
internet offers us as a boon rather than something to be litigated
against. You do your members no favours in taking this position and I and many
like me intend to counter any proposal to monitor or block our or
anyone else's internet connections. Regards, Stef