Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Flailing Themes
April 04, 2009

“I am trying to port a WordPress theme over to Habari the only way I know how. Step 1- Make mess. Step 2- Flail around making mess worse. Step 3- Somehow clean up mess miraculously. Step 4- Make another mess and repeat process.”

This kind of thing is an indictment of what Habari is all about. our community has been struggling for some time to produce themes as easily as some other publishing systems. Since there are a lot of themers coming from WordPress looking into Habari, they’re looking for similar features in Habari’s theming system that aren’t quite ripe for use. There are actually a lot of places in Habari’s theming system that could use some work.

My First Public Speaking Appearance
April 03, 2009

When I was much younger, I was in Cub Scouts. My parents were very involved in scouting. My mom was my den mother and later my dad was a scout leader. And in this short story, my mom had helped to organize a day camp in Kerr Park in Downingtown.

I remember it being my friend, Pat, that was also in the camp, but I could have that detail wrong. His mother was helping mine organize the event. This is relevant because when our scheduled speaker for the day didn’t show up, his model rockets were in the back seat of his mom’s car. This otherwise wouldn’t have been possible, since being a day camp, nobody else’s parents were present.

Meritocracy Versus Do-ocracy
March 21, 2009

At Drupalcon, there was a recurring theme of “do-ocracy”. Simply explained, a “Do-ocracy” is Drupal’s version of a meritocracy. Well, it’s not even so much Drupal’s version, as how people perceive the way that Drupal works, or how they choose to explain what a meritocracy is. Being involved with Habari and our own brand of meritocracy, I’m glad that they’ve come up with their own ridiculous term to explain how their project works.

As part of the definition of meritocracy on Wikipedia, you have this:

In a meritocracy, society rewards (by wealth, position, and social status) those who show talent and competence as demonstrated by past actions or by competition.

That’s the ideal scenario. But what the folks presenting do-ocracies at Drupalcon are advocating is something slightly different. They’re giving wealth, position, and social status (or whatever the open source equivalent is) to people who simply “do”, not by people who show talent and competence. That is, your work needs to be of no merit, you simply need to do it. That’s not right.

Web Design for Web Developers - A Book
March 15, 2009

I pitched a thought on Twitter about a book that I think should exist. The helpful folks on Twitter kindly responded with some candidates, but I should clarify what I’m looking for.

What I really want seems to change every time I say it, but fundamentally I’m a coder. It’s what I know how to do, and I’m pretty good at it. I realize that I just don’t have the design skills to be building designs every day like some of the more prolific designers that I work with. Especially not at their level of quality. But what I would like is some magic formula that gets me at least to the point that I can produce something that is not butt-ugly.

Let's Fix SEO
March 14, 2009

If you’re not a tool, you hate SEO as much as I do. If you hate SEO more than I do, you are possibly also a tool. What’s the deal?

It seems to me that people hate SEO because: