Last night it occurred to me, I might never use PHP in a serious manner ever again. It’s bittersweet. No one is a bigger advocate for leaving PHP behind then me, but it was where it all started for me. I had played around with VB in grade school, but desktop programming never got to me like web programming. PHP was ready for me, meaning the metaphorical person who doesn’t know how to program but wants to learn. #

If you are interested at all in what is happing to curation you should read this well-researched article by Aaron Cope. The article stems from Cope’s time at Stamen Design Group, and Flickr, but it doesn’t stop there. This is a deep article with a lot of links, and references. What the Internet has done to the field of journalism, it will do to the practice of curation. This is not a claim based on empirical study, but rather, a prediction based on the evolution of “social software”, communities of interest that form and exist principally in on-line networks and a need to find stable ground in a digital world where the means and cost of production and distribution has approached zero. #

I have spent the last 3 years, or so, working at Yahoo!, you must raise your voice at the end of the hoo, and it has been awesome. The opportunities to learn, and grow were huge, but it’s time for me to move on. In any organization you can pick it apart, and I have, but my move isn’t about that. If anything, it’s about getting a variety of experience. #

I have been really impressed with the coverage of the javascript community over at DailyJS. So, when they were asking for guest bloggers I jumped at the chance. I chose to write about an idea that has started to surface which is mobile data sync. Sync can be tricky especially when you mix in the fact that mobile devices can be offline for long periods of time. I tried to find a solution, but couldn’t find anything. #

If you haven’t checked out anything from Jason Santa Maria, go check his blog out. He has been around for a long time, I think. The fact that I don’t know much about him is what impresses me the most. I have read a few of his blog post, but each one has been incisive, and powerful so that they stand on their own. I don’t need to know who he is to understand the he gets it. #

HTML5 is a loaded term that covers a range of ideas, but here is an attempt to explain it. Explicitly, all that HTML5 stands for is the next version of HTML. After this version there will be no more versions of HTML. Instead they will evolve the spec slowly over time instead of using major revisions. The next gold standard was going to be XHTML2, but it got dumped because it was built on an unrealistic view of the web. #

here is the story My favorite part besides the book was that I started to read it as if it was a dudes blog post about working in a 24 hour book shop. I thought the whole thing was real. The story was based in San Francisco too, and I was going to go to the store and check it out. Near the end of the story though something happened that isn’t real, and I realized it was a short story, and not a blog post, although it was written in the style of a longish blog post. #

I was caught off guard by an interesting compare/contrast over at snarkmarket. Two quotes from recent books, both disparaging looks at pre-internet life. The author, Tim Carmody, asks if these kinds of feelings are what are driving us to use our cognitive surplus towards creation. Maybe slightly, orthogonal to his original idea, was a thought that pop’ed into my head. Not just why are people leaving TV, but how. I have tried to get my parents to use “newer” things, like linux, bad idea I know, but here they are using the internet in interesting ways, in creative ways all without “my help”. #

I just published an article on the YUI Blog. I have been working at a Yahoo! for almost 3 years now. I have enjoyed more of my time at Yahoo, then not, and I think that Yahoo has a lot of really cool things going on. I have met some of the smartest developers I have ever worked with inside of Yahoo, and there is a lot of technical brilliance here. #

I have made a number of websites, small and large. I would say that wacchen, is my fifth large project “launch”. I take that word “launch” with a grain of salt because this time I have done almost no fanfare. I just started by sharing things on my blog, and twitter. People have started to show up, about 8 of them so far. That is fine by me, this is actually a great little rollout. #