Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

WordPress 3.8 is available for immediate download

The bright new and shiny version – WordPress 3.8 – is available for download.  As I mentioned previously, the biggest change is the reworked administration area that now scales well to smaller screens, like those of smartphones and tablets.  It’s far from perfect, but at least it works now.  I’m sure there will be more changes and improvements in the upcoming versions.

WordPress-3.8

But that’s of course not the only change.   The administration area has changed a lot – more contrast, different icons, improved typography, and now even with color schemes.  Also, theme preview and management got changed quite a bit.  With the new theme management interface, the screenshots are larger, which, unfortunately, makes them blur out a bit until theme developers will update with higher resolution versions.

Ekisto – visualizing online habitats

Slashdot is linking to Ekisto – a project to visualize online communities like if they were cities.  So far there are only GitHub, StackOverflow and Friendfeed (really? Friendfeed?).  I’ve seen plenty of data visualization, especially for GitHub, but I have to say that this is one of the most interesting ones ever.

github visualization

 

Here is a quote from the About page that explains how it works:

Ekisto comes from ekistics, the science of human settlements.

Ekisto is an interactive visualization of three online communities: StackOverflow, Github and Friendfeed. Ekisto tries to imagine and map our online habitats using graph algorithms and the city as a metaphor.

A graph layout algorithm arranges users in 2D space based on their similarity. Cosine similarity is computed based on the users’ network (Friendfeed), collaborate, watch, fork and follow relationships (Github), or based on the tags of posts contributed by users (StackOverflow). The height of each user represents the normalized value of the user’s Pagerank (Github, Friendfeed) or their reputation points (StackOverflow).

Download your Gmail and Google Calendar data … soon or now

I am a well known Google fan.  But even those who call it an Evil Corporation and a Global Spy, can’t argue with the awesomeness of these news:

Starting today we’re rolling out the ability to export a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data, making it easy to back up your data or move to another service.

You can download all of your mail and calendars or choose a subset of labels and calendars. You can also download a single archive file for multiple products with a copy of your Gmail, Calendar, Google+, YouTube, Drive, and other Google data.

gmail data export

Most of the 20 GB of data I store on Google Drive is actually my email archive.  I’ve imported email into my Gmail from as early as 1998 – much, much earlier than Gmail was even born.  Having a way to export them all out in one go, without using clunky POP or IMAP is much appreciated.