The Noosphere And The Return Of Honor (My Closure Of The Year 2008)
It’s the last day of the year, and I chose not to write any technical, nor critical article. Instead, I’d like to turn my attention to a phenomenon that’s one of the greater, even if overlooked, achievements of the Internet.
Besides the zillion apparent ways the Internet has changed human life on this planet, there are also several less apparent ones. One is the concept of “honor” in Internet-based cooperation.
Adblock Plus Footer JavaScript Impedance
According to the Yahoo Extreme Web Performance Team, javascript loading should be moved to the END of the page to improve the perceived page loading speed. (And Vladimir Prelovac has provided us with a plug-in that does this.)
However, users of Firefox and the exceptionally powerful Adblock Plus extension, might encounter the opposite effect.
The Right Way To Shortcodize WordPress Widgets
A couple of days ago, I’ve been asked how to make Sliding Notes work in sidebar widgets. The general answer is, as with any shortcode: “Enable shortcodes in widgets”.
As it turns out, finding out how to do it right is not nearly as easy as it should be, due to some tricky interweavement with plug-in loading and execution order.
Sliding Notes 1.2.1 Released
After much struggle with an annoyingly pertinacious cross-browser issue, and a thorough rework at both conceptual and code level, here it is, at last:
Sliding Notes 1.2.1
Download it as as usual, and see the plug-in homepage for details.
In Memory Of Srinivasa Ramanujan
Yesterday would have been the 121st birthday of one of the brightest minds this planet has ever been a home to: Srinivasa Ramanujan.
Little known to a wider public, this guy, although born and raised in poverty, and with absolute no formal education, managed not only to reproduce by himself – in a self-tought fashion – much of the mathematical knowledge from antiquity to the 20th century, he also invented countless mathematical methods that are the foundation of many modern theories, not least Superstring Theory.
Sliding Notes Back On Air
I’m pleased to announce that my efforts to overcome the cross-browser issues have yielded a promissing new Sliding Notes version. I’m running it on this site alredy, and I’d be grateful for your feedback on how it works with different browsers.
Stay tuned while I’m running some more tests and prepare an official release.
Slinding Notes – 1.1 Series Withdrawal
I am terribly sorry to announce that I’m temporarily withdrawing the 1.1 series due to cross-browser problems. The 1.0rc5 version is now marked as the “stable version”, and it will remain so until I’ve found a reliable solution to the problem. (The 1.1.0 version is still available through “Other Versions “).
Again, I’m really sorry for the inconvenience, but I thought this is the only fair thing to do right now (next to resolving the issue).
Of Boiling Frogs And Chinese Whispers
When I wrote “Psychology Of IT Language“, I brought up the aspect of communication of principles, the implicit communication of values, and its possible psychological impact on an organization.
As I’m further contemplating about it, patterns begin to disclose themselves. Two such patterns are Chinese Whisper and Boiling Frog. But before I go into them, an example:
YouTube Inside A Sliding Note
I’ve just received an email asking whether Sliding Notes support embedding YouTube videos inside.
I’m happy to confirm that they do! Here is a cool video» that proves it!
I used the Insights plug-in to embed the video object directly between the slider tags.
But: Using a video (or any other) shortcode in a Sliding Note is currently not supported.
Sliding Notes Major Upgrade
Today I’m releasing version 1.1.0 of Sliding Notes. This is a major rewrite of the plug-in and the beginning of the 1.1 series.
