BrainFuel

Mark Angeletti from Search-This has written a great tutorial for creating liquid rounded corners in CSS. There are a bunch of techniques for doing this, and this one is especially well written.

Do you know of a good pre-built classified ads system (has to be in PHP)? We have a client that wants to use something that is pre-built and we can get set up with limited problems. We don’t mind paying for something that is pre-built.

It would be preferable if it had all of the functionality for taking payments, but that’s not critical. Thank you. I’ll share our own research next month (after we review and search on our own).

I’m sitting here at BarCamp Phoenix and one of the things I keep hearing is that Ajax has been overused. People think it has been used too much. In a way, I think they’re right. Look at any web app these days and you’ll see a significant rise in Ajax usage.

Ajax creates a benefit and a problem. The good side is that Ajax lets you do things with data without needing to refresh the page. The flip side is that every instance is a surprise to first time users. They never know exactly what to expect.

So there it is, the one interesting trend I saw at Barcamp. I’ll have to keep listening.

I can’t believe this, I’m at a data center, chatting with friends while I set up RAID5, all alone, and it’s 11 o’clock on a Sunday night. I need to get a life. Well, all done now… Back to the office to make some wireframes. Yay for self employment!

I’m at Limelight’s data center today, and this is the connection. Sorry the caption contest is so late. I am stuck.

An old saying is it takes 5% of the time to complete 95% of a software project, and 95% of the time to finish that last 5%. True or false?

Our client needed a blog platform that runs on Windows servers, and developed in .NET. While we haven’t yet chosen a solution, I found a few possibilities and wanted to share my research.

• Ektron CMS4000.NET
• DasBlog looks interesting, they have been running this project for several years.
• Blogtronix looks better than DasBlog from a design perspective. They also have a demo.
• .Text
• Allinta is more of a CMS engine.
• dBlog CMS is from Italy and may be written in ASP.
• Vinetype looks promising. You can go to vinetype.org to see an example.
• CommunityServer looks to be a full featured engine. You can go to communityserver.com for a hosted version.
• Subtext is a branch of .Text.
• eActivated Portal Framework

That’s it! If you know of any others, feel free to leave a comment and I will update this list. I’ll mention as well, that WordPress and most PHP / MySQL apps can be run on a Windows server if you install them.

I know of a few people who code in Django, and there is a book coming out soon that is in “Beta” online, and I have to say it is the most intuitive collaborative book editing system I have seen. Great idea, excellent execution.

Anybody can add a comment to the sidebar, and they are indicated by a little icon (seen in my screenshot). I think that someone could recycle this idea for blogs. Imagine if instead of having comments be at the end of the post, they could be inline? I think that would rock.