the ideas factory

Something which someone linked to during the week was whiteboardwiki.IIRC from the project’s sourceforge page, some of the backend is written in Java so I’ll going to get the tarball and have a look at it. I’m not sure when he last updated it – I think the change control suggested it might have been a while.

Interestingly though this is something I’d like to see integrated into googleplus. Not sure what the architecture behind it is but I’m also inclined to wonder if this couldn’t be easier to sort out in HTML5 – way to choose a project to rejig those skills – probably easier to write a front end throw away board…more to the point is how you write a savable one and maybe which user would own it if the idea were used across different users.

The last copy of Surfers Path I got stated that the recession is very rough on the magazine – they’re down to one permanent staff member. Think this came out of a discussion on subeditting actually.

SP is one of the higher profile surf magazines, certainly UK published/outside the UK. Given the amount of money being pushed into the surf industry elsewhere, eg, Hurley’s sponsorship of one of the big US surf competitions with largest ever prize money, and the money that goes to the Billabong big wave titles, it struck me that the surfing business might be an interesting exercise to see how it’s changing. So the plan is to look into putting some data set together tracking surf business – as far as is possible (and there are limits to this – I may be able to track it in the US, Australia, France, the UK). Also meant to check how Tonnta – the Irish surf magazine – survives. We have three magazines (at least) in Ireland covering surfing, plus we have a couple of big waves giving us fairly hip popularity on a global scale (despite the cold). If SP is working out on one staff member, while Carve, for example, has about 5 – from what I can see, I wonder if the surfing business is starting to fragment.

Need to outline the data I want to gather and also, try and figure out how best to organise it. If I get that right, it could be an interesting subject for data visualisation techniques.

required technology – probably PHP because that’s what WordPress is written in.Possibly python and linking outside the WP infrastructure. This is for livingforlight or whatever replaces.

I’ve tested a few of these and I don’t like them, either the configuration is too messy, sorting out the images is too much hassle or I can’t customise the lightbox enough.

I tried using pixelpost as a nested gallery and basically hated pixelpost so that’s not really an option either. There are a few small python scripts floating around the web and given the plans to look at Python, a gallery script might be a candidate. I probably have an adequate supply of databases at the moment; need to check that out.

I have lots of ideas. This is where I talk about them.