A few months ago I took over a position from my good friend Gina producing the Digital Journalist, "A Multimedia Magazine for Photojournalism in the Digital Age". The DJ continually impresses me with the quality and depth of photojournalism they promote each month. The latest is no exception:

Magnum 60 Years - It sounds like the beginning of a really bad joke: There was this Englishman, Frenchman, Hungarian and Pole who got together to form a photographers' cooperative.

BuzzFeed launches today. Conceived by Jonah Perreti, designed by Chris Johanesen, edited by Peggy Wang, and a bit of tech by yours truly.

You may have noticed the introduction of tags here at bitterpill.org. I spent a few hours this weekend moving over to a new weblog tool. I know that many will exclaim, "Why have you discarded that crappy piece of software that you piecemealed together and have basically abandoned for the past two years?" Why indeed. Yet, with so many mature software packages out there to allow easy blogging, and me with so little resources (read: no desire) to add any new functionality to the old system, it seemed logical to move on...to let the old system go. It's me blogging software, not you. We've grown apart, and we just don't seem to communicate anymore. Not to mention the sexy little blog software that works at the dry cleaner down the street. She understands me.

With the new wares we get tagging...ain't it a peach. I've been tagging old posts when the mood hits me, and someday soon, or maybe never, I'll have tagged up the whole pill. In light of this new tagging functionality, I hacked up a little add-on code to display all tags in a format I like to describe as a "Tag Smog" (disclaimer, graphing idea stole shamelessly [maybe a bit of shame] from jason).

heh, server side <blink>. (via the Brain).

a heavily-loaded web server may not be able to respond to blink requests efficiently, which will slow down the perceived blink rate. One work-around to this would be to use a high-capacity blink server farm.

"Helping you find where other people aren't"

kottke.org ends its micropatron sponsorship for an ad revenue model. I say for the better.

filed under: how to avoid the work you should really be doing...

Nothing says Web 2.0 like a rotating flaming jesus.

An account on our social, folksonic, semantic, flaming jesus network is free, and fun! So sign up today at:

  http://jusflam.tv

The social network for people who enjoy Jesus, and flames, and rotating stuff.

Flaming Jesus® would like to thank Tony and Brian for their words of wisdom and guidance.

I have been searching around for decent gif animation software for, well, ever. There are free ones and shareware ones and commercial ones with trials. Each one has been clunky in its own way, and I have spent way too much time screwing around with these apps just to make an ad image animate. Do I really need anything so cumbersome and unwieldy just to make an animation?

Here's a brief example of an experience with any number of gif animation tools:

1. start app.
2. figure out how to get an image into said app.
3. image in, but the color is all wrong. bright green has become pea soup.
4. find the color settings.
5. screw with color setting to no avail.
6. reimport higher color image, not full on pea soup, but still soupy.
7. try and find the settings to make the animation loop. takes way to long to find loop setting...
8. after finding loop setting, look for frame delay setting...even longer than loop setting.
9. save out gif.
10. gif looks like shit. start over, and screw with color settings again.
11. repeat with another gif app.

Today I found what for I had been looking. A simple gif animation tool. An application designed with so few bells and less whistles, a technology so simple and perfect and common, that I hadn't considered it. Being blinded by the GUI, I had lost touch with my roots.

I stumbled upon Gifsicle, "a UNIX command-line tool for creating, editing, and getting information about GIF images and animations."

Simple, concise and one line:

After a myriad of crappy GUI tools that made me, well, a tool, I was reminded that sometimes the old ways are best.

The entries for the Huffington Post Contagious Festive went live today...

A few that I like, in no particular order:

• jesusaur - Jesus as a Dinosaur.
• Dropping the Ball - dirty, filthy, funny.
• Braindriving with Ms. Olga Suchadolsky - This one is very strange, but its got boobs, so...
• awwwstrich - Ostriches rapping, need I say more.
• Al Qaeda Caller I.D.

There has been a proliferation of web apps released in beta form in the past few years. For those who aren't exactly sure what beta means, basically beta is a term used for software that is not quite ready for release. It means that there are still some known bugs, and most likely some unknown bugs in the software. The software is in the need of some bug fixing and tweaking before it can go prime time.

Back in my early days of system administration, many of the GPL/open source software tools we used were quite usable in their beta stage, and it was very common for us to run beta software on our production servers. Most software projects had an alpha release that was, oddly enough, pre beta, and most alpha releases were quite buggy and unstable. Eventually these alpha products would become beta, and these beta products would become release versions. Alpha and beta versions were and are a way to release software to the masses for feedback and testing with the aim to produce a release quality version.

It seems many modern web based software products are using the beta label a little too freely and for other purposes. We labeled kinja.com a beta product when it was initially released, and rightly so as it was a new product just out of the gate. I left kinja well over a year ago, and yet kinja is still in beta. Google News, gmail and flickr are all still labeled beta well over a year from their initial releases. Its hard to believe that these companies have not been actively developing these products, and are unable to hammer out any of the bugs and features in the software at this point.

It is invaluable to release software early to your users so they can use it, touch it, and give you feedback on a work in progress. I think the idea of releasing alpha/beta software to users for feedback is an excellent tool that will help produce quality, bug free software. However, companies are using the beta label to excuse flaws in their web based software beyond just getting initial development feedback. What else can explain beta versions of web applications that have been in production use for over a year.

It seems that software companies think that adding a beta graphic to their webapp's logo gives them a bit of leeway in the quality of their wares. Maybe this is true, but how long can you label your live webapp as beta when people are using it as production software. Usually a beta release is followed by more advanced pre-release products, and maybe even release candidates, which eventually evolve into an actual released product, a 1.0 version of your software if you will. In the old days, if a product remained in a beta stage for overly long periods it meant that the software was most likely no longer being actively developed. I find it hard to believe that gmail has gone idle.

The beta label is being used to excuse flaws in software as opposed to being used as a tool to help expose flaws in software before final release. In the end it dilutes the value of releasing beta software if software is labeled beta without the intention of using feedback to produce release quality software. I imagine there is overlap in most cases, and most companies do wish to expose and fix flaws, but non the less, it still seems disingenuous when obviously production ready webapps remain beta for overly extended periods.