Thoughtless Banter – John Bellone

Dreams and Thoughts

Feb

Publishing Stories on Type Aloud

Posted by JB at 8:40 pm

One of the features that was omitted from the Type Aloud beta launch earlier this year was the ability to work on unpublished stories and chapters. My testing period in early December showed that the workflow of most of the users was to develop their story in some offline editor such as Word or Pages first, and then pasting in the finished product into the text area making slight modifications when needed for markup.

A few friends brought this to my attention and this afternoon I started cooking up some changes to make it possible to “publish” and “depublish” stories and chapters from the website. Any story that is created first begins in an unpublished state (draft mode) which needs to be explicitly toggled by the owner before it goes live on the site. At any point in time the user has the option to take their story offline making it unpublished again. It should then immediately become unavailable across the site. I am working on making sure that comments and subscriptions correctly disappear when a story becomes unpublished as well.

One good thing is that I do not plan on deleting subscriptions and comments on stories (chapters) when someone decides to depublish a story. This is assuming that the story will eventually come back because it was not deleted. When a story is deleted, the chapters, comments and subscriptions will follow.

Jan

Type Aloud Beta Live!

Posted by JB at 11:25 pm

I have been waiting a very long time to be able to say these words. For the past couple of months I have had a bottle of champagne sitting around, waiting, for me to finish the site enough to launch it to the public as a beta. I am glad, honored and relieved that the day is finally here that I can crack open that bottle and drink it (actually, finishing up the last bit of it now). My close group of friends have been pounding away at the site already reporting bugs that I promise I will get on top of as soon as I can.

Type Aloud has been a dream of mine for at least four years now. I envisioned a writing and reading community where people will not only be able to share their stories (and poems) but also get collaborative feedback for both editing, and hopefully, print publishing. Some of the most intriguing writing I have read came from people that were not published professionally. I look forward to being able to read (and write!) much more than I have in the past with this service. My primary goal is not to be profitable: Type Aloud is a service that I want to use myself. I am a lucky man if I am able to break even.

If you have a couple of minutes, or even better some writings that you want published, please take the time and head on over to the open beta page and sign up for a free account. Remember that all work posted to Type Aloud you retain ownership to. In the coming days I will have a proper copyright agreement up on there which will basically amount to you giving us the permission to publish it on the website.

There is much, much, more to be done, but I feel as if the first hurdle has already been past.

Dec

Type Aloud Home Stretch

Posted by JB at 10:37 pm

The holidays always seem to creep up on me.

This is the first holiday season I have been at my new gig and we’ve been quite busy busting our asses to get everything in line for next year. So the past few weeks I haven’t had a lot of time to get work done on Type Aloud but that all changed earlier this week.

For the past couple of weeks I have been sitting on the code and focusing on getting the design done. That meant learning a lot of interaction in Rails that I did not know before, working on some CSS beautification and generally cleaning up the god awful standard forms that are generated through the Rails scripts. I decided earlier in the week that I would send out an e-mail to all of my testers and let them know I am planning on pushing a release candidate for their testing.

After some successful UX testing tonight I am going to try to push a new candidate each night for the foreseeable future. My plan is to release to beta on New Years eve flipping the switch on-or-around midnight in a ceremonious occasion which will involve the consumption of a lot of booze. But all that hinges on the UX and integration/functional testing that myself and my testers are going to perform.

Next week the goal is to send out the invite to everyone who has signed up for early access and shut off the form in preparation for the switch. So if you’re a writer, reader or poet and you’re interested in getting involved and helping me out feel free to sign up with your e-mail address. Its free, and I won’t sell them to some clearing house.

Good times are ahead!

Nov

This Ain’t Yo Mamma’s Internet

Posted by JB at 11:21 pm

A decade ago most of America connected to the Internet through some form of copper telephone line, and America On-Line was the service to be on. I remember dialing into a local telephone switch because hours on the Internet could run you hundreds of dollars in long distance fees. Oh boy has the landscape changed. The slowest cellular network available is still much, much quicker than the 56K dial up that I grew up with.

My good friend Kenny Katzgrau has written a blog post about his thoughts about the social networking phenomenon and some questions that he has about new “boom.” Has the service that Mark Zuckerberg stole pioneered a new type, a new form, of real-time communication and interaction with the world?

These social services such was Twitter and Facebook both provide a new medium to communicate around the world. This instant, publish-anywhere, status update has much more power than merely giving your ex-girlfriends the ability to stalk you on their iPhone. In merely 140 characters millions of people convey joy, hatred, love and disgust for anything and everything. Our thoughts, what we might have once kept to ourselves, can now be broadcasted to millions of people who are drooling to read the next quip from Ashton Kutcher. Mere mortals have become super stars because of Twitter.

Is this much different than Yahoo Chat a decade ago? There were literally thousands of rooms available for all sorts of pleasures. This then, instant communication tool, was a first of its kind. Yahoo pioneered one of the first social network web site providing photo profiles, chat services and much more – five years before Facebook even existed. Why am I going on and on about history?

How will Facebook and other social networks become even more real-time?
I think that this answer is less about the technology and more about the ability to integrate, aggregate, information in a single package. A few years ago web portals such as Yahoo were shunned – we wanted the minimalistic design but the amazing power of Google’s search solution. We didn’t need a directory curated by Yahoo minions. But what is the most interesting morsel is that we are now looking to integrate services because it is a pain in the ass to deal with the replication of data and information.

As human beings we do not want to have to continually type in the same information into different services. I want to be able to log into websites with my Facebook account, and update my status on Facebook via Twitter. Why do I use Twitter instead of Facebook? Market share? Hype? Twitter definitely does not have a technical advantage over Team Zuck.

I believe that the future is aggregation. Facebook et al are going to integrate with each other. New data is going to be created because of this, and services will crop up to mine, analyze and display this information in new, interesting ways. Google realized early on that data and information is king.
How will desktop software fit into the picture?
All of the JavaScript engines will eventually fall into oblivion and the Internet browsers will go with it. We’re going to see less and less differences between browsers and more focus on integrated experiences with services. In the case that Kenny brought up, Rock Melt, a browser designed with social connectivity in mind, is a first step towards this. Google has introduced a plugin-based software extensions for its Chrome browser. We’ll be using more and more services over the air via web API endpoints and less of the actual service through their web sites. The new crop of Internet businesses will be “cloud computing” style service-oriented websites that sell access to their API and offer a limited front-end to an overly simplistic service.
How many investors will spend money on social applications?
What exactly isn’t a social application now on the Internet? Any new business will need to embrace the social aspect of the Internet or another business that does is going to crop up and displace them. Very few services are going to be able to get away with this.
What is the sum of it all?
As I said before this is leading to an Internet that is a jumble of inter-connected services that are all providing data, for a price, to any client that is able to access the public API. We’ll a lot of services that both combine two competitors’ data into an application that trumps the user experience of both. The future of the Internet is decentralized information, plain and simple.

I could go on and on for hours regarding this. If any of you have thoughts please feel free to comment here, or head on over to Kenny’s blog and make sure to use both of our URLs in your WordPress callbacks!

Jan

My 2010 New Year’s Resolutions

Posted by JB at 5:43 pm

New Year's Resolutions

I hear that it helps to sometimes write down your New Year’s resolutions. Because I usually fail to complete most of my resolutions I figure that I should receive all and any the help that I can get.

Exercise at least three times per week.
Lose 30 pounds.
Take more pictures.
Eat healthier.
Get organized.
Take a vacation.
Start writing a book.
Get involved in volunteer work.
Launch a website.
Enjoy life.

Nov

New Apartment, Code, School, and Consulting

Posted by JB at 1:53 pm

Well, well, it has been quite awhile since I have last written a blog post to the masses. Since then there has been some very awesome updates in the world of technology that I have been unable to give my opinion about (not that anyone is actually reading my opinion). The last month has been a busy time in my life. I finally have a change of scenery and have moved across the Passaic river from Newark, NJ to Kearny, NJ in a much better apartment (and area). I cannot even begin to express how great it is to finally have a bed to sleep on. You do not really know how much sleeping on a couch, mattress, in your car, at your friend’s place, really sucks until you have to do it for two months of your life.

My tenure at the New Jersey Institute of Technology is about up. I will be receiving my bachelors degree in December as long as I do not screw up any of my classes. As it looks now the only class that I have to worry about is Physics II, because I absolutely loathe electric circuits and the such, but I have a good feeling about the next exam so I think all will be good. Last week I taught two classes on Linux, Boost, and C/C++ to some capstone students at NJIT. Capstone students are essentially students that are working on their senior project (or thesis) to graduate.

At the beginning of September I made the concise decision to get off my ass and start getting my life in gear. So along with a controversial hair cut (went front long hair to short hair) I went and began putting out my feelers for contract (and consulting) work to pay some bills. I am currently working on a project for a friend of mine, have one or two personal projects in the pipeline, but unfortunately nothing that is paying some green yet. We’ll see how that goes.

That’s about it for the quick read. I am going to make an effort to post some more blog entries when I think about it. Most of my bright moments happen when I am not near a keyboard.

Sep

Army of Crackheads

Posted by JB at 5:42 pm

I began thinking the other day, “What would happen if the crackheads united and decided to declare war against all of us sober people?”

This got me into delving a little deeper than I wanted to think (I actually should have been concerned with the shower I was taking). How many people out there are crackheads in hiding? Just like alcoholism are there functional crackheads? We may be amongst crackheads and not even know it. Those people who come in every day that look like they went out a little late last night and drank a hundred dollars worth of alcohol; they may be a fucking crackhead.

This is all the more interesting because what if the crackheads decided to hold an uprising? The only line of defense we would have would be crack, because as everyone knows the only way to stop a crackhead is with an offering of crack. If the crackheads were to takeover we would all now need to either become a crackhead ourselves or be the mindless slave that harvests in the fields working the crack to the blessing of the supreme crackhead leader.

Get a dog. Because one thing that is certain is that dogs know where crackheads are. Just like they are able to sniff the ass of another pooch and notice if they had shat on my lawn, they immediately know who a crackhead is. Its like fried into their brain. Be nice to your pet, because when the crackheads decide to hold an uprising we’re going to need their expertise in the world of hunting out the crazies.

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