I’m not usually described as, nor do I typically empathize with, Thoreau-spouting twirps or Luddites whining about the march of progress, but there are some very interesting observations in Quitting the Paint Factory, a Harper’s piece by Mark Slouka about maybe slowing down just a little so we each don’t die with a crumpled to-do list in our clenched fists.

“I distrust the perpetually busy; always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters.”

Coolest thing I’ve seen in a while - 10×10

I don’t recall where I snipped this quote from…

“…having a coherent, interesting concept for a site is more important than having an organized site. Coherence of the ideas being communicated is not the same as coherence of presentation. Coherent thinking leads coherent presentation. Ideas are good, before they are organized. Readers are forgiving about superficial disorganization if the information is interesting enough to them.”

…but it makes sense to me.

I’ve tossed together a simple page containing links that I run across and find nifty or somehow interesting. For now, it’s called Link Dump. If I keep it fresh it’ll stay. Otherwise I’ll pull the plug. And no, I don’t like the layout of it either. If everything had to be perfect right outta the box, nothing at all would ship.

A fella can only care deeply about a limited number of topics at any given time. I tend to jump around quite a lot when it comes to what I’m interested in, so I thought I’d take a snapshot of what interests (and doesn’t interest) me right now…

Off the Radar

• CSS Tricks

• RSS Formats

• HTML Validation nitpicks

• Table-less layout

• Designing my weblog

On the Radar

• Getting Things Done (GTD) and other process/systems for task/objective management

• Web service syndication of everything

• HTML-based application GUI improvements (Javascript/PHP interaction via JSPAN and others)

• Information Architecture for dummies (Top-down vs. Bottom Up, Navigation and Taxonomy, etc)

• Unit Testing

• Tagging vs. Metadata (Like Flickr and del.icio.us as applied in content management systems)

• Publishing (Improving the quality and quantity of information in this site)

• Transitional Volatility (Should navigation really be consistent?)

• Mind-mapping concepts (Useful?)

Neato

Try the The Online Film Critics Society’s ‘Top 100 Overlooked Films of the 1990s’

I’ve seen quite a few of them and all deserve to be there. And here I thought I was the only person on earth who loved Cemetary Man (aka Dellamorte Dellamore)

Mr. Merlin over at 43Folders drops a lovely piece entitled Five Mistakes Band & Label Sites Make. Most of the mistakes apply to any type of site. A few short quotes below, but read the whole thing anyway…

1. Too much Flash

“Okay, I get it. You’re creative. Awesome. But you’re totally wasting my morning…. Use Flash like you would cilantro—sparingly and for a single high-impact effect. Nobody wants to eat a whole bowl of cilantro, and nobody wants an animated death march when they have a â€Âoepassionate taskâ€Â? to complete.”

2. Crappy or non existent mp3 metadata

“Remember: people often download dozens or hundreds of songs at once, so it’s really unlikely they’ll remember where Track_07.mp3 came from. ”

3. Too artsy, too fartsy

“People are visiting your site because they want to learn more about bands and music—not to have a guided tour of your designer/brother-in-law’s Photoshop brush collection.”

4. No search

“If your site contains more than a handful of pages, provide a clearly labeled search box (or link to a search) on every page, and test it.”

5. One-way communication (served one way)

“Read your email, and answer it.”

I was a little disappointed that the initial release of Delicious Library didn’t come with some sort of HTML export feature. I’m sure they’ll fix that soon, but until then, the Delicious Exporter will fit the bill well enough.

I’ve got most of my movies and a few of my books imported, take a look at my library if you like. It’s, uh, delicious.

OpenLDAP is difficult, confusing and comes with lots and lots of incomprehensible documentation. Or at least that has been my experience with it.

I’ve spent countless hours pouring over documentation, forums, weblogs and what have you trying to get a grip on this thing. I think I finally get it. It’s really not much different than heirarchy of unusually-named folders. It’s also quite groovy. It’s like having a lightweight database with easy replication and being able to store pretty much any collection of objects - users accounts, equipment, etc - all accessible via a popular and ubiquitous interface.

Long story short, I’ve finally got a working LDAP server running (with a lot of help from Jeremy) and managed using phpldapadmin

I’ve set up Apache to use LDAP authentication. This meant also getting a handle on mod_ldap, which is nearly as confusing. The crux of this is that I now have hundreds of contacts available via LDAP (using an authenticated query) which I can use for lookups in my email client, authenticating web site users, Samba authentication and tons of other stuff. One step closer to a single sign on solution and never had to say “Active Directory” even once.