Last night’s WordPress meetup in Amersfoort was, at least as far as I’m concerned, a resounding success. Around 70 people attended, and we had a lot of interesting speakers. Most of the presentations were captured on video, and will be placed online later. For now, I’ve put the snapshots I managed to take on Flickr for you. Enjoy!

I’ve also created a Flickr pool for Dutch meetup images. Please feel free to add you pics there. I’m still pretty new to Flickr, but I think I allowed everyone to contribute…

Recently, Picasa started serving its RSS feeds over https. From what I can tell, this has caused quite a view “clients” to fail. Digital photo frames seem to be affected, and so is my Flickr widget. Fortunately, there’s a quick fix.

I’ve run a few tests, and it seems that simply removing the “s” from “https” fixes the issue. Every feed I tried could be called up over regular old http as well, and all of them worked with my widget.

So if the RSS link in Picasaweb gives you an https feed URL like this one:

https://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/user/roy.tanck/albumid/5053904170293136801?alt=rss&kind=photo&hl=en_US

You should change it to this before entering it into the form that generates the widget:

http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/user/roy.tanck/albumid/5053904170293136801?alt=rss&kind=photo&hl=en_US

As always, the preview will show you whether the feed works.

The great thing about WordPress is that there’s a huge, active and helpful community of users and developers. There have been WordCamps organized all of the world, as well as many smaller meetups. Last week, Kaj Rietberg and I put together just such a meetup in the Dutch city of Amersfoort.

The event was sponsored by open source development company 4WORX and hosted at the neighboring Dara restaurant (recommended!). Kaj and I were happy to welcome around 25 WordPress enthusiasts, a couple of whom had been tricked beforehand into preparing presentations. Kaj has written a more detailed account over at the WordCampNL website (in Dutch) which includes the slides from two speakers.

More images are on Flickr (sets by Kaj and 4WORX).

I’d like to thank 4WORX for helping us out. That was cool.

I used to be a real nitpicker when it came to preparing images for the web. I’d laugh at people using large images in web pages, showing them in a smaller format by setting the width and height properties.

In the days before broadband was everywhere it was bad karma to do this, because a large image file would take a long time to download. You needed to prepare the image at the size you were going to be displaying it. Nowadays, things are a little different.

A client asked me recently to propose a new layout for a page that had a fixed grid. Unfortunately, their CMS could was limited to a couple of image sizes that were a complete mismatch with said grid. So I used CSS scaling to get them to fit. Unfortunately, the client wasn’t convinced this was a feasible technique to use. That’s why I did a few quick tests to see if using scaled images in a web page would slow down rendering.

A quick test

I created a page with 150 random images on it. Fifty of them were 24bit PNGs, another fiftly were JPEG and the rest were 8 bit GIFs. Next, I created a copy of that page and set the CSS size properties for the images to a lower number, scaling all images to 61.5%. I then used Google’s Speed Tracer extension for Chrome and Yahoo’s YSlow for Firefox to see if there would be any difference in page load and render times.

No difference whatsoever

The results were pretty clear. Even with 150 images on the page, there was absolutely no difference in page rendering times in Chrome. Both pages finished rendering in around 4:10 seconds. In Firefox, the results were much more erratic, but both pages averaged at around 6.5 second. In both cases I didn’t worry about caching, since I was interested in differences in rendering speed, not download speed.

So there you have it. It may still not be 100% good karma, but to overcome design obstacles, using client side scaling isn’t as bad as it used to be. If you need a few images to fit that you can’t prepare or resize on the server, you won’t have to worry about it slowing down your page. However, actually scaling an image usually makes the file smaller, so if you can you still should.

When I first heard about gdgt.com, I thought the startup founded by Peter Rojas and Ryan Block was terribly clever, and right up my alley. The idea of having gadget freaks keep “had”, “have” and “want” lists makes sense both from a user’s perspective and from an advertiser’s. When the website opened to the public I was quick to register and started adding things to my lists. Some stuff that wasn’t in there yet. It was amazing to see how much stuff was entered by users.

But I don’t buy a new gadget every day, so keeping the lists up-to-date doesn’t require me to visit GDGT daily. Considering how Rojas and Block were also involved in Engadget and Gizmodo, I was hoping their new effort would replace both those blogs and become a one-stop shop for technology enthusiasts. So far, at least for me, it hasn’t.

Looks

I don’t dislike the way GDGT looks, but it’s not the friendly mess that is Engadget either. Images are small, the color scheme is high-contrast and it all rather looks like a listing, not a magazine. All the elements look great, but the design hasn’t won over my heart, and chances are it won’t.

Auto-generated

Another thing I rather like about both the major gadget blogs is the humor. Gizmodo especially has some pretty funny writers. Gadget news can be pretty boring (who cares about yet another point-n-snap camera?), so some comic relief is in order from time to time. Because your GDGT homepage is auto-generated, most of it isn’t funny. And currently, not all of it is relevant to me either. The above screenshot is from my GDGT stream, and I can’t help but wonder how a USB headset ended up on there. I hate those and would never use or buy one.

Community

As a community, the only thing connecting me to other users is possibly owning (or having owned) the same gadgets. I find it a little awkward to befriend someone just because he or she also has an iPod Touch. Unlike with other social networks, very few of the people I know in real life are on GDGT. Basically, I feel lonely .

So, i guess what it comes down to is that GDGT isn’t a blog, and not a very natural community either. It’s one f those websites I really wanted to love but find myself visiting less and less.

Twitter by it’s very nature is a very limited service. That’s what’s fun about it. Some people manage to be really clever and witty in 140 characters. But there’s only so much you can express in a tweet. The other main way to express your personality on Twitter is through your avatar image (or ‘profile picture’ as Twitter calls them).

Many of the people I follow have carefully designed avatars that they don’t change very often. But what if you could have your avatar be as current as your tweets. Showing you exactly the way you look today, doing what you’re doing right now? That’s where Snapatar comes in.

Snapatar lets you create a new Twitter profile image from your webcam in two very easy steps. You snap a picture, and if it looks right to you you enter your Twitter account details and upload it. That’s all. You can do this as often as you like, there’s currently no API limit for avatar updates. Of course it’s also a great way to create your first avatar if you’re new to Twitter and don’t have one yet.

Two days ago, Snapatar was nothing but a vague notion in my head. I’d thought of it while on vacation, and when I couldn’t find a similar service I decided to see if I could create a proof of concept application. I soon enlisted the help of my PHP guru Bernalyn, and from there things started to really gain momentum. This post is meant to announce the project to the world, and I hope we’ll get some Twitter users to try it. It’s still pretty beta, so we’d love to know what you run into. Please post any errors you come across, suggestions and feedback in the comments.

(Oh and yes, I know I need a better webcam…)

I came across this post on Smashing Magazine yesterday, and while it offers some fine reasons for web developers to use a PC, I thought it missed a few too. Most of these venture into web designer territory somewhat, but I wanted to mention them nontheless.

What you see is what 95% gets

In my opinion, the main reason to at least have a PC around when doing anything for the web is that it’s the platform most of your end users will use. It allows you to test your products in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome without the need for tricks or virtual machines.

Another thing (for designers) is gamma. Macs use a different gamma setting that makes everything look slightly brighter. While this looks nice, it’s not what the majority your audience will see. I’ve had countless discussion with Apple users about tricks to overcome this, but the easiest solution by far is to use a PC. Simply disable all color management options in Photoshop and your work will be displayed exactly as it will be to most users. This is also why in most cases a virtual machine with Windows won’t do. The gamma will still be ‘wrong’.

Software

There’s plenty of great software on the Mac, but there’s no denying that Windows is the dominant platform in the software market. For every great OSX application there are at least ten on Windows. And usually a couple of those are pretty good. And in most cases some of those good ones are free. I’ve never come across a Mac application that I wished I could use on my PC. There’s always been a similar program for Windows that was either equal or better.

The post on Smashing Magazine highlights some of these tools, but what it comes down to is that software just isn’t a reason to use a Mac. There’s an abundance of great software. No other platform has this much choice, and choice is good.

About that ‘The best parts of Mac’ bit

Yeah sure, you can install RocketDock if you like a bunch of icons at the bottom of your screen overlapping your windows. And Launchy if you were used to Quicksilver. But I’d encourage anyone to try Vista before trying to fix it. I love how you can press the Windows key, type a few letters and launch the app you’re looking for. I like things like the quick launch tray. Vista’s own user interface isn’t so bad. It’s adequate for launching the apps you need, and once you’re inside Photoshop it doesn’t matter what OS you’re on.

If you’re so attached to OSX’s icon dock you should probably just stick with a Mac. On the other hand, if you’re a little more pragmatic about what you need your OS to do, consider using a PC. It’s not as bad as Apple zealots will have you believe. Nor is it perfect.

I’d been meaning to do a proper redesign of this blog for some time. The content part was reshuffled a couple of months ago, and I was pretty pleased with how that turned out. But the header was a watered down version of the old Papertrail theme and far too boring. That’s why I asked Blondmonster to help me out.

Suzanne‘s a former colleague, and a fabulous designer. I really like the stuff she does, and ‘boring’ is simply not in her vocabulary. She came up with the underwater theme, did all the drawing and all I had to do was put it all together. Hope you like the result. The theme was tailor-made for this blog, so don’t expect it to become available for download any time soon.

Talk about picking a poor name for this project. I first considered giving it a catchy name, but decided to simply call it ‘Flickr widget’ becaused that best describes what it does. But then I found that Flickr itself has a Flash widget too. And now I’ve made it support Picasa feeds too, so the name doesn’t make any sense anymore.

The upside is of course that Picasa users can now use the widget to show off their favorite albums on their websites. It accepts the feeds from your ‘My Photos’ page and album pages. If you, like me, have only a couple of albums under ‘My Photos’, the feed from that page will only show the album covers, so it makes more sense to use an album feed (on the left is a trip to the zoo with my daughter in 2007). Like with Flickr, the total number of thumbs shown is limited to 20.

Fortunately, Google uses a very similar feed format to Flickr, so I was able to put support for both into one Flash movie. Please feel free to try it, and let me know if you run into anything.

Get the widget here

I never thought this to be possible, but Dawid Fatyga just emailed me about his ‘Stratus‘ project. He’s recreated the 3D Flash movie from WP-Cumulus in Javascript. Sure, it’s no match for Flash’s ultra-smooth anti-aliased scaling (yet?), but that doesn’t really make it any less impressive.

Dawid stressed that it’s still very much a work in progress, and there’s still a lot that can be optimized. I had no success running it in Chrome, but it does work in Firefox. I’m sure that can be fixed. And with Chrome’s ultra-fast Javascript engine it will probaly fly.

Dawid is working towards a possible WordPress plugin implementation, which might mean some healthy competition for WP-Cumulus. I’d love to see if Javascript can beat Flash at its own game (being animation).

P.S. Dawid just emailed me that he’s only been working with Javascript for a few days. Go figure.