While those of us in the United States dove into a three-day Labor Day weekend, the rest of the world was still humming along, and your Mashable weekend team was here to keep track of it all.
Sep 062011
Sep 062011
Unfortunately, as evidenced in the video embedded below, a newly appointed Page admin can remove the Page creator’s admin status, which can be very nasty in certain cases. Today, Facebook Pages are more than fun, they’re a serious part of business promotion and losing administrative access to a Page can lead to host of problems.
Sep 062011
Fast Flip is one of nine in a batch of products to be discontinued from Google Labs. The company announced it would shutter Labs experiments shortly after releasing its second-quarter earnings results in mid-July.
Other Labs products Google will shut down:
Aardvark: Social search product that helps people answer each others’ questions.
Desktop: Gives instant access to data while online or offline.
Fast Flip: Provides a faster, richer news content browsing and reading experience.
Google Maps API for Flash: Allows ActionScript developers to integrate Google Maps into their applications.
Google Pack: Makes it easy to download and install a package of Google and third-party applications.
Google Web Security: Protects against web malware attacks.
Image Labeler: Helps people explore and label images on the web.
Notebook: Helps people combine clipped URLs from the web and free-form notes into documents they can share and publish.
Sidewiki: A browser sidebar that lets people contribute and read information alongside any web page.
Subscribed Links: Enables developers to create specialized search results that were added to the normal Google search results on relevant queries for subscribed users.
Sep 052011
Over the long weekend I took the opportunity to tweak our WordPress blog, and mock up another for a client. While WordPress seems so easy to use, I’m starting to think that impression is a bit deceptive.
For one thing, I seem to find myself spending a lot of time activating and deactivating plugins, and installing and uninstalling various widgets and other add-ons. I’ve discovered that user ratings are very important. Even a quality plugin might not work exactly the way you expect it to. If you are lucky, this will only lead to some unexpected time spent scratching your head until you figure out the problem, or find an alternative. Worst case scenario(which does not seem all that infrequent), when something goes wrong, you may lose access to the platform altogether, and be faced with 404 pages, and figuring out what code is out of place over ftp.
The biggest issue seems to be quality. So this is fair warning: make sure you go with the highest quality you can find, and save yourself some headaches. That means highest quality add-ons, that are well-maintained and come highly recommended. It also means quality information. One issue I ran into: information about what you are trying to do(whatever it is)is all over the web, but it may not apply exactly to your situation. I mentioned that I was working on our blog and a mock-up. I thought, “there has to be a way to have more than one blog on the same domain.” I discovered WordPress Multisite. It seemed simple enough; a tweak here and there, a few lines of code, and I would be good to go.
Not so fast.
A couple of days and a downgrade, and complete second installation later, I knew better. What I learned from piecing together low-quality info from around the web is that a) there are a few more steps than at first glance, b) many of the steps are quite server specific, and the biggie, c) for some reason you can’t successfully convert blogs older than 30 days to multisite. Well, not for ‘some reason,’ rather some reason I don’t care to remember at this point.
Bottom line: save yourself time and headaches by finding the best quality information you can, know the steps to your project, and know the information necessary for your specific situation.
-James Andre
Sep 012011
Explore the new CSS transforms features and create a 3D carousel that rotates from panel to panel. Paul Hayes takes you through the project and explains browser support and fallbacks along the way
via Build a rotating 3D carousel with CSS | Tutorial | .net magazine.
Sep 012011
As you can see there’s no drivetrain and the crank has been locked, with the pedals replaced with mere foot peg holders. In testing, Tiedeken has reportedly done 60 m.p.h. plus on this thing.
Sep 012011
Harald Belker is a California-based industrial designer specializing in concept vehicles for Hollywood, and he’s worked on everything from the Batmobile to the lightbikes from Tron and the race cars in Iron Man 2. Belker’s recently-released graphic novel/coffee table book, Pulse, is a collection of futuristic vehicle renderings tied together by a fictional narrative:
via Entertainment Designer Harald Belker’s Mag-Lev Racecars – Core77.
Sep 012011
In 1990, Godwin got fed up with Nazi comparisons on bulletin boards, Usenet newsgroups, and the WELL discussion site. So prevalent had these comparisons become that Godwin began to wonder “how debates had ever occurred without having that handy rhetorical hammer.”He believed that most of these comparisons simply trivialized the Holocaust and the true horror of the Nazi regime and so consciously decided to build a “countermeme designed to make discussion participants see how they were and are acting as vectors to a particularly silly and offensive meme.” The result was Godwins Law in its original form:As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
via No Nazi comparisons? Sounds like something Hitler would say!.