“It occurs to me that the tools we have available each do a large variety of things, and that there’s no good reason for these functions to be bound together into one application. For example, Maciej’s recent article on why not to have a public of WordPress (and more details) shows that serving the website and editing it can be very separate pieces. The original ancient Blogger software also used to push a copy up to your site via FTP.”

via joshua.schachter.org

Great ideas.

“The Internet has been incredibly empowering to creators, and just as destructive to middle men. In the 20th century, every musician needed a record label to get his or her music heard. Every author needed a publishing house to be read. Every journalist needed a newspaper. Anyone who wanted to send a message needed the post office. In the Internet age, the tail no longer wags the dog, and those middle men have become a luxury, not a necessity.  Meanwhile, the software industry is moving in the opposite direction.” (keep reading)

by Joe Hewitt via joehewitt.com

“When Leopard was introduced, backing up became an automatic and effortless operation. Set it and forget it. Unfortunately, Time Machine backups are not off-site and don’t protect you against an on-site disaster. When I previously covered some online off-site backup solutions, Apple’s backup utility was not one of them.”

by Dave Greenbaum via The Apple Blog

“Coda is awesome. Here’s a quick way to make it awesomer: invisible visible invisible characters!” – Justin via justinhileman.info

Coda lets you show all the newlines, tabs and spaces, which comes in handy. But the default settings are pretty distracting. If you change the invisible character display color to match the background, they only show up when you select text.

First do this:

Then change this:

And rock out like this:

“On WordPress.tv, you’ll find tutorials for both WordPress self-installs and WordPress.com to help you get blogging fast and hassle-free. We’ve kicked things off with the basics — now you can shape what comes next. Just drop us a line and let us know what you’d like to see added.” via wordpress.org

This might be fun.  Send us a photo of where you use Xero.  We’ll come up with a prize for the best photo. – Rod Drury.

My photo is below…

Xero in the hammock in Honduras

As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together.

Visit DataPortability.org

Adium blog post.

The Adium team is proud to announce the availability of Adium 1.2. This is a major feature release with a ton of fantastic improvements as well as a a ridiculous number of bug fixes. We’ve discussed many (but not all) of the new features themselves previously on the blog, including the improved Adium menu item and account management features, various and sundry improvements to Jabber support (including SSL certification authentication, server-supplied action support, and discovery services browsing), fixed Bonjour local area network messaging with file transfers, better group chat (conferencing), a completely rewritten Applescript dictionary which should lead to all sorts of powerful new interactions with other programs, and detachable groups. (One ‘advertised’ feature which did not make it into Adium 1.2 was MSN personal messages; development efforts for these are still in progress by the libpurple team. A future version of Adium will have this enhancement once it’s ready.)

That’s not all! Massive improvements have been made to the localization of Adium; if your native language is Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), English (including Australian English), Finnish, French, French Canadian, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, or Turkish, you’ll find Adium 1.2 to be your most natural instant messaging experience ever. 188 tickets were closed by Adium 1.2; each ticket represents a feature request or bug, most filed by users. As always, see the version history for all the noteworthy changes.

A lot goes into every Adium release, from testing to coding to support. We’re a friendly and active development and user community, but we always want for more hands, eyes, and minds. That means you! Remember, Adium is free, open source software, coded entirely by volunteers. See Contributing to Adium for how you can submit patches and code, help hunt down bugs, and donate!

We greatly appreciate the donated resources of our excellent site and code host NetworkRedux (who most recently added donated rack space and connectivity for our Mac Mini build and testing machine, smew, to the array of services they provide us) and our download host CacheFly!