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Digitalistic.com 10 years old

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Today, it is exactly 10 years since I bought the domain digitalistic.com. It was September 13th 1999 when I registered the domain, before that I was a domain virigin. For most of the time it has been a really bad web site to market my consulting skills, that it was bad didn’t really matter since I had employment for most of the time anyway. For years the only reason I kept the domain was to have my own private email address and not use my work email or hotmail for my private stuff (yes, this was BEFORE GMail, it was that long ago).

There have been versions in Swedish, Spanish and English (even a breif French one) depending on where in the world I were at any given moment and the designs have varied quite a lot, as you can see below. A few years ago I started blogging and since then digitalistic.com has been a perfectly OK blog. Here’s a look back at old digitalistic.com designs…

1999 – 2002
Not much to say… it was one of my first web pages and I have learned a lot since then. At least I didn’t have a spinning @ sign or any applets on the page!

Digitalistic 1999-2002

2002 – early 2006
Here’s the Spanish version of the second generation of digitalistic.com. I still use the logo from back then, even if the colours have changed (thanks Kemie for the great logo!).

Digitalistic.com 2003-2006

2006 – early 2008
Then the blogging started…

Digitalistic 2006-2008

(Both Pownce and Popfly that I had invites to back then are not dead – RIP Pownce!)

2008 – 20??
You are looking at it! (or if you are reading the RSS feed, you could be looking at www.digitalistic.com)

I have no plans to let digitalistic.com go and it will be my main domain for quite some time. It will be cool to see how it develops during the next 10 years (assuming we still use domains in 10 years that is).

The 3 biggest trends in Digital Media right now

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A week ago I got an email from a student of Digital Media at Hyper Island in Karlskrona, Sweden. She wanted to ask me several questions for one of her projects, and I hope that the answers I sent was somewhat userfull. One of the questions were “What are the biggest trends in digital media right now? and what’s coming?”, and after thinking about that one a bit I came up with this rambling answer…

  • The culture of digital natives are starting to invade the mainstream. That means that content that are currently on youtube and other similar sites are soon going to be much more available for the general public. Fiction made for the web (webisodes etc) are going to start competing with old school media (TV series and cinema movies). We are yet to see the first mainstream hit, but there have been a couple of underground hits already (Dr Horrible for example). It has for many years now been possible to cheaply produce quality media by a small team or by yourself from your house, and soon we are going to see the big effects of this.
  • Worldwide increased bandwidth and connectivity. In the western part of the world this means more bandwidth, in large parts of Africa/Asia this means that people get online via mobile devices in ever increasing numbers. This will probably affect the media and services available in two ways.  First of all increased bandwidth is going to push ever more rich experiences onto the web in a more efficient and broadly available manner. Some years down the line this means the death of TV as we know it today as well as many many bad experiments with new GUIs as developers and designers are trying to figure out what to do with all this new bandwidth. That people in the 3rd world are going online also means that web services that are simple and usefull will have a great potential, services that are usefull to farmers in the Indian countryside but not to European urban youngsters.
  • The (somewhat) success of the Kindle and the digitalization of books is just a first step towards the death of the printed book as we know it – at least the current printed book business model, not the actual physical existence of a printed book. Already 3 industries (software, music, movie) have tried to fight the new technology to keep old business models alive, and they have all failed. You can try to stop “evil” new techology (like the VHS, or the Pirate Bay), but unless you change with it you will loose. The book industry have to decide what to do when books starts to be ever copyable pieces of content (just as music is today). The old business model where publishers print paper editions of books will die, the question is how the industry deals with this. The early signs is that they are trying to fight the new technology instead of accepting and using it, and that is a bad sign for the publishers.

As you noticed I didnt mention trends like the end of the newspaper industry as we know it or mashups or anything like that, I do think that the trends above do have a bigger impact and/or are more interesting.

What do you think? Did I get things somewhat right or completely wrong?

MySQL and SSH Tunneling for an improved quality of life

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Lately I have had several projects where I need to get to a MySQL database behind a firewall on another server. In some cases I could access the database via phpMyAdmins web interface, which is useful but hardly a great user experience, in other cases it was command line access to the database only. Instead I want to use my standard MySQL GUI which means that I need to set up a SSH tunnel to the remote host. After reading way to much about SSH tunneling and trying way to many suggested commands that turned out not to work for whatever reason I finally got it right, and it has improved my quality of life immensely (OK, that might be to exaggerate just a little bit). Maybe everybody else already have figured this out, but by blogging about it at least I know that I can find my own instructions again when needed…

I run OSX 10.5 and use Sequel Pro as my MySQL GUI, but if you use something else the approach should be similar. I assume that you do have SSH access to the remote server and also access rights to the database.

  • Open a terminal window and run the command “ssh -NC <username>@<remote server> -L 3307:127.0.0.1:3306”
    • <username> is your username on the remote server
    • <remote server> is the IP address or URI to the remote server you want to connect to
  • You will be asked for the password for, write it in an leave the terminal window open. You now have a SSH tunnel to the remote server that is using port 3306 on the remote server and mapping it to your local port 3307.
  • Open Sequel Pro and connect to your remote servers database using host “127.0.0.1” and port “3307” and the username/password used on the remote database.
  • Time to do whatever you want to do in the database from within Sequel Pro (much much nicer than phpMyAdmin)

Don’t you feel a bit happier already?

Pimp my Coda

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Coda is the best IDE I have ever used, and one (if not the biggest one) reason I am really happy with moving to Mac (sorry folks, Coda is Mac only). It does all the stuff I need, such as syntax highligthing, FTP, source control etc. At the same time it is skipping all the stuff that just clutters up the interface (like all the stuff Eclipse is full of). Some people might want more bells and whistles, but I am happy with a development tool that does just what it should and not more. I am mostly using Coda for writing things in the PHP Framework CodeIgniter or in the Python Framwork Django, but Coda can handle most languages quite nicely.

Coda

Even of Coda is great, it is not so great that it can not be made greater (so much for simplicity, hehe), which is pretty simple since Coda allows for plugins. In the Coda Developer Zone there are a number of plugins listed, and if you look around on the web you can find even more. Also, you can easily add new code completion, reference books and other goodies. This is a list of the stuff the extra stuff I have used and am very happy with so far…

URL Encode
This is a a very simple but very practical plugin that allows you to highlight some text in your HTML files and then URL Encode it. As a Swede using a lot of words with åäö it is very usefull.

PHP Toolkit
This plugin makes it easy to validate and clean up PHP files.

PHP Toolkit

CodeIgniter Syntax Mode
Code completion with CodeIgniter classes and functions, a must if you are using Coda to develop CodeIgniter applications. You can download the file here and read more about it in this thread in the CodeIgniter forums. I have made this syntax mode my default one for PHP files since I hardly do any PHP that is not CodeIgniter anymore.

Extra books
It is easy to include help files about programming languages etc in Coda in the form of “books”. Out of the box Coda comes with books about PHP, HTML, CSS and Javascript, but it is easy to add more. Here is a great list of more books you can include in Coda, complete with icons and all. Personally I have added CodeIgniter and jQuery so far, but I am sure some Django, Drupal and WordPress will sneak in as time goes by.

What are your favourite add ons to Coda? Please let me know if I have missed something I just must have!

F1Almanac.com – The Worlds Greatest F1 racing site?

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A couple of weeks ago we launched the F1 site I have mentioned before – F1Almanac.com. The goal with the site is to create the worlds greatest Formula 1 racing site, with an incredible depth and breadth of statistics for the hardcore racing fans. We already have a huge amount of data about every race since 1950 – that includes data about every race, every car, every driver and every track – and we keep collecting more data. Every F1 race is viewed by 600 milion TV viewers world wide (Brazil and China each has 150 milion viewers per race), so it is one of the worlds most popular sports. With the unique collection of data we have we have great hopes that F1Almanac.com will attract a lot of interest.

For now it is just a temporary site to start getting the name out while we are working hard on the upcoming feature rich real site, hopefully within a few months. If you want to us to tell you as soon as we have the real F1Almanac.com up and running then please sign up to our newsletter. At the moment we are mocking up screens like crazy, and soon it is time to write some code.

If you have any ideas how to make F1Almanac.com as great as possible please let me know!