New Project

I just uploaded the first iteration of a new project to the web.  

Ocean City, New Jersey Bench Plaques

The site is a bit rough and all the content is not yet available.  There are ~300 bench plaques on the boardwalk and town of OC, NJ and I am manually entering all the content.  So I do about 5-15 photos a day and upload new pics every couple days.  I'm also playing with a redesign offline, perhaps rounded corners (!?), so even that might change soon.

Maybe it would be good to document my reasons for the site.  I do explain this a little in the FAQ at the site.  In summary, I've been heading to OC since I was 6 weeks old.  My grandparents have had a house at the north end of the boardwalk since the late 60's.  I really consider it a second home.

The plaques started appearing on the boardwalk in the early-1990s.  The program has been stopped and started several times since then.  There have been some controversy as well about how long the plaques are meant to stay on the benches.  When I discovered that I wondered if anyone had chroniceled the existing plaques.  Having graduated from college as the internet was exploding on the world, my first thought was to create a website.  And it is a natural for backend storage in an XML/XSLT application.

So I spent an early morning in mid-July 2008 walking the length of the boardwalk.  Along the way I snapped photos with my low-end Kodak camera of each plaque.  That explains the fuzzy qualities of many of the photos.  As I walked I made mental notes (first mistake) of where each plaque was located.  I also didn't bring a monopod to stabilize the camera (second mistake).  The entire walk took about 3.5 hours.

I expected to have more people ask me what I was doing.  In fact only 3 people stopped me at all.  The first was a couple near the north end Kohr Brother's Ice Cream stand.  I had to ask them to slide over so I could photograph the plaque.  Obviously they asked what I was up to.  I called it an 'art project'.

The second was a woman who stopped me near the Sindia pavillion.  I was taking a shot of the bench across from the pavillion and she asked if I wanted my picture taken with the plaque. Naturally she thought I was taking it due to personal signficance.  I wasn't expecting that question and blurted out a too quick, 'no'...which I quickly apoligized for.  She took off immediately so I didn't get a chance to explain myself.

The third was a group of Leigh University alumni (circa 1940s) who I ran into at the south end turnaround.  They were a wonderful source of information about the plaques and the city's program.  And they told me of a book that had been printed with photos of the plaques.  I've since bought the book and misplaced it.  However, it wasn't available through any online retailer and I only found it by asking at the Atlantic Book Warehouse on the boardwalk itself.  I like to think I am taking the next step of that author's work and putting the plaques out for a wider audience.

Going forward I have several things to accomplish:

• finish inputting all photos I have on hand
• re-walk the boardwalk to retake fuzzy photos, check locations, add new plaques
• site redesign
• accumulate more information about the people and events mentioned on the plaques
• accumulate more information about the program and the benches themselves
• publicize the site more

Overall it has been a learning experience and looks to teach me a lot about all aspects of web design, maintenence, XSLT development, and hopefully, community building.

Twitter and Position Postings

I enjoy using Twitter.  I have my professional account and my private one.  I'm not prolific on the professional one since I mostly use it to follow others in the industry but I do post a bit on the private one.

Today I was checking into LinkedIn.com for the first time in a while and noticed that one of the members of the Philadelphia Technology Group was experimenting with Twitter.  Jason Martin is a recruiter at Apex Systems, Inc.  He's in my network at LinkedIn but I've only spoken with him via email once.  I've never worked with him.

Jason has been Twittering his position opportunities for the past month.  So far I see 16 postings.  Perhaps this is standard practice in the recruiting industry but it was new to me.  But I didn't begin to follow Jason on Twitter.  

As I said before I have a couple Twitter accounts.  What I've found in both of them is that the tweets pass by pretty quickly and I only check my Twitter accounts once or twice a day.  So I probably miss a lot of what is being said on the Twitter stream.

The great thing about the internet today is that information is available in many forms.  So instead of following Jason I grabbed his Twitter feed.  Now I can check Jason's new job postings whenever I please without wondering if I have the most recent ones.

This isn't rocket science by any means but it might provide a reminder to people who just 'don't get' this Twitter stuff but understand an RSS feed.  I think it is time to look around Twitter some more and see what else is being offered.  Maybe that next great opportunity is just a Tweet away!

Of Twitter and Conferences

I am attending a couple days of the XML-In-Practice 2008 conference. And one thing I have noticed is a decided lack of laptops. Sure people have them but a lot of them are closed during the sessions. That is in stark contrast to Balisage where almost every attendee has a laptop and is taking notes or searching for a rebuttal to the speaker.

However, I did see that a few people are twittering, myself included. Bob DuCharme, Scott Abel, and Adam Hill have put up several posts each...in Scott's case it appears to be something of a torrent of tweets. The links above will take you to their Twitter home pages but, as Twitter is designed to do, these will have moved on from conference tweets by tomorrow.

If you'd like to get a view of the tweets from the conference try these links:

XML In Practice

#xml2008

The first is mostly used by Scott Abel, the second was coined by Bob DuCharme and picked up by Adam and I.

As usual this is a stream of consciousness stuff like Twitter is prone to be. But I think the intrepid reader might find useful nuggets in there.

I have notes from several of the sessions that I hope to write up on Wednesday after I get back from the conference.

To "tag" Or To "mark up"

There was a lively discussion recently on the XML-Dev listserv regarding the use of the terms 'tag' and 'mark up'. A synopsis by one of the participants is available here.

I didn't want to address the verb vs. noun question that was the root of the discussion. I was more interested in the use of tag vs. markup (or more correctly, mark up).

The question, to me comes down to professional terminology. To be seen as 'XML-ish' it is probably best to use the term 'mark up', as in "I marked up the document". Since XML comes out of the publishing sector and the term 'mark up' has a long history in that realm the it carries over.

At the same time most non-XML professionals I've met use the sentence "I tagged the document" interchangeably with the previous one. Are they wrong? I don't think so but that comes down to my impression of how they think they are working with the document. For example:

What is this? <table>

What is this? <table>Ikea Round</table>

The first is a tag (a start tag) and the second is an element. So, if you have a document without any pointy-bracket tags in it and you start putting them around existing words, aren't you applying tags (to form elements)? Thus tagging the document?

In the end I have to agree with Debbie Lapeyre when she said:

"You may state which the pros find is best practice, but I think you should also admit there is a popular culture alternative. Those have a habit of taking over the language over the long term. (Contact IS a verb now, as well as a noun, for all that purists may howl.)"