The mo'Times

Friday, 31 December 2004

New Year's Eve/Day

As Southeast Asians mourn their losses and rebuild their lives, we will be marking the passing 2004 and welcoming 2005. Our world is a complex place filled with both joy and pain. Let's work to create more of the former and less of latter in 2005.

Read about New Year's history here.

I found this site which lists New Year's traditions around the world. I call your attention to Denmark, where "it is a good sign to find your door heaped with a pile of broken dishes at New Years. Old dishes are saved year around to throw them at the homes where their friends live on New Years Eve. Many broken dishes were a symbol that you have many friends."

May you find many broken dishes at your doors!

posted by: howard at 11:28 | link | comments (5) |

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Tuesday, 28 December 2004

Blogs and the disaster in S.E. Asia

The terrible disaster left in the wake of the earthquake in Sumatra, and the tsunamis that it generated, is hard to fathom. Once again the international community of bloggers has come together to share stories, images and to provide help to the people hit by the disaster.

Read the New York Times article "Blogs Provide Raw Details From Scene of the Disaster" by John Schwartz.

Here is a quote from that article:

"Ms. Jardin of BoingBoing said people online often argued about whether blogs would replace mainstream media. The question is as meaningless, she said, as asking "will farmers' markets replace restaurants?"

"One is a place for rich raw materials," she continued. "One represents a different stage of the process."

Blogging from the tsunami, she said, is "more raw and immediate," but the postings still lack the level of trust that has been earned by more established media. "There is no ombudsman for the blogosphere," she said. "One will not replace the other, but I think the two together are good for each other."

posted by: howard at 12:37 | link | comments (5) |

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Friday, 24 December 2004

Running late!

I usually like to post something about seasonal changes, like the winter solstice, and connect it to the various holidays celebrated around the world and throughout history. But somehow I just cruised through the solstice this year without realizing it. Ooops. So, let me rectify the situation:

On Dec 21, 2004 at 12:41 GMT, the Sun was directly above the Tropic of Capricorn. Depending on whether you are in the southern or northern hemisphere, you will call this the summer or winter solstice, a day widely recognized as the first day of the new season.

In many cultures there are holidays and rituals associated with this day. The solstice (from the Latin solstitium, standing still sun) is the day of the Earth's maximum tilt either to or away from the sun, depending on the hemisphere.

The wikipedia, my favorite first stop for many kinds of research, has complete entries with lots of links for these keywords: solstice, Christmas and Yule.

Speaking of Yule, following the links I came upon this Icelandic site explaining their Yule traditions including this recipe for Laufabraud (Leaf Bread) which does not include leaves.

This essay about the winter holidays has a lot of material explaining the origins of seasonal celebrations in an even wider selection of cultures.

Happy reading and happy holidays to you all.

posted by: howard at 17:53 | link | comments (1) |

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Wednesday, 15 December 2004

Rambling conversation

I would like the thank H-seventy-nine and Giuli812 who took the time to offer their constructive criticism of the upgrade's interface. I wanted to respond to some of their major points in this post. (Read the post below this one if you haven't already.)

It was pointed out that, in certain respects, the new interface shares elements of Blogger's interface, as well as other community sites around the web. This is true, but it is true in the same way that different word processors, image editors, forum sites and portals resemble each other. Certain standards emerge when they work well, spread across the net and are more widely adopted. It is in this spirit that we decided to adopt a tab-based navigation, for instance, which may be found on many sites and has proven to be an easy-to-use navigation device.

H-seventy-nine, you'll be happy to know that the editor is currently being redesigned, will be (finally) available not only in IE on Windows, but also on Mozilla and Firefox on all major operating systems. You can directly add tables in this editor.

We have already implemented the Recent Comments menu because you cannot see comments from the main post page without clicking through. Recent Posts seems a little redundant, since you can read the recent posts directly on the page.

Now, Giuli812... :-) First of all, I am the one who designed the look and feel of the "original" mo'time, so (1) I am very fond of it and (2) I will miss it, too. I had a big hand in this redesign, too, but the CSS (the code that controls the fonts and graphics) was developed for our sister site in Italian, from which the 'blueness' derives, and was rather time-consuming to develop. Since it is, by most opinions, a nice-looking layout, we decided to launch mo'time3 with this look and feel rather than delay it just to "mo'time-it" a bit more. I did love the white blue and orange quite a bit...so who knows?

Having said that, however, the beauty of using CSS to design is that I can morph the elements as we go along to increase the mo'timiness of the site as we go along. This is a living project. Change is part of the deal. I would like to play a bit with the color scheme some more, but the priorities I have for now are to write the new manual and explain the features better.

The feeling of being alone that you mentioned is more of a concern for me and I agree with you. Paradoxically, there are now MANY new features to allow you to see who is actually online, to view other blogs, to contact other members and to create and read profiles. And there will be more developments in this direction.

I think we will be able to adjust the layout of the updated list and tweak things here and there to get back that "live" feeling from the home page. In the meanwhile, I would encourage you to explore (or bookmark) the "Members Logged-in" link on the right-side menu of the Control Center and tried and true recently updated menu.

On the subject of the Contol Center, take the time to get used to it, and you will find that it makes more sense than the divided controls we had before: the right side menu of the home page and the blog editor with no access to the home page controls.

I guess I'll stop here...I think I've covered most of your points. I enjoy having this dialog with you because it reminds me of how personal our relationships with mo'time are. That's what I love about this place and members like all of you. So, thanks from me (and the crew) to you.

posted by: howard at 00:12 | link | comments (17) |

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Sunday, 12 December 2004

We're ONLINE!

Hello everybody... listen up, I decided to put the site online to let those of you who just MUST blog, get right down to it.

But we'll be working on fixing lots of little things all through the night until they're done, including a guide to the new features and tags. I'll warn you in advance that I am working on the template still, so best to keep to your old ones until tomorrow, ok?

posted by: howard at 15:25 | link | comments (10) |

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Saturday, 11 December 2004

Motime v.3 launches on Sunday Morning

We'll be offline for 4-5 hours —

motime3 homepage
It's time for an upgrade!
From 10:30 a.m. to about 3:00 p.m. (Central European Time) Mo'time will be unavailable while we upgrade the system, optimize the databases, move stuff around on the servers and then take it around for a test drive.

This is a rough estimate; it might take just a little longer. To see what time this corresponds to in your time zone, go to worldtimeserver.com.

Major upgrades can cause a bit of pain here and there, but we are confident that we've got most of the bugs worked out and that we've built a more useful, usable and stable Mo'time for you. This is a work in progress! I look forward to hearing your reactions in the days and weeks to come.

Tech note: I'll mention this again after we're back online, but the first thing you will need to do after coming to the home page after the upgrade will be to press the Control key and then F5 to refresh the graphics on Windows. On other systems, you need to empty your cache and then click the Refresh button of your browser.

Here's a partial list of what you can expect:
• More centralized blog and account controls
• New templates, tags and features
• Improved community tools
• Upgraded instant messaging, including voice calls...