Recent Projects & Clients

Remote Media Queries via Widen DAM

Last week I wrote a joint for the WorldFish Center which uses the REST protocol to interface with the WorldFish media repository at Widen.com. My responses are mixed, but hopeful.

The Widen API is just a bunch of remote functions for managing, querying and organizing media assets in many different ways. It can be seen as a transitional technology between what we web pros call "Web 2.0" (distributed services) and "Web 3.0" (semantic web).

The folks at WorldFish have a huge media repository including thousands of well-organized images from around the world, including metadata, and they wanted to give users searchable access to this repository via their website. But there's a complication: WorldFish is part of the nonprofit CGIAR consortium, and that entity has many other websites, all of which want searchable access to different subsets of these media collections.

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Oracle: The Stone-Drawing Bag

The Stone-Drawing Bag
Starting Counts: Black stones White stones
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The Difference between Narrative and Story - Pt 3

It has been pointed out that writers and sociologists have different definitions of the word "narrative". But the differences are not as great as we might think, and in the last installment of this series I promised to square that circle. Here we go.

From the writerly camp we get several definitions for the word "narrative" (leaving aside those which simply use it as a synonym for the word "story"):

  1. A Narrative (common noun) is an arcless, themeless retelling or reporting of events.
  2. Narrative (abstract noun) is a direction or theme which guides or gives purpose to retold events.
  3. The Narrative (common noun) is the form taken by the events of a character undergoing change.

From the sociological camp we have the definition in which a Narrative (common noun) is an open-ended network of stories or statements that a group of people tell themselves about themselves, about their history, about their values, or about their place in the grand scheme.

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Happy Birthday Drupal

Today the Drupal project reached the grand old age of fourteen. This is a great milestone for the community and the project, and in celebration, the Drupal association has released the results of their 2014 Community Survey. Among the insights:

80% of Drupal Users who responded say they have plans to adopt Drupal 8, and another 8% say they are planning to evaluate the new release.

Upgrading is an inevitability, because "the drop never stops" - i.e. there's no backward-compatibility in the Drupal universe. But personally, I've always waited about a year before recommending major upgrades for my Drupal-based clients.

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The Difference between Narrative and Story - Pt 2

In the first installment of this series, we looked at the differences between Story, Narrative, and Narrative Structure. A Narrative Structure is the shape and purpose of a Story, absent the mundane, non-archetypal details. As for "Narrative" vs "Story", some banal but substantiating links I found were this and this.

But for my money (and politics aside), the most interesting one by far was this

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The Difference between Narrative and Story

The words "Narrative" and "Story" are often used interchangeably, but they are not synonymous.

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Fictioneers.net

Fictioneers are designers, facilitators and explorers of collaborative fictional spaces, otherwise known as "Roleplaying Games" and "Storygames".

Fictioneers.net is a directory of the games they play, and conversations about the things they do. come join us and share your experience.

http://fictioneers.net/
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Draconic Magazine

Draconic is a new online magazine dedicated to the roleplaying OSR (Old School Renaissance) and the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons, featuring articles by Venger Satanis and other regular contributors. The site also supports photogalleries, Youtube videos and MP3 audio uploads for podcasts. Publisher Korth'thalis wanted a site that was well organized, easy to administer, and looked bad-ass. With Drupal 7 and a custom theme, we delivered.

http://draconicmagazine.com/
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