As usual, that means I get to switch to my French persona, as we visit new places and meet delightful people of all ages. Lots of baguettes, cheese, wine, and fruit – as usual. Life is embarrassingly good this way…

We visited a friend of a friend at this amazing spot in the Provence:

I’ve never been in a house before, on top of a hill, with a 360° view towards all the surrounding mountains. Here’s the side of the house where we stayed:

It was an incredible place to be.

The geek in me couldn’t resist peeking at the way electricity is hooked up there:

The black box at the bottom right is an earth leakage circuit breaker, which trips at… 350 mA! IOW, it doesn’t protect people, only the house wiring! – luckily, a modern 10 mA version has also been added.

Lots of personal stories, which I won’t bore you with. Been back for over a week now, but still mostly in vacation mode. I’m looking forward to going into lots of Jee Labs projects again, starting tomorrow…

A few more images from the country which gave us the phrase Joie de vivre and a lifestyle I truly love:

P.S. Liesbeth took all the pictures, roughly 600 in all – I just tagged along to relax and enjoy…

1. Jee Labs will be closed from July 14th through August 14th

No new posts will be published on the weblog, and no orders in the shop will be processed or sent out during one month, starting on Wednesday “Bastille Day”.

2. Special discount during the entire month of June

Yes, five hundred!

If you’ve been following along, you know what I do, and why. And my views on OSH and OSS.

My motivation for the daily weblog format comes from a guy called Seth Godin, who – surprise! – writes a daily blog (for many years now). I find his never-ending stream of insights absolutely delightful and inspiring.

So what does it take to write about something I care about, day in, day out? Surprisingly little. The trick is to stop chasing quick results. And to stop chasing big results. The drive comes from within. The challenge comes from the problem. The goal is to understand and to solve. You start with a puzzle, you end up with learning something new. The journey is the reward, to quote Steve Jobs – something I profoundly agree with.

This weblog isn’t a race. To the top, more readers, fame, success, fortune, or even to get the most posts in. This weblog is a dedication, to those who explore and invent, and to those who teach and inspire. Day in, day out.

It’s a lifetime thing.

Check out the following story…

Driveby culture and the endless search for wow – by Seth Godin, March 2010

The net has spawned two new ways to create and consume culture.

The first is the wide-open door for amateurs to create. This is blogging and online art, wikipedia and the maker movement. These guys get a lot of press, and deservedly so, because they’re changing everything.

The second, though, is distracting and ultimately a waste. We’re creating a culture of clickers, stumblers and jaded spectators who decide in the space of a moment whether to watch and participate (or not).

Imagine if people went to the theatre or the movies and stood up and walked out after the first six seconds. Imagine if people went to the senior prom and bailed on their date three seconds after the car pulled away from the curb.

The majority of people who sign up for a new online service rarely or never use it. The majority of YouTube videos are watched for just a few seconds. Chatroulette institutionalizes the glance and click mentality. I’m guessing that more than half the people who started reading this post never finished it.

This is all easy to measure. And it drives people with something to accomplish crazy, because they want visits to go up, clicks to go up, eyeballs to go up.

Should I write blog posts that increase my traffic or that help change the way (a few) people think?

Should a charity focus on instant donations by texting from a million people or is it better to seek dedicated attention and support from a few who understand the mission and are there for the long haul?

More and more often, we’re seeing products and services coming to market designed to appeal to the momentary attention of the clickers. The Huffington Post has downgraded itself, pushing thoughtful stories down the page in exchange for linkbait and sensational celebrity riffs. This strategy gets page views, but does it generate thought or change?

If you create (or market) should you be chasing the people who click and leave? Or is it like trying to turn a cheetah into a house pet? Is manipulating the high-voltage attention stream of millions of caffeinated web surfers a viable long-term strategy?

Mass marketing used to be able to have it both ways. Money bought you audience. Now, all that buys you a mass market is wow and speed. Wow keeps getting harder and dives for the lowest common denominator at the same time.

Time magazine started manipulating the cover and then the contents in order to boost newsstand sales. They may have found a short-term solution, but the magazine is doomed precisely because the people they are pandering to don’t really pay attention and aren’t attractive to advertisers.

My fear is that the endless search for wow further coarsens our culture at the same time it encourages marketers to get ever more shallow. That’s where the first trend comes in… the artists, idea merchants and marketers that are having the most success are ignoring those that would rubberneck and drive on, focusing instead on cadres of fans that matter. Fans that will give permission, fans that will return tomorrow, fans that will spread the word to others that can also take action.

Culture has been getting faster and shallower for hundreds of years, and I’m not the first crusty pundit to decry the demise of thoughtful inquiry and deep experiences. The interesting question here, though, is not how fast is too fast, but what works? What works to change mindsets, to spread important ideas and to create an audience for work that matters? What’s worth your effort and investment as a marketer or creator?

The difference this time is that driveby culture is both fast and free. When there’s no commitment of money or time in the interaction, can change or commerce really happen? Just because you can measure eyeballs and pageviews doesn’t mean you should.

In the race between ‘who’ and ‘how many’, who usually wins–if action is your goal. Find the right people, those that are willing to listen to what you have to say, and ignore the masses that are just going to race on, unchanged.

(Re-posted with permission)

Flagged by Akismet, but still a pain because I have to clean them up once in a while – and manually skim over each one to pick out any false positives. No fun, especially knowing that all this spamming is scripted – regardless how little effort it takes, life’s too short for this sort of nonsense!

Fortunately, there are additional tools for WordPress to prevent most of this junk from even reaching Akismet (which does a terrific job, btw).

As you can see at the end of the graph, the spam log is clean again. Five incoming junk comments in two weeks – that, I can deal with :)

Thanks to Project Honey Pot!

It is now possible to print postage stamps with a label printer, instead of having to constantly buy stamps and place up to 8 (!) of them on the packages going out at Jee Labs. Not to mention keeping 4 different stamps around.

Until now, the only other option was to buy a fairly expensive franking machine which weighs the packages and prints stamps on them, but it doesn’t handle thicker packages, so I’d end up printing on separate labels anyway – and essentially waste most of the investment while still doing the same as before.

I’ll probably keep using stamps for the small shipments. But no more reams of stamps per envelope, new shipping options in reach, and no more running out of specific stamps!

Now, if only they supported the Mac… oh, well.

Here’s one of the pages, as seen by anonymous visitors:

The same page, once you pick a username and register:

As you can see, the site can be extended to include more features for registered users (there are lots more!).

TikiWiki has 12,723,940 options – I’ve only tweaked 83 of ‘em so far…

In fact, I’ve been turning off features, stripping menus, changing permissions, and simplifying the CSS theme, to try and regain some uncluttered screen space. I may have gone too far in some areas, but there’s definitely room for further simplification in others.

There are built-in anonymous, registered, editor, and admin “groups”, so we can make this thing as open as possible w.r.t. participation, while sharing the maintenance burden later on if this site becomes hyperactive.

I still find web-based page entry and editing extremely tedious. But I’m willing to stick to this wiki formatting convention, and I can easily use my own text editor to prepare new pages off-line when it gets too painful.

I’ve moved the site to its definitive cafe.jeelabs.net URL (www.jeelabs.net and jeelabs.net will also work).

The talk.jeelabs.net forum and the wiki/jeelabs.net wiki will be kept around in read-only mode for a month or so, until all the main content has been moved over.

Update 2010-04-02 – the Café has been closed again. I’m sticking to BBpress + ProjectForum for now.

Sample wiki page:

It’s based on TikiWiki, as suggested yesterday.

This new setup is hosted on the Jee Labs server again. No user signup in some big wiki farm, no tracking of activity (I don’t do big-brother style “analytics” – not now and not ever…).

The interesting aspect of TikiWIki is that it is even more powerful than Wikidot, but that almost each individual feature can be turned off, so that I can pick exactly what’s needed to create a convenient site, without all the bells and whistles which would only distract from creating useful content and discussing important topics. The flip side is that it’s quite a large set of config options to navigate through!

I’ve replaced the Wikidot with this new site, again at test.jeelabs.org – you are hereby invited to sign up and try it out (all user names are available, since this is a standalone setup). I can assure you that it is an order of magnitude more tedious for me as it probably is for you to have to go through all this hassle again…

As before – this is a test. Final decision as to whether this becomes the new Jee Labs community site will be made within the next 10 days … I sure hope this is it!

Looks great, right? So what’s the problem?

It’s too powerful and it’s too complex.

The #1 feature which drew me to Wikidot, is its unification of a discussion forum with a wiki. The forum is very good: hardly any setup needed, good threaded discussions, good notification options, and good admin interface. Perfectly usable, right out of the box. As I described here, the combination of a timeline-oriented forum and a project / topic oriented wiki sounds like the pefect way to merge the two major areas one would like to have on a community-based site.

But the wiki, if you pardon my French, sucks…

It’s an attempt to shoehorn formatting options, style elements, and content management features into a wiki-like syntax which just doesn’t make sense. Tables, tabbed views, modules, footnotes, formulas, … the list doesn’t end, but the confusion just increases as you go along. There are numerous ways to create links, yet I can’t make internal and external links appear differently on the page. The way to change a link’s title depends on the type of link used. Some features are modules, others are built-in. I don’t know about others, but as I’ve been trying out a few things, I’m not getting more and more used to the syntax – which to me is a sign that it lacks regularity.

In terms of site structuring features, there is too much functionality: sections w/ table-of-content, tags, categories, and parent-child page relationships. The problem with this is that every contributor will choose a different mechanism when adding new pages. Some people will put everything into a single page, others will try to create “islands of personal hierarchies”, twisting the available features to match a personal preference for specific pages. I don’t fancy spending my time editing pages and adjusting structures to try and unify things. And I’m only going to end up stepping on everyone’s toes if I change something they spent ages perfecting to look “just right”.

Don’t get me wrong. There is a lot to like about Wikidot.

But for an open community site, which aims to help lots of people find their way around, while letting active members share and contribute highly informative nuggets of knowledge (link broken as of 2010-04-05), I think the Wikidot format has (far!) too many degrees of freedom. Style should be pleasing (which is evidently a personal preference) but most of all it should be uniform. This daily weblog gets information across because its style was defined long ago and has become unimportant – both for me as writer, and for its readers, judging by the friendly emails I keep receiving.

A drawback which bothers me more than I expected: posting on the forums requires signing up with Wikidot.

The other thing I found out is that browser-based editing is tedious. There’s not much Wikidot can do about that (it does explain why I prefer email-based discussions over web forums).

If only someone would create the perfect community site … open source, preferably, with minimal lock-in!

I’m inclined to keep the current forum and wiki as is for now. They are not perfect, but Wikidot is too much of a compromise. Maybe something else will come along …

Update 2010-04-05 : this particular wiki is no longer being used.

I’m not quite happy with that setup. The PROJECTS, DOCS, and CODE links point to stuff I’m working on and sharing through this site, but there’s a bit of a disconnect with what others are doing. It’d be nice to be able to maintain a list with other projects derived from (or perhaps just inspired by) the ones at Jee Labs. Likewise, the code I’m kicking into the world is only part of the story – what about changes and extensions by others? Or sample code? Wouldn’t it be nice to have everything available in a single place?

And then there’s the somewhat confusing separation between the TALK discussion forums and the WIKI pages. Both of them intended to help people share and exchange articles, code, images, etc.

Lastly, TALK is of course about asking questions, but wouldn’t it be nice to tie in much more to the pages to which these questions apply, and to have the answers easily reachable from those same pages?

I’d like to try something new. Better get it over with early on, and benefit as soon as possible from an improved community exchange site.

Meet the new experimental Forum + Wiki site:

This is a unified forum + wiki setup. That concept in itself risks being so confusing that I’ve decided to start a Guidelines page to describe what I’m trying to do.

Will it work? I don’t know. Let’s review this a few weeks from now …

The trouble with a site change like this is that it’s going to be disruptive. Especially since I’m not yet 100% sold on adopting the above site and throwing out the current forum and wiki.

The current plan is to proceed as follows:

• Allow everyone to explore and try out the new site, which is now public at http://test.jeelabs.org/
• Keep the current forum and wiki links on this weblog intact for another week or two.
• If the new test site is deemed effective, make it the default one.
• Create read-only archived versions of the forum and wiki for reference.
• Enjoy the new site, make it rock, and move on!

I hope this works out. Let me know what you think, especially if there is any show-stopper or other issue!

Here’s a quick impression of the 1680′s Comédie-Française (on the right):

We went there to see a nice French theater piece. And although I’m not even remotely as culturally enlightened as such a remark might suggest, I did have a great time.

Normal transmissions to resume tomorrow…