Jotspot, which is an applied wiki product, has launched. I applied for the beta.

TextMate has been released.

As you can see by looking at my Blogger profile, the amount of text I have posted using the tool has now exceeded one hundred thousand words. It’s worth mentioning that before I started using Blogger as my posting tool in March of 2000, I had been manually posting for three years, and those posts are currently both not on the web and not included in that total. I have been thinking of ways to get that stuff back up on the site lately. Mainly, I need to change hosting companies.

Evan Williams is leaving Blogger/Google. Wow. I have to say that I totally appreciate the sentiments in his post. This industry grinds you. Launching projects grinds you. Starting companies grinds you. For all this grinding, there is a lot of fulfillment that comes from building things and seeing people interact with them. I think I’ve learned, over the years of working in this field, a way to manage my energy levels that works for me. Evan is a smart guy, and a really nice one. I hope he finds the recharge he is looking for. I don’t think it is a coincidence that his former Pyra co-founder also decided to step away from “the business” recently.

There’s a new Zeldman in town.

New Gmail Features include an atom feed of your incoming messages. Now that is cool and useful.

Hey all you Georgians, today is your last chance to register to vote. You can find more information in the Voters Information Guide for the 2004 US Election. Please, please vote.

I just love Sundays when I don’t have to work.(Which is every other Sunday during the golf season.) Today is one of those Sundays, and I have taken full advantage thus far. I rolled out of bed around 10am. It would have been earlier, but I went out and had a few beers last night, catching up with friends, and watched Ohio State lose in overtime to Northwestern. (Imagine that.)

After the whole morning Hygiene routine, I proceeded promptly to my favorite neighborhood coffee shop, bringing two books with me, one already in progress and one I hadn't started yet. Grabbing my traditional coffee with two shots of exspresso, I proceeded to read both books to their completion. This freed up two spots in my reading queue, so I went to the bookstore.

Next, I returned home, and am currently munching on Salt and Vinegar chips and sushi while watching football on TV, and my fantasy football league scores on the computer.

I should apologize for the mundane nature of this post. I was just loving the day so much that I wanted to record it.

The Atlanta Business Chronicle reports that the construction on the IKEA Atlanta store is underway. From the looks of the map, it’s in the huge new multiuse project named Atlantic Station.

Flickr announced their for-pay pro account yesterday. I went and subscribed for the next two years almost immediately. You get 1 Gb of uploads a month, with unlimited storage and bandwidth for an introductory price of $41.77 a year. Sounds like a great deal to me. I subscribed for two reasons. The first is that this is a Web application that I actually use and have used more, not less in the months since I joined. The combination of social network with photography is perfect because, at least for me, pictures tend to be a very social thing. Secondly, it is one of the best Web applications I have ever used, and I want to encourage the team that built it to build more stuff because I think that I will like the new stuff they might build just as much. Over the time I have been using Flickr, they have been constantly adding and rethinking things, and the result is an evolving elegant application.

The Yankees beat their likely first round opponent in the playoffs, the Twins, and clinched their seventh straight American League East title. How fitting that the game was won by a two run home run in the ninth inning by veteran Bernie Williams.

People who have worked with me in person can tell you that I rarely can be seen in the office without my little black Moleskine. I keep notes on everything in the small black notebooks, and have been for the last two and a half years. At home, I have the four or five spent ones on a bookshelf, and although I rarely refer back to them now, I foresee a time when I will do so fondly. I prefer the ones filled with graph paper, perhaps a throwback to my geekier youth. Today, via moleskinerie, an excellent blog devoted to the notebooks, I learned of two new Moleskine Styles. While I have little use for the Musician’s Moleskine, the Story Board Moleskine is intriguing. The small Story Boards are the perfect size for commenting on Web pages, or mocking them up in a meeting. I’m ordering some now.

Monday night, I decided to see how difficult it would be to create a ColdFusion Language Module for BBEdit using the new codeless language module feature of BBEdit 8. I’ve wanted solid syntax coloring for ColdFusion docs in BBEdit virtually forever, and undertook this project one time before only to run up against a brick wall (previously, language modules had to be written in C.) As far as I know, with the exception of the UI painful Eclipse and JEdit, the only option on the Mac OS X platform with real ColdFusion syntax coloring is Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver on Mac OS X is painfully slow to use, gets in my way constantly, and deserves, in my opinion, to be rewritten from the ground up. I don’t say this lightly, but then again, I do feel that virtually all the code I’ve ever written needs to be rewritten from the ground up.

First, if it weren't for John Gruber, I never would have found the documentation needed to use this feature. Bare Bones' site does not do a good job of pointing developers looking to use this set of functionality in the right direction. Once developers have found the documentation in Appendix D of the BBEdit user manual, they will discover that it's not terribly helpful in terms of learning how to map a language to the modules. As it turns out, and you can read more about the matter in this great post on the subject of BBEdit 8, language modules in BBEdit 8 are not quite powerful enough to implement a language module for ColdFusion. I worked on it for about two hours, a good part of which was just finding the information I needed, then experimenting with how changes to the plist files manifested themselves in my copy of BBEdit with a ColdFusion document open. Well, perhaps the next version, this one got me much closer than I was before, and I can keep using my Win32 box for ColdFusion coding when I need to do it.

Jason Kottke has compiled a Voters Information Guide for the 2004 US Election. I take this moment to point this out to you in the most non-partisan spirit possible. If you do not vote, you are missing a key component of being a citizen of this country, even if you don’t live in a swing state. I encourage everyone to get out there and vote. Those of you here in Georgia, you have until October 4th to get yourself registered for November 2nd. All the information you need can be found in the VIG linked above.

I made the trip, last weekend to visit my friend Adam, who just moved to Chicago six weeks ago. We had a real fun time, although the pictures I posted are pretty tame compared to how some of the weekend went. I really enjoy the city itself, and kept thinking to myself that it would be a great next stop for me, until I remembered what the weather there is like in the winter.

Brent has announced the availability of public betas for NetNewsWire 2.0 and MarsEdit, Ranchero’s new Weblog Editor. I’ve been involved in the private beta cycle for the two apps for the last couple of months, and seriously consider NetNewsWire 2.0 to be a must have upgrade. The addition of the built in Webkit based browser alone has made the app the most used one on my machine. If you own a Mac OS X based machine, and have any interest at all in RSS feeds or feed readers, go download yourself a copy.

Well, I am back from The Ryder Cup. It was a very stressful and work filled seven days in Michigan, and I’m not sure how long it is going to take before I don’t feel worn out. I got a lot of sleep last night, and will do the same tonight. I wrote a lot of code onsite, mainly because we had no other choice given the parameters under which we were working. We also had a major set of server issues, ones which were hard to diagnose, and which we are still trying to pin down today, two days after the event ended. I wish I could say that I saw a lot of golf, and that I really experienced the Ryder Cup, but I didn’t do either. I’ve got a lot of Web reading to catch up on now, and housework and chores. Will be back with you shortly.

I probably won’t be posting too much for the next week or so, I arrived in Detroit today to work onsite for our coverage of the The 35th Ryder Cup Matches. As usual, Todd has done a fantastic job with the design and coding of the site. It is attractive, easy to use, and reflects the identity of the event itself. My part of the team is primarily responsible for the integration of the Todd’s site with our CMS software, and also for the scoring software that will be posting the scores to the site and syndicating them out to our third party partners. As always with the week of an event, we have a lot to do. I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t excited to be here for the event, it’s a very unique one.

Well, it is this time of year again. As per my prediction in 2002, the same tree dropped a big limb during the beginning stages of Frances smacking us. Luckily, that limb landed on another limb, pivoted, and the softer, leafy side landed on my roof, causing very little damage that I can see. I have had a hard time finding a tree service that wasn’t overwhelmed by the storm damage, but have to get it off. Hopefully I can get someone out tomorrow.

Tonight, I decided to rock out some bookmarklets that I needed to make for our editorial team. If you ever need to write a couple bookmarklets, I heartily recommend Bookmarklet Builder. It allows you to write your Javascript as you normally would, then formats the stuff all up for you the way it needs to be for your browser and stuff. I had mixed results getting it to work properly in Safari, but it rocked out in Firefox. Now if my power would just come back on.

Good Lord, Jose Luis is one of my favorite photographers.

I flew back on an earlier flight, trying to make sure that Frances didn’t interrupt my travel plans during this critical part of our work season. Now it looks as if Frances is bearing right for Atlanta, the heavy rains have already started, so I’m guessing that the Northern part of the system us here. My thoughts go out to the people in Florida, it looks as if the damage there is severe, and especially troubling considering that another storm, Ivan is moving into the same path.

On the plane, I read The Wisdom Of Forgiveness: Intimate Conversations and Journeys a book about forgiveness authored by Victor Chan and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It’s the second book about forgiveness that I have read this summer, and I definitely enjoyed it as much as the other works I have read that involved the Dalai Lama. Victor Chan added a very personal set of insights into the way Tibetan Buddhism views and deals with forgiveness, and that made this book that much more special to me. This personal touch never felt contrived, this man is a friend of the Lama, and his interaction with His Holiness seems to be a special one. I think that anyone, regardless of religous conviction or beliefs, will take something very moving and changing from this book. Forgiveness is something that I seem to struggle with greatly at times, and the interdependent nature of our relationships with the people and world around us is something that I need to think about more when conducting my daily affairs.

I spent the weekend in Dallas where my good friend Steve Isenburg got married to a beautiful and engaging woman, Amanda Wilson. Steve was one of the first real friends I met when I moved down to Atlanta from New York, and I’ve missed his company since he and Amanda moved down to Fort Worth. We had quite a few small adventures together, including an ill fated attempt by me to do some white water canoeing with him. It was great to see the two of them tie the knot, and to do so in front of two amazing families and numerous friends. One of the real treats of the weekend for me was to get to spend time with Steve’s dad. All I can say is that I wish them the best possible life together, they are two genuinely great people.

ars technica reports that TiVo and Netflix join forces for broadband movies.