Josh Sharp - web application development.

When I came up with the domain name techAU, it wasn't already taken — but it wasn't unique either. Jason Cartwright had already been working on techAU.tv, a weekly tech podcast. And amidst the flurry of activity post-launch this week, I've been talking to Jason about the similarities in our sites' names. He isn't particularly happy.

Now, when you buy a domain, say a .com, and someone else buys the .net of that name, you're not really able to jump up and down about it. After all, if you wanted to be the sole owner of that name, you should be buying all of the TLDs for it. That's just how it goes.

However, being the jolly good sport that I am, and the endeavour being relatively new, I decided I would concede defeat to Jason. I don't want to go around making enemies, and the guy's already got his thing going. Seeing as I'm only aggregating blogs, I don't mind particularly about the domain name. Maybe I can sell it and make a tidy profit.

Thus techCollective.com.au was born

Hurrah! I'd like to think it's an even better domain. Invokes images of solidarity, and camaraderie. Bringing people together, and gently feeding them technology news.

For the moment, techAU is still active and redirecting to the new domain. But eventually, who knows. I trust you good ladies and gentlemen will remember the new domain and this will not slow anyone down.

Thankyou for a successful launch

Otherwise, thankyou everyone for all the positive attention you've given me for the site — we're still focussed on Aussie web and tech bloggers, and I'm sure we'll succeed in getting some more awareness of the local industry.

It didn't take long, and now it's live. As it says on the site itself, "techAU aggregates both prominent and up-and-coming Australian bloggers who write about the new generation of the web and related technologies." And it doesn't do much else at this stage. I mentioned my list of bloggers in the previous post, and with the exception of Sam Lai (get back to me Sam! We'll figure something out), all have made it to the list.

Its purpose

The idea is that, like Alltop or Web 2.0 Workgroup, you're able to visit the site and quickly scan a list of relevant bloggers for posts that look interesting. In this case, the focus is on Australian content, as I really wanted to boost recognition of prominent figures in our local industry. Bookmark the site and keep up to date on what Australian bloggers think about the future of the web.

Who can be on the list?

Any Australian blogger who writes consistently insightful posts on the web, social media, startups, and the like. I wanted to include Duncan Riley, but I'm not sure the world needs to know about his penchant for rescuing stunned birds :) If you do know someone who you think should be on the list, let me know. I'd be happy to add anyone who fits — the longer the list, the better!

Who said that laziness doesn't yield good results? Earlier this year I called for tech bloggers to help me launch a local-based tech blog in the vein of TechCrunch, but I didn't get a great deal of interest and I don't have a lot of time to follow the idea up, as much as I think it has merit.

So after a bit of thought I have come up with something different, which I think could still help raise awareness of our local industry.

In the same vein as Web 2.0 Workgroup, I'd like to aggregate the blogs of prominent Australian bloggers in the IT industry. I'd like to feature bloggers who consistently write about web-related technologies and ideas, and have something worth adding. Here's my list so far:

• Chris Saad
• Ben Barren
• Ross Dawson
• Nic Hodges
• Mick Liubinskas
• VS Consulting Group's Startup Blog
• Sam Lai's Drive:Activated

What I'd love for everyone else to do, is to let me know in the comments if you know of anyone else who fits the bill. I'd love to feature anyone who falls into the right category, but I don't necessarily know everyone who qualifies at this stage.

Let me know below!

I've recently discovered popurls.com. I like it. it has the very simple purpose of aggregating a number of popular social media sites (most of which are themselves psuedo-aggregators) into one easy to browse page, so that when people like me are bored we can scan for interesting links without expending too much effort.

But are sites like popurls just getting a free ride off the hard work of the sites they aggregate? Do they deserve their traffic when they don't provide any of the content?

It's easy to see it that way. The site provides none of the content itself, but could've been knocked up in a day by finding an RSS parser and choosing the sites whose content it would display. Not exactly a work of art.

But really, I think the answer is no — it's not a free ride at all. Just like 'easy' art which causes jealous viewers to mutter, "I could've painted that", aggregators provide a service which is inherently easy to do, but is still useful to the end user — whether they "could've done it themselves" or not, they didn't. The aggregator exists as a valid service, and while it doesn't create any of the content, it still provides the service of aggregating. As long as it doesn't attempt to exploit the content, all traffic the site receives is fair and valid.

Besides, syndicating your content through RSS only serves to increase recognition of your brand and traffic to your site in the long run. So the sites owning the content are still winners — everybody's happy.

Sometimes it might seem like what your manager wants you to do, and what you wish you could do, are two different things. You, as the shining pinnacle of developerness that you are, would like to satisfy your client's requirements by developing a generic solution that fits, but can also scale up, down, and sideways depending on the scenario. But this isn't what your manager wants to hear.

By the way, this isn't aimed at my manager, or anyone I know — just an attempt to explain a programmer's thought processes.

Let's take an example. Say your web application needs to allow admins to create a tree stucture of users, assigning them to groups and sub-groups. Each user will be two levels deep, in a subgroup.

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Okay, so the idea is this: an Android app that takes a set of criteria for what sort of real estate you're looking for – price, no. bedrooms, etc. – and uses its location-awareness to alert you to real estate within your area that matches your criteria. You could even set it to tell you about open houses so if you were driving past you could pop in. But I think it'd also just be handy to know these houses existed – for example, I like to go for the odd evening walk and it'd be handy to be able to say, "Hey, there's a nice house the next block over. I'll detour to have a look."

So anyway, if realestate.com.au wants to contract me to create said app, get in touch :D

So, you may have noticed that I don't update this blog all that often. A lot of the time it's because I don't have a great deal to say, but at the moment it's equally fair to say: I've been bloody busy! I've been working on a couple of different things, and there's still some more to come which I'll fill you in on as well.

OurIntranet

Timesheet module

Previously at Cruse, we've used spreadsheets to track the time spent on jobs. But finally I've got around to creating a module for OurIntranet which tracks users' time spent on various job codes.

The interface shows a week at a time, and uses an autocompleter widget to allow users to search for and select relevant job codes. The timesheet hours themselves are updated via AJAX as they are edited — taking a leaf out of Google Spreadsheets' book, surely, but it makes for a very fluid and pleasant UI experience.

This also marks the first time I've used Open Flash Charts to create some nice dynamic charts — in this case, a pie graph representing a breakdown of hours against clients.

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Windows Vista has been almost universally panned, by critics and users alike. Aside from offering hardly any new functionality, it added a lot of things users didn't like — from changing around menus, to moving and renaming system tools and control panel options. It seemed like Microsoft was trying to make up for their lack of functionality by, well, just changing things. And it doesn't help that MacOS continues to get prettier and prettier.

I've recently bought a new laptop which came with Vista preinstalled, so I've witnessed first hand what everyone talks about. Also, within three days I've already broken it and had to reinstall from the recovery partition. That's quality. Something loading on startup broke it, and it was stuck in a perpetual reboot cycle.

I think it might have been Daemon tools, but for chrissakes if something like that happens, your 'fix Windows startup' tool should actually fix Windows startup errors.

With all this in mind, if Microsoft came to me and asked what I'd like in the next release, I'd probably tell them something like what follows.

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