Zach Beauvais

I am a firm believer in the idea that a little knowledge is dangerous. When you overhear a conversation in which one person says to another (imagine whatever derisory accent adds to the flavour-I always seem to hear Watford…):

"Yeah, ever since I watched that (insert celebrity TV show) the other day, I gave up (eating, drinking, buying) + (wheat, white wine, bleach…). Really makes you think, donnit?"

I always, always wince and imagine having the temerity (or bad manners) to break in with questions about the speaker’s level of intelligence, trust in an over-paid celebrity, or belief in a ridiculous cult of misinformation. Allergies seem to be a favourite topic in these conversations, I’ve noticed.

I find the proponents of these ideas far more galling, however. Dieticians, ’scientists’ from dubious academic associations, ’specialists’ and ‘independent consultants’: all these people ruin their very titles for the proper holders. Worse is when people go off half-cocked and make a mint selling their partially-formed philosophy.

I have just discovered a new breed in the person of Lee Siegel. I will, in the interests of transparency, state that I only heard about the man today, at about 16:30, and I know about him only what Wikipedia does, so not much, and therefore have only a limited platform from which to wince and whinge.

Typeroom is a content management system which takes a different approach to traditional Content Management. Instead of using databases and managing content directly, Typeroom works more like Adobe Contribute by allowing traditional html pages to be edited in real time. With the service due for public testing shortly, I have had a Beta test of the setup and have a few observations.

The editor is web-based, and a user simply enters a url into Typeroom’s site and navigates to content they wish to edit and selects ‘edit this page’. Typeroom then displays a copy of the page and opens a WYSIWYG editing environment. This is a multi-paned approach, with the editing at the bottom and a preview panel above that updates in real time. Text and images can be manipulated from the editing pane, and there are various formatting options. The look is not dissimilar to TinyMCE or other familiar WYSIWYG platforms. Impressively, they have a drag-and-drop interface for adding images, and an auto-align by simply dragging images around the editing area. This feature, if it works consistently, could be of major advantage to non-technical users, because it eliminates the need to assign either a style or an attribute to an image to make it flow consistently. 

Publishing makes use of either FTP or a Typeroom account, which presumably stores FTP information. An interesting feature, though, is the ability to ‘publish’ by sending a revised version by email to a webmaster.

It is now 2008, and I wish you all the best for it.

I’ve been asked by all the friends who shared the ringing of the new in last night about new years’ resolutions I might have.

I tend to be very abstract, and can’t really put an exact goal down, and have always felt a bit pressured to make something sound important and amazing without being pretentious. I plan to lose two stone or climb a mountain or travel more or read better books… These are all kinds of things I’d like to do, and might. But I don’t want the added pressure of people knowing, especially because most people wouldn’t remember anyway.

I am blessed enough to have friends who would remember, actually, and that makes me even more disinclined to set a list of resolutions. For a particular friend, her last year’s resolutions all turned out to be blessings, and she fulfilled them. I think she’s amazing, and wish her all the best for this years, and I can see how, to her, the resolutions are challenges and exciting possibilities.

Unfortunately, any resolutions I might put down tend to carry with them the taint of guilt. Thoughts of: "oh, that was too much food, that’s another resolution lost" or "why am I reading this, I thought I was trying to better my mind…?" are more prominent than the excitement of challenges.

So, I won’t be making any resolutions for this year.