Category: Writing

deck.ignite.js – Ignite / Pecha Kucha presentations in deck.js

After experimenting with deck.js yesterday for two presentations I had to give at a local networking meet, I decided to try to hack together a small extension for deck.js that makes any presentation an Ignite presentation. The concept is simply: 20 slides, 15 seconds for each slide – allowing you to only present the absolute minimum about a subject.

Using the extension is easy; simply download deck.ignite.js from my github repository and add a script tag that references the file after you’ve loaded the usual deck.js files (together with your other extensions):

You can also configure the delay used for each slide (Pecha Kucha presentations use 20 seconds) by setting the igniteDelay option when initializing deck:

$.deck(".slide", { igniteDelay: 20 });

You can read a more detailed description at the github project page.

Content License Change

Just a friendly reminder that I’ve now changed the license of the content on this blog to a much more friendly Creative Commons-based license, namely the “Do what the hell you want, but remember to link back and tell people who wrote it”. I’ve been using the license for the majority of my photos during the last years, so it’s a natural evolution. Have fun!

The Handwriting of Font Designers

En route from Slashdot comes an article with examples of the hand writing of several people that design fonts and typefaces for a living. They’re obviously human too, but I actually think that all the provided examples of their hand writing are beautiful in their own way – and should be turned into typefaces by themselves. In particular I’d like to point out Marian Bantjes and Sebastian Lester, but that might be because I’m very fond of typefaces with large decents (read more on Wikipedia’s article about typefaces).

Getting Scientific

In the latest edition of Birkebeiner’n, the norwegian magazine sent to all participants of Birkebeinerrittet, a novel way of applying the scientific method is described. The writer starts off with “[this technique] does not have a scientific proven effect on strength”, and then follow it up one sentence later with “since over 90% of athletes uses [the technique], we can conclude that it has an effect”.

So there you have it, as long as most people do it, it works.

Writing in English or Norwegian?

Tobias has a post about wether he should choose one language and stick to that at his blog, or if he should keep mixing norwegian and english like he does now. I’ve given this issue quite a bit of thought as I’m currently writing my blog in English, but I write professionally (for Gamer.no) using Norwegian and I’ve written several starter articles and documentation tidbits in Norwegian (most of this material is also already extensivly covered in English).

The reasoning behind writing my blog in English is that most articles I write is meant to serve as a resource for both myself and other people who are experiencing the same issues and searches for help through search engines like Google and Yahoo!. I feel that by writing my blog in English, I make the information available to as many people that I’m able to reach. I’ve several times stumbled across help on non-english blogs, and although translation tools are available, they tend to make things a bit more confusing. Using English as my primary language on my blog also enables me to participate in discussions and writing posts that are aimed at the general user groups of my fields of expertise.

Although I’ve decided to keep my blog English, I will post the occasional article in Norwegian. I’ll keep these to a category by itself on the blog, and I’ll keep them away from the front page (but I may write a short summary in English and keep link to the Norwegian post). This way I’ll keep the blog as a useful resource both to those who come here from a search engine and to those who subscribe to my RSS feed. If you read an English post and then got Norwegian articles in your RSS feed, you’d probably be confused and start wondering about how you could unsubscribe. The signal/noise ratio for this blog would exceed what you’d find acceptable.

So Tobias, my suggestion: stick to one language on the front page, but provide a category for posts in the other language. Provide an RSS feed for each language and one that merges both languages (for those of us that are bilingual) if you decide to write in two different languages. And never mix languages in the same post (<pun>except for programming languages</pun>).

Wether that language should be English or Norwegian will have to depend on your goal for the blog and who you’re writing for.