Ben Werdmuller

Month: August 2011

  • Citizen lawmakers: is Iceland the future of politics?

    Note: it’s been pointed out in the comments (and elsewhere) that the source article is full of inaccuracies. Here’s the rebuttal. Nonetheless, I think there’s strong interest in a new kind of democracy that takes its inspiration from the hierarchy flattening we’ve seen on the web. It’s an issue I’m still keen to explore. My […]

  • Bonita: a PHP template manager with lofty ambitions

    I’m fed up of using the same PHP template pattern over and over in my web apps, so I decided to write it from scratch and iterate on some core ideas. And then open source it under an Apache 2.0 license. The result is Bonita: a simple PHP templating engine. It’s definitely version 0.1, but […]

  • Learn to program the Codecademy away

    I’m really taken with Codecademy, a series of free tutorials on learning to code. It’s incredibly simple, and you can take the first exercise without signing in. I know quite a few people whose portfolio of skills could be enhanced with a little bit of coding; this is a great start for them. I’m not […]

  • Decentralized social networking using web intents

    I believe that web intents are the last missing piece for decentralized social networking. (Previously I’ve talked about creating a social web architecture using Activity Streams and OAuth; this builds on that idea.) Picture this chain of events: I visit your website, and see that you have a “connect to me” button[1]. I click the button, […]