I haven‘t been a big fan of JavaScript in the recent years as it has been mostly used for useless eye-candy that does nothing for the user experience and adds tons of accessibility problems instead. But this is about to change. Taking the outdated and buggy IE aside (which you can, if you want) modern browsers like Safari, Mozilla, Firefox et. al. deliver a stable JavaScript environment these days that conforms to the Document Object Model (DOM) of the W3C well enough to open the door for a new web craft: JavaScript widgets.

There are a couple of good examples on the web but one of the most impressive feat is the redesign of 1976design.com that features „sliding sheets“ and „tabbed“ content.

Gmail is also a good example for this but not everybody has access to it.

We are currently developing a new web-based conference planning software for our upcoming event currently and consider a set of JS widgets as well.

There is a ebuild package of the Blinkenlights Library for Gentoo Linux now.

Advertisement break: my good friend and DJ Sven Dohse (aka Don Shtone) has started his exclusive MP3-Label Shtone Music. So all it‘s music is available online only in non-DRM MP3 files in high quality. You get it at Conzoom.

I finally managed to complete the website of the 21st Chaos Communication Congress (21C3) that has been online for a while but which we decided to launch silently as some final bugs had to be squeezed first. Now it‘s a more or less complete site which should tell you most of the important things about the upcoming congress at the end of the year. Please have a look at our Call for Papers as you might either consider doing a talk your own or pass along the information to other people.

To make communication even better we have also set up a dedicated 21C3 Weblog that will point you to news, recent changes to relevant changes, previews for scheduled talks and other background information.

To round things up, there is a 21C3 Public Wiki as well that here for participants to publish what kind of projects they pursue or whatever comes to your mind. The wiki has been filled with helpful information on accommodation options and a FAQ page that you might want to consult first.

Arrived at Euro Foo Camp today, initiated by Tim O‘Reilly. It‘s a meeting of interesting people and the participation is by invitation only. There is going to be an interesting series of talks tomorrow and on sunday and the schedule was created by the speakers themselves by filling the available timeslots on a whiteboard themselves. Friendly people, friendly atmosphere. Hope I‘ll find the time to tell you more about it in the coming days. Much too tired right now to explain more…

I have been using del.icio.us for quite some time now. The web interface is easy and the concept of having a social network based on shared bookmarks is still compelling to me. Now Buzz Andersen (an Apple employee) has posted an early release of its del.icio.us client for Mac OS X.

The client downloads all your bookmarks and makes it available in a simple interface. Not much more functionality but it might receive some nice updates soon.