Weblogs
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I posted this today on LinkedIn. I'm having to rethink my approach to using this platform. Next week marks 20 years of my "Through the Interface" blog, but lately my standard approach of posting links to my content - with a few images - is leading to fewer and fewer people seeing my posts, at least those coming in from platforms such as this one. Part of me doesn't care all that much: I feel like I've grown out of my dopamine-hungry, engagement-measuring phase and I certainly find it a shame that I have to create "native" content to be…
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Here's one more post relating to what has somehow become a bit of a recent theme on this blog: artificial intelligence. Something has been weighing on me, of late. I've noticed a significant uptick in my site being mined by bots and spiders: once upon a time it would be for search engines trying to find its content, but increasingly it's the likes of Anthropic, OpenAI and Grok, coming in and stealing/learning from this blog. There was a time when I'd have shrugged and said "c'est la vie", but given the increasing competency of these models to write code themselves,…
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After last week's missive on AI (something I will try not to make a habit of, but we shall see), I felt I had to come clean about something. While I promise never to use AI to write a blog post - mainly because I enjoy writing so much, rather than being from any particular sense of propriety - I used it heavily when moving this blog to it's new, post-Typepad platform but also to make me look a bit older. My blog photo has been the same for quite some time (it's only the third I've used on the…
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A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the news that Typepad has (finally) decided to get out of the blog hosting game, after 22 years. The platform had steadily become less relevant, and from my side I was forever fighting with silly technical issues - mostly related to images, for some reason - so a) I'm not surprised and b) I won't miss the platform at all. The timing was insane, though: they basically gave a month's notice for the remaining blogs to figure something out. Even accessing the old content in the days after the announcement proved to be…
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If you're going to forget an anniversary, let it be the one for your first engagement with social media. The very definition of a victimless crime. I just remembered that it was back in June 2006 when I started this blog (the welcome post was on June 19th, 2006, so I didn't miss it by much). It's been quite the ride… 2021 posts over 15 years, at an average of about 2.6 posts per week, rain or shine. I always set myself the goal of 3 posts per week, but in recent years that's dropped back to 2 or so.…
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This post goes out to my blogging brethren (and sistren) around the world… I'm sure more than a few of you have tried this, yourselves, so hopefully it'll be of some help to people. I recently looked back at a post of mine embedding Autodesk University 2018 videos and noticed that they no longer worked: I was sure they did when I wrote the post, but it seemed that something had changed, probably with the viewer component being used. I gnashed my teeth for a while and then posted to the Ooyala developer forum to see if anyone there could…
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When I first started this blog, back in 2006, I used our (back then) Autodesk-recommended blogging platform, Typepad. When configuring the blog I had in the back of my mind that I'd end up putting it on a custom domain of some kind (perhaps Shaan Hurley's autodesk.blogs.com), so I chose to use a blog-specific subfolder (through_the_interface) beneath the main through-the-interface.typepad.com site. I did this for a good reason, but it did result in pretty monstrous URLs for this blog. And I didn't end up using a custom domain, after all, so we all ended up being stuck with big old…
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The Forge team (many of whom I worked with back when I was part of the Autodesk Developer Network organisation) have created a new developer blog focused on all things Forge. You'll find a lot of the usual suspects who contributed to the Cloud & Mobile DevBlog (in fact that particular blog's content has already been migrated across to the new site with the Forge branding). I expect lots of helpful information will be posted during the coming weeks/months/years. Be sure to bookmark it and check back regularly. Now if only I could find out how to search the blog's…
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Last week this blog sailed through the 10th anniversary of its first post. I can't believe how time has flown… posting 3 times a week for a decade has resulted in 1,448 posts, accumulating more than 6.2 million pageviews. I suppose when something's so much fun you don't really see time passing. Visually, the blog has changed a few times, over the years… (There's a 4th theme that is still in the works, but I've hit a bit of a wall with the content transfer… I've noticed that backslashes have been filtered from the various code samples. I need to…
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I've been spending more time looking at generative design in recent months (although this is a relative thing… I've still only posted once about Dynamo, for instance). So far a big chunk of my research has been understanding what's going on in different parts of the company with respect to generative design. As part of this effort, several months ago I chatted with Anthony Hauck who heads up a team focused on generative design in the AEC space. He talked to me about Project Akaba – an early generative tool for space planning – and its successor, Project Fractal. At…