funkfeuer.net

funkfeuer.net is a weblog about the latest mobility trends and development techniques for the mobile web. It’s about mobile services and applications and only giving attention to the latest greatest gadgets if they are enablers for those services. The coverage of services is focused on the German web (Germany, Austria and Switzerland).

I will keep you and other mobilists updated and share my thought on the latest launches, innovative services and other discoveries. Please engage with the community and me by leaving your comments, writing trackbacks, helping me to find interesting material or by providing me with feedback about this blog or individual articles.

The Author

A Brief History of Mine

I have been a fan of the Internet for a long time already. As soon as I could understand some English I started to dial into the CompuServe network with my parents modem and started to hang around in chats and forums. After discovering the World Wide Web and later AltaVista the real journey began and I am addicted ever since.

Somehow I managed to be so interested in programming, Linux, networks and computers in general that I was sitting many hours in my youth in front of some huge books with funny animals on the cover and a big one-colored title box. This helped me to get my first job as a webmaster for a startup in 2000 where I was able to greatly enhance my allowance. In 2001 with 17 years I was living in the U.S. with my parents for one year and this was the first time I could enjoy a broadband cable connection and proper Computer Science education in school. I truly benefited from the daily C++ courses. And I am still pissed off that today - more than 7 years later - my DSL connection in Germany is still slower than Comcast in 2001.

After finishing my German “Abitur”, which can be compared to the U.S. high school degree, I decided to study Business Computer Science at the University of Cooperative Education in Stuttgart in cooperation with Hewlett Packard. This three year long study or trainee program is quite famous in Germany but not that common in other countries. You are applying at a sponsor company and selected by companies in assessment centers. Afterwards one is employed by this company, being paid a monthly salary for studying and always alternating in three-month intervals between university and internships within different departments of the company. After graduation one receives a German diploma and a Bachelor. This study program gave me great insights into HP and allowed me among other things to attend the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona twice and to go to the HP headquarters in Palo Alto for an internship.

The atmosphere in the Valley impressed me enormously and I got motivated to develop a website myself after I came back to Germany. Ruby on Rails was the tool of choice and made me enjoy programming and web development even more than before. With a friend I worked on a mobile community for the German market for 9 months. Then I came to the point where I realized that my friend was not able to support me sufficiently and I knew nobody else that was a geek like me. I cancelled the project with pain but many learnings and the intention to start something else in the future with new partners that are able to support me better.

The most important thing for me is to enjoy the work I am doing. I have always been into PDAs, smartphones and the Web. I can spend hours in front of a mobile phone and play around with great web services or think about new ones. I will use this blog to focus and specialize on the (mobile) Web and mobility as this is my passion and I want to work in that specific area in the future.

The Technology

funkfeuer.net is powered by the excellent blog publishing system Wordpress. Wordpress is written in PHP (no Rails!), free, open-source and provides the ultimate framework for blogging. Themes enable easy customization and there are numerous plugins to extend the software. This blog uses the K2 theme and about two dozen plugins. Debian is the Linux distribution of choice for funkfeuer.net.

Besides following Web Standards I try to keep the code as semantic as possible. To even take this a step further I will support Microformats on many different parts of this blog.
Microformats are a web-based semantic data formatting approach built on (X)HTML classes and attributes. They are helping to put the Web on the next level by allowing computers to pull meaning out of the content which is otherwise a hard task for a computer to do. The hCard on this page is only one piece of the data that is microformatted on this blog.
The blogroll (XFN), events (hCalendar), reviews (hReview) and more will be based on Microformats as well and you will be able to use your own microformatted data when writing comments.