BarCampVancouver: The End

Session: For some reason, the wireless crapped out on me at the very end of the session Tod Maffin led regarding “Hacking the Mothership(CBC)”, and I had a complete blog post vanish on me when I hit publish and lost all bandwidth at that exact moment. Yeah, that totally sucked, but I imagine that this is just apart of the beauty that is BarCampVancouver. Let me see if I can recall a little bit from the last few sessions of the day that I attended, and in no particular order.

Drupal is a powerful platform that I am becoming more and more familiar with everyday. It can do more than just a blog, and the programming aspect is a bit more meaty than WordPress. What I have learned in the past few months about PHP and MySQL tends to make me interested in seeing what I can do with Drupal. It’d be a major jump into a learning binge, but I’d like to give it a shot.

Other interesting elements to the platform is how it can be integrated with podcasting. That is, one site can serve up multiple feeds, and it is all built in to Drupal. Modules can make you site dance circles, and installation is generally simple. Some things do take some knowledge and experience. I’ve done a bit of reading about it up till now, but the session today really gave me a better understanding.

Session: David Gratton led a session about “Music Social Networking” that was interesting to sit through. He mainly laid out what his company is doing with ProjectOpus.com. It’s a lot like how it sounds, but is learning from its errors, as well as its users, and attempting to put a new spin on how people network in the world of enjoying music. Find friend, new bands, spread the word, and report back to the artist so they know what’s going on with their music.

It’s a really great concept, and I asked about how this can be incorporated to podcasting. They have a lot of local Vancouver artists already on the network. I’ll have to explore their library and see what I can do with their service. If anything, I’ll be in touch with them for sure.

Alexandra Samuel ran a session on tagging and the various ways that one can use them to help promote their blog and network with other bloggers with similar interests. These are classic tools that all blogs seem to have built in these days, but there are many ways to expand their effectiveness. Her blog and company’s website, Social Signal, are full of great ideas about this topic.

Session: And this is where I hate my laptop or the wireless network or the evil spirits who struck down my ability to have bandwidth in WorkSpace at the very moment that I had a long list of points that Tod Maffin covered in his session. That sucked so much.

Basically, Tod opened the floor to everyone in attendance to get ideas on how this new age of media can revolutionize the CBC as it currently stands. How can blogs, podcasting, and interactive media alter or be incorporated into what the CBC does? At the same time, how do we, as the general public, feel about where we can fit in the grand scheme of things.

Damn, Tod. It makes sense as to why you have scaled back on your podcasting projects now. I talked to him briefly and discovered that he is no longer affiliated with the Foursevens Podcast Network as he was before. TodBits still exists. He just hasn’t gotten around to getting something done. Look at what he’s trying to do here with the CBC. Think he’s busy?

There were a lot of interesting ideas thrown around that my tired mind can’t really recall now(stupid wireless). One thing I do recall is the fact that everyone in the session has listened to a CBC podcast. On the flipside, none of us knew that the CBC will pay you to read or perform a piece from your blog if you were to submit it, and, of course, it was chosen for air. That’s something I’m going to keep in mind.

WorkSpace - Leaving BarCampVancouver 2006After all of that, even sitting here on the couch at home, there’s still a lot to soak in. I have a variety of contacts that I made, shook the hands of some really cool people, and dropped some business cards that we made up last week. Events like this are dangerous. It doesn’t help that I get ideas in my head, fall in love with them, and then dive in head first until, not coming up for air until I’m happy with the result.

I ran around, taking pictures with my Nokia all day. All the pictures are now in this Flickr set.

I’m beat. After our time spent with Matthew Good last night and today’s excitement, I’m ready to crash and hit the beach in the morning. It was fun.

Making a switch over to Firefox

Screenshot of my Firefox setup Being the Apple fan that I publicly am, I’ve also been very partial to Safari.  That changed the other day when I launched Firefox while just being curious about how it stacks up to my “usual” browser.

I really like Safari.  That being said, in the past few days, I am not longer using it as my default browser.  The element I really liked about Safari was the RSS feature.  After numerous, spinning beach balls(Apple users will know what I’m talking about), I grew tired of how it behaved.

It’s annoying and time wasting to have that happen.  RSS was made to make getting info more simple and quick.  On top of that, Safari does not fully support WordPress.  So for creating my posts, I ran Camino along side Safari in order to use the “quicktags” feature in WP.  You can’t use that in Safari, so posting with that browser reverts back to manually typing up HTML code as well as your text. Can you see the headache going on here?

I also experimented, briefly, with making Flock my standard browser, if not something to use in conjuntion with Safari and replacing Camino.  I can’t say that I was overly happy with its performance, RSS interface, and overall feel.  I still think that it’s a great browser, but the development needs to keep going on it until I would be comfortable using it full time.  Maybe it’s something to keep revisiting as the built-in blogging and photo sharing support is pretty cool.

That being said, I think I am 80% with being fully converted into using Firefox.  The ability of using plugins has already found me pretty happy.  Using Tab Mix Plus and Wizz RSS News Reader has me feeling even more efficient than I did with Safari.  Additionally, I’ve changed the theme to make it look more like Safari.  That might sound sad to some folks, but having it look like how I’m used to made the change all the more easier.

Pages load quicker than before, and I mean that by being more snappy.  Clicking on a RSS article has the page load in a few seconds.  And if I want to blog about something I read, I open a new tab and make a post.  Even publishing a podcast gets easier because if I need to search for info to add a link into the show notes, eveything is all in one.

These are just some preliminary thoughts about the switch.  I have to say that I’m pleased with how easy it was, but my experience with doing these things might be more than the average user.  For now, I’m sticking with Firefox.

Burn all you spam monsters! Burn!

I’ve been getting slammed recently with spam on all things WordPress related.  For a while there, it was subtle.  Just a comment or trackback every so often, usually on the same post for a series of days, even weeks.  I monitor a lot of the activity, and it’s fairly easy to clean up and block.

That was until I woke up one morning to nearly three hundred of these things.  They’re getting better at these things, too.  Comments with full sentences that actually convey thoughts across numerous posts.  The URLs are getting harder to spot for this crap as well, even if you try to moderate for people posting them into the body of the comments.

I’ve put some lines of defense up while holding my breath.  I’ve only been in the WP world for a hand full of months now.  This was bound to become a problem at some point.  Akismet is my hope for now.  Anyone have any success with it?  Or might there be something better?

Taking on the PodPress

I just completed an upgrade of PodPress from version 4.4 to 5.8 for my podcast. I should always know better that anytime I have it in my head that something will be pretty easy, it won’t. It took me a while to hammer out all the kinks, but the upgrade completely killed my RSS feed. And for those of you who don’t know, that’s your pipe for getting these little audio buggers out to the world.

With that said, I like what they’ve done in this version. This WordPress plugin is constantly under development, so be on the careful lookout for updates. Read the FAQ’s, visit the support forums, and be confident in your editing skills. This plugin is great once you get it installed. It’s the upgrades that will catch you by surprise.

Dear, Makers Of Camino

Please put a spell checker into your great and wonderful browser.  I love using WordPress, but it pains me to no end that I have a lackluster abilty to check my sppeling.  Grammer is a constant annoyance that I can deal with, but being able to make sure that you spell everything right on the fly like you can in Safira is a life sacber.

Opoen source, fast, slick, and a prety great browwer.  Camino is awesome, but it could be awesomrer.

And if you guys know of some other way that I can get this put into Camino without some uber hack, that would be outstanding.

Thank you.

PodPress 4.2 Update

A great WordPress plugin for podcasting, PodPress has been updated to version 4.2. I have yet to make the upgrade, but this was the major reason I made the jump to WordPress with RadioZoom. Publishing is that much easier with this plugin.

This update is a matter of days old and has gone from version 4.0 to 4.2 within a matter of days, updates fixing minor issues and bugs. Other details to the release:

– Full featured and automatic feed generation (RSS2, iTunes and ATOM)
– Auto Generation of enclosure tag
– Preview of what your Podcast will look like on iTunes
– Podcast Download stats
– Support for Premium Content (Pay Only)
– Makes adding a Podcast to a Post very simple
– View MP3 Files ID3 tags when your Posting
– Control over where the player will display within your post.
– Support for various formats, including Video Podcasting
– Supports unlimited number of media files.
– Automatic Media player for MP3, MP4, MOV, FLV, ASF, WMV, AVI, and more, with inline and Popup Window support.
– Preview image for videos
– Easy way to link to your podcast within iTunes

I hope to make the upgrade soon, but might hold off to make sure that there are not any major issues requiring a new update.

Update: As of March 31, 2006, PodPress is now up to version 4.3.