Category: WordPress

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The issue of quality

Allow me to rant some more about podcasting, but it’s something I haven’t done very much of. Regardless, I feel like I should get some more thoughts about this medium out there. I can be such an armchair warrior, telling Rebecca all sorts of different feelings and thoughts about the things I see and hear.

When it comes to the quality of your podcast, there is a correlation to the content that you are producing, or at least there should be.

For instance, if you are a major company providing audio podcasts for the world to hear, then make it sound good. This should be the number one thing on your list of priorities. The actual quality of the content should matter just as much, but if I can produce something that is audibly better, then you have a problem.

I have a nephew back in the states that fired up Garageband, all by himself, and recorded his own podcast, trying to be like his uncle. Sure, an eleven year old kid yakking about going to school and playing soccer isn’t the most entertaining thing for the rest of the world to hear, but the crisp audio quality of him using the built-in mic on their iMac worked amazingly well. What he recorded never reach the ends of the earth, but it amazed me so much that I ran some bits of it on an episode of RadioZoom[rz#71].

On the other side of this argument, give me brilliant content with questionable audio quality over the reverse, no questions asked. I’ll always be wanting something to improve, that’s a given. If you have something really important or worthwhile to share with the world, then crank it out there.

You should always strive to make things better, but if you are hunkered down in the middle of nowhere with a mic, laptop, and some form of internet connection, podcast away. Tell the world what it’s like to be alone and starving to death, but surviving on the heat of your laptop battery. That might be a tad bit extreme, and you should be able to at least IM some one for help in that situation. Stiil, if you have your laptop and a mic in your office at work, get what you can when the situation calls for some ghetto engineering, or in this case, ghetto podcasting.

I only mention this because I listened to some big company’s podcast today. It irked me because of the reasons I just mentioned. I won’t mention who it was for or done by, but it sounded painful. The content itself wasn’t up my ally, but even an objective view of it still makes me think that there is room for improvement. I wasn’t buying into their product when I went to the site in the first place, and you can bet that there is no way that I will in the future.

On another, related note, Matthew Mullenweg has started podcasting. The brainchild behind WordPress has a mic, a computer, and probably a lot to say. Only two episodes[#1, #2] and not the best sound quality, but I’m more curious as to what a major player in the world of blogging has to say versus how well it sounds when he says it.

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Don’t mind the mess

It’s been a bit of a process getting this blog update to WordPress 2.1. The hardest part is making sure all your plugins work and figuring out what templet tags have changed or not. I’ve got the CSS of my site cleaned up with some minor tweaks, but I feel like the pages are loading slower now. I don’t know, but there will probably be some minor changes yet to come. Most you probably won’t even notice. Regardless, if you have to make the upgrade, do so very carefully.

Update: I have added a RSS feed for the comments of my blog. I know that I find it pretty handy for other people’s sites, so it was about time to add it to my own. You can find it at the bottom of the sidebar on the main page, or you can take this link and add it to your list of feeds that you pay attention to.

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WordPress 2.1 and PodPress

Being someone who uses PodPress with both of the podcasts that I produce, I thought I would pass on a heads up in regards to the recent release of WordPress 2.1. If compatability of this plugin is of a concern to you, then you’ll be interested to know that the plugin has been updated to version 7.1. I did some preliminary testing and can verify that this does work.

I have not upgraded any sites to WP 2.1 yet, but that will be happening over this week. I’m also doing a bit of reprogramming to this site, offline, in order to clean up my CSS and make some other, minor tweaks.

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WordPress releases and betas

I’m knee deep in the world of WordPress right now. I actually oversee five setups, and when there is a new release of an upgrade, that’s five sites I have to work through. Backup here, backup there, overwrite the old, and in with the new. It’s a few hour process when all is said and done.

The big thing right now is that 2.0.7 was released just a few days ago. In fact, 2.0.6 was released not even two weeks ago, and I’d avoid that version if I were you. There was some security concerns in the PHP, meaning that could allow some hacking to happen to your blog. Not good.

The hugely geeky reason that I know this is that I have recently joined up with the development mailing list. Just a couple of days after the 2.0.6 release, there was an announcement on the list about the issue and a test version sent out to all subscribers for testing. This is why I always hesitate to be on that “bleeding edge” of things. It’s good to let people much smarter than you test things out if you don’t have the resources to do it yourself.

The WordPress Podcast is what really got me into the idea of joining the testers mailing list. WordPress 2.1 is in beta, and I get a kick out of seeing the exchange of knowledge about what’s new, what doesn’t work, and so on. You can get more info about it at WordPress Planet.

I did a local install of it and made a preliminary look through of the next generation of WordPress. There’s some interesting things, but it’s still too early for me to report on it. Regardless, I’m looking forward to the full release, as many folks have for over the past year.

The WP Podcast did just mention that there is talk about a 120-day turnaround between versions 2.1 and 2.2, a vast departure of the development, or lack there of, that we’ve seen from the WordPress folks. This won’t stop me from doing development from here on out in 2.1. Who knows when it will go into full release.

Wrote this post while waiting for the last of the sites to finish updating and listening to the They Might Be Giants podcast. Holy crap. Now back to your regularly scheduled geekiness.

Update: This post about 10 things you should know about WordPress 2.1 is a really great read about the new version that should be coming out soon. In fact, this article sites as January 22, 2007 being the day that this version is to be fully released.

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Using MAMP for local site development

Those who pay close attention to the various projects that I get myself involved with will notice that I like to play around with the design of the sites. Call it whatever you want, but it always seems like there is something better that I can add or change to the way a site looks. It’s all apart of learning. You try to do something the old or stupid way, only to discover there is a new way that all the cool kids are using that makes things so much more simple.

The worst part about changing a lot of things is doing them publicly. You just can’t go in with an idea, make the change, and go about your business. When you are restless as I am, and I know there are lots of people out there with similar mindsets, the idea you tryout might not look as good as you originally thought. Even worse, it mucks up the whole site and makes it not function at all. Not a good thing, so you might try something else or go back to the way it was in the first place.

MAMPMAMP has really helped with that. It’s allowed me to install and run numerous test sites of WordPress locally[wordpress]. I play around and change things on the fly. Install plugins and surf the site in a browser with full function. Everything that MAMP can do is already there on the Mac(Apache, MySQL, and PHP) these days, but this application makes it work with far less headache. Launch it, do your work, and you’re golden. When I’m settled with what I want, the site goes into the wild.

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with WordPress 2.1, and the changes to the next version are looking promising. Drupal can also be managed this way. That took me a little more thinking to get that sorted out, but I was working without an explicit, step-by-step tutorial for MAMP.

I’ve also tried to install WordPress MU, but stopped short of being successful. Actually, I hit some snags and simply gave up. Some quick searches for solutions came up short, but I know that it can work with MAMP. Will have to give it another shot in the near future.

Tricks of the trade, and this might be more obvious to some. I figured I’d share because this has made work on my projects easier, especially taking that FTP part out of the equation. There are various ways to do local installs for WordPress and Drupal development for the Mac and PC, but I can seriously vouch for this one.

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I have a thing for lines of code

I’m redesigning the RadioZoom site again. Ok, it’s not a redesign, but I’m porting the design, mostly, into a better layout. I’ve worked so hard to not make the website look like a blog because, let’s be honest, it’s a podcast, right? Anyone can start a blog and shift it into a site for a podcast. I’m just going to stop fighting the inevitable.

The current theme that I’m using, as it is a WordPress driven site, has so much code that is cobbled and hacked together that it hurts too much to clean up. I know it’s bad taste to take someone’s theme that they put out there for public use and then tear it all apart for my own amusement, but I’m picky. It has to look right, at least to me. I ain’t no design genius either, but beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder. Well, in this case, the programmer.

PodPress is really the reason I’m revamping the design. Subtle changes makes it not want to play nicely with the current design. They recently released a new version of this great podcasting plugin for WordPress, so I think it’s high time to dive into fixing it. At the same time, it keeps the geek skills sharpened.

If all goes according to plan, the new design should be live next week. Don’t expect any huge surprises. It should look similar to what it is now, but functionality will be the true improvement, perhaps more so on the back end.

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When geeks podcast about WordPress

Just last week, I discovered The WordPress Podcast. Being a podcaster that uses WordPress in all the projects that I’m apart of right now, I subscribed immediately. This is close to being the official podcast about WordPress, but not quite. That’s not to say that the folks involved don’t know what they’re talking about.

Of course, what they are talking about is incredibly geeky. There is something to be said about those out there who understand all the behind the scenes aspect of WordPress as a blogging engine that will not appeal to those looking for entertainment. If you use WP, like it, and are interested in the idea of exploring all the extra things you can do with it, then this might be for you.

So far, I’ve listened to a handful of episodes and been really liking what I’ve heard. The concept goes beyond just the hosts telling you tips and tricks for what you can do with WordPress. Other users, programmers, and designers contribute segments about things they are doing with their own sites. I already have a few ideas that I want to try out based on some of the things have been mentioned.

The one aspect that I really dig is the segment about recently released plugins for WordPress. They give a basic run down on some of the latest releases and updates, and the website for the podcast allows you to find links directly to what they mention. Very useful because anyone who makes WP sites will know what a pain it can be to keep tabs on what’s out there for plugins.

I’m anxious to listen to their two part interview with Matthew Mullenweg[wiki], the guy who basically headed the creation of WordPress at the age of 19. That shows you that The WordPress Podcast has the knowledge and connections for good, geeky content.

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Dinking with things that dink with content

I’ve been cramming a lot into my brain over the past few days. For one thing, I’ve been exploring the lovely world of Drupal. After all the things I’ve seen and heard about it, I’ve been impressed. It’s everything that it’s said to be. Content management system, and they ain’t kidding.

I set it up locally and played quite a bit yesterday. Every time I tried to do something that would be complicated by doing it stupidly, Drupal had some sort of built-in way to do what I wanted. Very interesting. Not sure that I like it from a blogging aspect, but it has that too. It can be oh so much more.

I’m experimenting with WordPress more and more. I’ve been a long time user of the visual rich editor. However, not anymore. It’s come to be such a pain, and the WYSIWYG interface gets so annoying after a while. Being a user of only version 2.0 and on, this is what previous versions did. I’ve gotta say that I like this, non-rich editor, much more. Loads faster in FireFox and has no lag. I’ll stick with this for now.

I did find a really great Flickr plugin for WordPress. Flickr Photo Album adds a nice interface for dropping images from your Flickr account straight into a post, all from within the editor. You can already do this with Flock, but I am still not impressed with its performance. This plugin makes things simple and quick, but the setup takes a little to sort out.

I also got into some Unix[wiki] junk last night. Seems that my external hard drive has the occasional ability of renaming itself at random times and confusing some of my peer to peer programs. How else are we to have our cheap nights in with some ghetto Tivo, aka BitTorrent? This could also cause problems with some of my podcast projects. If I spent enough time with it, Unix could become another language I could start to really understand. I’ve got way too many other things on the list right now. I should get some tape for the middle of my glasses.

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Hackers got into MG.org

MG.org This pisses me off to no end. Being a recent victim of a hacker myself, I can totally sympathize to as to what happened to Matthew Good. In fact, there’s a little bit of my help that I gave him that was a victim of an attacker to his site as well. Good needed some help getting PodPress to work on his site, so I was more than happy to help him out. None of that seems to matter a whole hell of a lot now.

I’m not sure what the complete story is, but the hack seemed to go deeper than just getting into WordPress and making a stupid post, like what happened to me. According to a post by his friend Sonny, another person who has helped him on numerous aspects of his site, files were compromised and are missing. I really liked the recent design to his site, but all of that is lost.

I’ve always been one to proceed with restraint, but right now, lynch mob is the phrase that immediately comes to mind.