New Blog Engine

As you've probably noticed I've moved the blog software over to Drupal. That's the content management system I'm using for TWiT.tv and I wanted to standardize on it and PMwiki for all my sites. Plus it's a really excellent blogging engine and it works beautifully with Ecto my favorite blogging client (I'm using it right now). Next step, applying the new design from Leoville.com and the KFI show notes - that should be fairly easy. The TWiT redesign is moving along, too. Ted, Jeff, and Matt at Lullabot are working very quickly to integrate the design into Drupal. We're on target for an April 1 launch. Stay tuned!

Technorati Tags: Leoville, LOL, redesign, TWiT

Green Laser

Green Laser,
originally uploaded by Leo Laporte.

Expression Engine (my former CMS) had built-in moblogging -- that is uploading from a camera phone. But I think that with ShoZu and Flickr I can get some of the same functionality, although not automatically.

ShoZu installs on the camera phone and automatically uploads to my Flickr account. Then I can use the Flickr "Blog This" button to create a blog entry that interfaces to Drupal via the Metaweblog API.

If you're looking at a glass of ice water illuminated by one of Woz's green lasers... it worked!

TWiT Offices

The TWiT Building,
originally uploaded by Leo Laporte.

From cameraphone to ShoZu to Drupal. So there.

I Hate Windows

I just erased all the WAV files on my main editing system - including two FLOSS episodes ready to roll out the door. OK this is operator error and it could happen on any operating system, but... it was too damn easy in Windows. I suppose it's my karma for trying to produce an Open Source podcast using Windows. I'm writing this while running ActiveUNDELETE and praying. It all started when a shiny new 2GB mini-SD card arrived for my T-Mobile SDA SmartPhone. My plan: put podcasts on the thing so I could listen just about anywhere. I guess I'm a little spoiled by iTunes and the iPod (despite Apple's appalling anti-competitive DRM). Getting podcasts on a Windows Media device is just ridiculously complex.

• Step one: install Active Desktop.
• Step two: install podcatcher client that can use Windows Media Player for synching (still trying out different solutions there. Man I miss iPodderX.)
• Step three: configure Windows Media Player for synching media
• Step four: search hard drive for tunes

And here's where mistake #1 happened - I let WMP check the entire drive for media files. Actually mistake #1 was using my audio editing machine for this. I have, in the past, been careful about keeping stuff off that computer so it's just Adobe Audition, FTP programs, and podcast files. But I got lazy. So now Windows Media player has everything, but everything, in its playlist.

• Step five: connect phone

Yikes! WMP is trying to copy everything to my phone. I don't want every copy of TWiT on my phone. So I press stop synch. A bunch of times. It sorta stops. Then starts up again. Windows really really wants to synch all this stuff to my phone. So I delete the playlist in Windows Media Player. You know that box that says "Delete the entries in the playlist or actually delete the files?" Can you guess which one I clicked? Within seconds 1000s of megabytes of precious podcasts and podcasts as yet unborn disappeared. And they didn't go into the trash. They disappear entirely. And I didn't notice until the next day when I sat down to edit. I admit I acted in haste. But it was way too easy. An operating system should make it easy to do the things you want to do (like copy podcasts to your phone) and hard to do the things you can't reverse (like entirely delete all audio from your PC). Microsoft has this completely backwards. No wonder Vista isn't coming out until 2007.

Remember the Milk

I'm getting hooked on these Web 2.0 sites - maybe it's because of Inside the Net - but I can't stop subscribing to new AJAXy utility sites. I now use:

• Blinksale for my invoices
• Netvibes for my home page
• del.icio.us for my links

and my newest heartthrob - Remember the Milk for to-do lists. You can email items to yourself, subscribe to your list from iCal, create a To-Do RSS feed for consumption anywhere, send reminders to your email and cell phone, and on and on. The keystroke commands alone are worth the price of entry. Sites like these have turned a light on for me about the power of RSS lately - it's much more than news aggregation and podcasts - it's a universal data format. Everything, including cell phones, should be RSS aware. I apologize to Chris Pirillo and others like him for being so slow to board this cluetrain. My only concern about RTM is that it's free and there are no ads. How are these people supporting themselves? Who do they think they are, podcasters?

Technorati Tags: Links, Web 2.0