Acrobat 8 Webinar
Friday, October 6, 2006
If you haven’t seen a demonstration yet of Acrobat 8 and Acrobat Connect, you can catch one here (done of course with Acrobat Connect - formerly Breeze). technorati tags:acrobat, breeze
Web Publishing
Flash Player Does Full-Screen Video
Thursday, October 5, 2006
A newly available flash plugin supports full-screen video. You can download the plugin here, then try out some samples here. It looks great and is very welcome on the Macintosh where full-screen video is hard to come by. Quicktime doesn’t support running embedded movies as full screen. Real does, but few use it anymore and DivX also supports it but again is rarely utilitzed. Prepare to see it everywhere. technorati tags:flash
Contribute 4
Thursday, October 5, 2006
Contribute 4 has been released by Adobe. I was pretty surprised as Macromedia NEVER released a product without announcing them almost a month in advance. I have downloaded it and am using it right now to create this blog posting. That’s a new feature in Contribute 4! Don’t get too excited thoughâ??this is the most painful posting experience I have ever had. So painful in fact that I’m going to stop right here.
One Blog
Thursday, October 5, 2006
On this blog, you will find increasing amounts of ‘religious’ news. I didn’t just find anybody, but have become the webmaster of my congregation’s web site. Since this blog serves as the center of the content I put online, it is unavoidable that content I collect for this relatively new site to arrive here. Because I am also the webmaster for a public school and this blog is aggregated on a page there, there could be issues.
Links... again
Thursday, October 5, 2006
I’ve added my links back to my blog. I’ve posted about this a few times and I’m sure that no one cares, but I want my thought process to be here. I have long had my del.icio.us links displayed on my blog, but I have gone back and forth on including them in the blog postings. It’s easier to say why I think that this is sometimes a bad idea. First, if you have a bad system, as I have had from time to time, you can end up with a lot of empty posts if you aren’t creating del.
Go2Web20
Sunday, September 17, 2006
It’s a Web 2.0 application that serves as a directory to Web 2.0 sites. I wonder if it lists itself…
Fresh Apollo Information
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Adobe Labs has posted new information regarding Apollo â?? their upcoming build-an-application-out-of-html-css-javascript-and-flash development environment. technorati tags:apollo, adobe
Redesign
Monday, August 21, 2006
I was getting frustrated with a single sidebar on my blog since so many things were ending up too far down the page, so I have redesigned. I like this much better and it gave me room to add my delicious links to the side, so I will probably stop doing the link dumps that haven’t been working for me very well anyway. Enjoy!
Podcasting: Encoding for Flash
Saturday, August 19, 2006
I've mentioned here before that I started using the LAME mp3 encoder to prepare audio files for publishing to a podcast (if you are using OS X, you can use darwinports to install it for you). While it is a little usability-challenged since it's a command-line tool, once you have the settings figured out, it's easy to use. My big reason for not using iTunes to do this is that I was getting a lot of file clutter putting files into iTunes, encoding them and then receiving them again through the podcastâ?
CNN Front Page
Monday, July 17, 2006
The Israel / Hezbollah conflict has given CNN plenty of opportunity to use the Breaking News section of their recently redesigned site. I think it's pretty sharp looking. technorati tags:cnn, breakingNews
Opera 9 Available
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Yesterday, I think, Opera (the company) pushed out the finished version of Opera (the browser) 9. If you haven’t tried or used Opera before, this is a pretty good time to try it out. Opera could probably be considered the original ‘standards’ browser. While IE and Netscape were battling over features and market share, this browser from Norway was steadily creating a browser that followed the rules. Opera has become a browser that tries to do everything, similar to the way that Mozilla suite (they call it seamonkey now?
Scheduling Content Removal
Thursday, June 8, 2006
Today I have started the first serious effort I can remember in the 8 years that I have been with Lincoln Public Schools to clean out all of the orphaned junk on the web site that has collected over that time. I have just completed one of the smaller sections of the site. I figure I removed over 70% of the files that were on the server in the five hours that it took me to go through it all.
iTunes Encoding Alternatives
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Every couple of weeks I encode the audio for the Board of Education meetings of Lincoln Public Schools an publish them in a podcast. While iTunes works very well as an audio encoding tool, it can be frustrating when podcasting. My audio starts as a track in a quicktime movie. I export that movie as a AIFF file, giving me a very large (1GBish) audio document. I then put this file into iTunes, right-clicked on it and chose to encode it as an MP3.
New York Times Goes Wide
Monday, April 3, 2006
The New York Times is sporting a new look–and it’s beautiful. They, like CNN last week, have gone wide (970pixels by my measurement) and have also centered (which I really can’t figure out why more big sites don’t do–everybody else does).
CNN Goes Wide!
Monday, March 27, 2006
CNN has a fantastic new layout that is standards-compliant, wide and beautiful. The new site is 980 pixels wide. WooHoo. I’m for anything that aids in stretching web users expectations of what a site is. Monitors are wider, let’s use them.
Another book to buy...
Friday, March 24, 2006
Digital Web Magazine reviews “CSS Mastery”
Web 2.0 Logos
Friday, February 24, 2006
There are so many “Web 2.0” companies that it’s almost impossible to track them. Here’s a poster that’s been assembled using web 2.0 company logos. It’s fun to see the designs and colors used. It’s also fun to just start going through them to see what’s being done by all of these companies.
Web 2.0 Humor
Monday, February 20, 2006
What is meant by web 2.0? What was web 1.0? Read all about it here…
Flock .5.11 released
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Apparently Flock has scrapped plans of making .6 a major beta release or they have decided that using numbers like .5.11 highlights the fact that these are betas. Either way, it has been a long time since a release of Flock was put out (outside of the hourly builds) and this new one is fantastic. Check out the new features here, then get it. technorati tags: flock, browser
What should your site be doing?
Saturday, February 18, 2006
This is a list that showed up on digital-web magazine over a year ago listing those things that a modern site should be doing. While it's hard for most casual developers to incorporate these into a homegrown site, it shows that one should really consider some of the great content management systems available when building a site. Most good ones will take care of a majority of these items. In the end, you need to decide what is and isn't important to you and your visitors.
Another CMS
Monday, January 2, 2006
Xoops is a PHP-based content management system. Looks like Mambo.
New E-Book Reader
Sunday, January 1, 2006
Sony may be coming out with a new e-book reader and I think that this may be the time for it. I have been thinking a lot about the relevancy of newspapers today and always come to the conclusion that there is no better source for information today, but that the delivery of that content is not what people want today. I have little interest in subscribing to my local newspaper (or any newspaper) and I don’t often take the time to visit their sites to read the stories.
Fixing the Links
Sunday, January 1, 2006
Semi-frequent readers of my site have probably been annoyed by my constant empty “Links” posts. The problem causing this has been a script that I’ve had running every night to grab new bookmarks that I have posted to del.icio.us and list them on the site. This script creates a post whether there are new links or not. I have disabled this and will just run it manually now so that I don’t have this goofy thing posting all of the time.
First Day at MAX
Monday, October 17, 2005
Some observations and thoughts from the first day at Macromedia’s MAX Conference: Flex is awesome and the price may be right now. I’m frustrated that right now there is no way to develop flex applications on the Macintosh (that I can see). The code is just XML, but you have to have something that can compile the SWF file and that seems to be Windows-only right now. Stephen Elop (Macromedia CEO) took quite a swing at Microsoft and their new flash-like features in Avalon.
Yahoo Blog Search
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
I found another post about the Yahoo blog search that made things much more clear – AND OF COURSE linked to the correct page. That’s not so hard is it News.com? The Yahoo blog search is nice. When you do a search on the Yahoo news site, a sidebar is presented on the right side of the screen that displays recent blog entries with related information. You can also click a link which takes you to only blog results.
Rant: News.com Articles
Monday, October 10, 2005
I was just reading a news.com article regarding a new blog search that Yahoo has and of course wanted to then try it out. News.com however, never seems to have links to the topics which they are discussing. This is so 5-years ago, sticky-mined. Stop thinking that you have to be everything to everyone (like yahoo) and just link to those things that a person would likely want to go to.
Yahoo Launches Podcast Site
Monday, October 10, 2005
Yahoo has launched a new podcast beta site. It’s a really nice site that does a pretty good job of introducing visitors to lots of podcasts. The site allows you to listen to podcasts right within the website, but directs visitors to existing podcasting tools to subscribe.
NetNewsWire Acquired by NewsGator
Friday, October 7, 2005
“NewsGator has acquired NetNewsWire from Ranchero Software”:www.newsgator.com/NetNewsWi… and the developer of NNW, Brent Simmons, will be joining NewsGator as a software architect. The future of Ranchero’s blog posting tool, MarsEdit, is being discussed in the product’s mailing list.
Google RSS Reader
Friday, October 7, 2005
“Google now has an AJAX powered RSS reader available.":reader.google.com I can’t seem to get to really liking an online reader, but as far as they go – this seems like a real nice one.
PunBB
Monday, September 26, 2005
PunBB seems be be a nice, newer, no-frills php-based bulletin board.