Brian Fitzgerald

Xoops is a PHP-based content management system. Looks like Mambo.

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. If I could subscribe to the paper and have it delivered in a way that was portable, searchable and easy to read, I would almost certainly do it. I wouldn’t even care if there were ads as long as the content was made available in a way that made it easy for me to read. I hope that Sony releases something wonderful (and Macintosh compatible).

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. Sorry ‘bout those.

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. He displayed a big slide telling them to “try again”. Of course Microsoft has the money and resources to try again, and again, and again, and again.

Adobe’s Bruce Chizen (CEO) spoke at the end of the general session (many thought it was over and had left). He’s not a great speaker and stumbled over his points quite a bit. He flattered the developers some, but propped Acrobat and print. It will be a curious melding of philosophies when Adobe meets Macromedia. The first’s idea of digitizing content is to put replicate print formats while the other’s goal is to blow people’s minds with ways in which content can be delivered.

Macromedia’s XD development group has a series of sessions available in which they are discussing the way that they build applications. This is something that I thought was really missing next year – talk about how to build an application (beyond the code). The session I was in this morning talked about application design, brainstorming, cycling, etc. It got me excited and I hope to find more sessions like it tomorrow.

Tomorrow is going to be a loooong day. Morning starts at seven. General session should be a lot of fun as the different product groups take turns showing what cool and new. There will be a sneak peak session after the sessions have ended to show what may (or may not) be coming in future products. Finally, there is an event for attendees at Disneyland’s Paradise Pier. I may need to be dragged back to the hotel room tomorrow night.

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.

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. For reference, here is the story that I was reading.

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.

“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 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 seems be be a nice, newer, no-frills php-based bulletin board.

I’ve done a few personal podcast episodes on this site and more recently, produce the Board of Education podcast on the Lincoln Public Schools website. Through these efforts I have tried just about everything available on the macintosh right now and am yet to find a tool that does a great job of making the entire process easy.

I’ll use the Board podcast as an example. I publish two podcasts for the board. One is an enhanced m4a version for iTunes with chapters. The second is a standard mp3 version for other clients. Here’s how it goes together…

1. First I separate the meeting audio from the video, trim the beginning and end, and save it as a separate quicktime file
2. Then I create a text file with the current date in it which I feed to an application called TextToMP3 to get an MP3 file with the computer speaking the name of the podcast and the date
3. I open up the last podcast that I did in Apple's Soundtrack Pro software and replace the meeting audio and the date audio with the new files. I adjust the bumper music to fit the new lengths and output the AIFF file. (I had a difficult time getting garageband to work with a file that was more than an hour long -- but I've read ways to get past this and will be trying it out)
4. I drop the AIFF file into iTunes and compress it into a mp3 file and an m4a file.
5. Add ID3 tags and the podcast image in iTunes to the two files
6. I open the m4a file into ChapterToolMe and listen to the file, putting in chapters where appropriate.
7. I re-export the m4a file. I now have finished mp3 files and m4a files.
8. I launch Feeder to create the XML entries for the two podcasts and attach the files.
9. I post the podcasts.

A lot of work isn't it? I would like to see as much as possible of this in one application: The ability to record tracks, mix tracks, compress the files as both mp3 and m4a, tag the files, chapterize the m4a file, create the posts and upload. There are podcast tools available now for the macintosh (Chat Easy and Podcast Maker are two), but they assume that you have already produced the podcast into an audio file. There are some decent audio programs out there, but they don't make podcasting as simple as it could be. I really hope to see something soon that is a beginning to end solution for doing this.

Here's 7 simple steps that describe the blogging process (publisher to reader).

Will Richardson contemplates what Wikipedia means to research papers.

Wikis, getting bigger and bigger, are featured in a Time article.

Willowdale Elementary School in Omaha has a podcast called Radio WillowWeb.