Tag: Blogging Posts

Rebecca and John swung by tonight for 2.25 L of wine drinking fun. Don’t shake baby. Also, my hosting account over on another server basically expired. I did my best to move everyone’s websites over, but turns out that it’s rather difficult to change over DNS entries for websites you don’t own. I tried my best though.

Big thanks to all of you who pinged me about helping with my little web experiment. So far we have six hosts represented, but I’d love to have a lot more. So if you have any friends that have blogs and can help out, please direct them to me. I’m collecting data in real time right now, so it will be interesting to see what it’ll all look like after a few days. When this is done, we should all have a pretty intimate insight into all the various hosting companies out there and how they compare to each other during normal wear and tear. The teaser is over for now! Stay tuned, in a few days I’ll post some detailed results.

Tonight I had a few people over at my place to watch movies, drink some beer, and hack out a few techy type things. My little project for the evening was to try and media-ify my blog somehow. One of the ideas I was playing with was extracting all the media out of all my blog posts and having that in a separate player somewhere. There are other players for WordPress (based on the popular flash FLV player) that do something similar, except with those you have to manually input a playlist or set up a special directory. A snapshot of the media player The main benefit of the way I’ve done it is that it’s just business as usual for you, the blogger. The plugin will parse all your entries and pull out the media you normally include anyways. It generates a site-wide RSS feed all that media which […]

There are a bunch of guys over at my place right now, messing around with blogs, media, podcasts, and of course, beer. Right now it’s John Bollwitt, John Biehler, and Boris Mann is downstairs with the next shipment of beer. I’ll update this as the day/night goes on. We all have a few projects we want to do. I’m currently moving all my websites over to Media Temple, which is basically easy but requires a bunch of grunt work to pull off. After that I’m going to attempt to make really awesome movie/mp3 player for WordPress. John Bollwitt making scrambled eggs, photo by John Biehler Wow, the day sure went quick. It’s already 8:45pm. I’ve been working on a pretty cool WordPress plugin during the day that will automatically extract all media out of blog posts and put it into a media player. I’ll have a demo going in a […]

Yes, this is what I look like before I cut off your head and steal all your powers, bitches. Big thanks to Clay for misusing all our web design resources at work to make this possible. Apparently he thought the whole Star Wars thing was too retro, and came up with something better. Thanks for supporting my cause against the evil guys against me, dude. Watch out for my sword. PS – I’m commando under all that shit. Believe it. Also, tomorrow is a big nerd session at my place. John Bollwitt, Boris Mann and John Biehler are definitely swinging by to drink some beers, watch some movies, and play catch-up for all the things we’ve all fallen behind on this week. It’s the unoffical “Catchup-Camp” over at my place.

I’m not entirely sure if this is a new feature or not, but I use analytics all the time (and if you don’t, you should promptly head over and sign up for an account), and I don’t remember seeing it until just a few minutes ago. It appears Google now has a new analytics section where you can track internal searches on your blog. So while Google Analytics already shows you how other people are reaching your site from Google, you can now see how people are navigating within your site based on searches within your blogging platform. To configure it, you have to go edit your website profile from the Google Analytics dashboard. Edit your main website profile and enable the in-site search capabilities. It will ask you for a custom search parameter which it will use to determine whether or not a search is being done. I’m not […]

I have, for the last few years, had an idea about something I’ve wanted to do involving technology. I was talking to Boris about this a while ago, and I’m pretty certain this actually has a real name and has been done many times before in various cities. But for now, I’m just going to describe what would happen, and we’ll decide an official name later (until of course Boris wakes up in whatever country he is in and chimes in). The idea is that over the course of one full weekend (that is, starting Friday at 7pm until Sunday at midnight) you get a team of people together to develop a product/service/technology completely from scratch. In my head I am thinking that it would be basically a weekend-long sleepover involving donated beer, good people, music, and tons of know how on various aspects of the web world and technology. […]

So, I’ve been meaning to ask this question for a long time. Yesterday I had a pile of traffic, thanks to a few inbound links from some massive sites. I broke into the thousands for unique visitors, which doesn’t happen that often in Duane-land. Given that only about ten people ever comment, I gotta ask, who are the rest of you guys? Nearly 50% of you are returning visitors every day, and yet you lurk in the shadows, thick as thieves I say. The lack of comments either means: I’m really boring YOU’RE really boring I’m pretty sure I am not boring all the time, which means it JUST MIGHT BE YOU! 🙂 So, if you swing by and read this, drop a quick comment and say hi! Tell everyone where you’re from and what you want for Christmas. Don’t be shy. If you’ve commented before, say hi anyways and […]

I heard little bits of pieces of this last night, but just managed to read the real blog entry today. Tony Pierce is going to be leaving LAist and will be heading over to the LA Times to run all of their blogs. Congrats Tony, that’s really awesome. First beer’s on me out in TO bud.

So tonight I was trying to figure out just how in the world I was going to go about merging multiple RSS feeds together. The end result I was trying to achieve was so my RSS feed on this site would actually have my entries from duanestorey.com as well as those from matthewgood.org. I sort of assumed that feedburner would do that for me, but it turns out you can’t combine your own RSS feeds using it. The solution? Yahoo Pipes. I had never heard of it, but after doing a quick search, I learned it’s the tool to use. And man oh man, is it cool. You can pick and choose different source elements, filters, operators and outputs, and make your own custom output, RSS or otherwise. Took me about 2 minutes to figure out how to merge two streams (using the Union Operator), and then output a sorted […]