Tag: open source Posts

I’ll be going to BarCamp Vancouver in October, and one of the sessions I’m thinking about trying to organize is one about open-source business models. Given that BraveNewCode releases several open-source, GPL plugins, this is an area that I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about lately. Truthfully, our WPtouch plugin represents well over a thousand hours of work. For a while there, Dale and I both dedicated the majority of Fridays to updating and enhancing our plugins, including WordTwit. And while donations on these products are great, truthfully the amount received is only enough to buy a bit of beer now and again, and not enough to even come close to financing these projects directly. Obviously, our plugins have a lot of indirect benefits, such as increased exposure of our website and allowing us to be further involved in the community. But I believe there are ways to […]

Last night was Vancouver’s first ever WordCamp down at the Network Hub downtown. I got there about 15 minutes early, and was fairly amazed that it was already standing (or sitting, if you will) room only. There were so many people in fact, that they wrapped around the edges into locations where you couldn’t even see the projector. Clearly Vancouver has a very large and supportive WordPress community. Photo by John Biehler The open-source community in Vancouver is pretty amazing. Whenever I travel and tell others this, they are always suspect, like it would somehow be impossible for our little corner of the world to have any talent or innovation. And yet, I’m constantly amazed at the level of depth, the passion, and the good nature of most people in the Vancouver blogging community. A big thanks to the Network Hub and Tazzu for organizing the whole event, and for […]

I’ve decided to head back home for the weekend. I haven’t been back to Chilliwack since Christmas time, so I figure I’m long overdue. A whole whack of conferences start soon, and I’m going to by fairly swamped up until mid April. So, I’m going to grab a book and curl up on the couch back home this weekend to relax a bit. Also, for those of you that have been patiently waiting for more information about what was previously called “Startup Weekend Vancouver” or “Beer Camp” — the wait is nearly over. Stand by for the unveiling of the website along with more information.

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 […]

For those of you who don’t know, the Internet Engineering Task Force is a group of people that ultimately decide the technologies that will ultimately be engrained into the internet. UDP, TCP, SSL, HTTP – these are all examples of technologies that were originally put through the IETF before becoming standards. Next week, the 70th IETF meeting will be hosted here in Vancouver. A bunch of people from our company usually participate in the sessions, and I might swing by and check out what’s new and exciting. One of the best parts about meetings like this is that it brings together a bunch of the amazingly bright people in the industry that I usually only see once a year. I believe I’ve even offered my couch to someone during that time, and for sure there will be a few nerdy drinking sessions (assuming I can drink next week). I’ll probably […]

About six months ago I got it into my head that I wanted to play around with RSS technology and see if I could come up with something cool with it. That eventually turned into a standalone RSS reader I wrote for the Mac called TrollDigger. The one feature everyone liked is the ability to view the actual pages instead of the RSS excerpts. I haven’t touched it since then, and the version that’s currently available for download is a bit clunky, but I was thinking about spending a few hours on it this weekend. To be honest, lately I’ve been thinking about a completely GUI-less RSS reader. I’d like to be able to subscribe to feeds, and simply get Growl notifications when new articles are available. There can be a little drop down in the status bar at the top of the screen that I can click to view […]

Tonight I found myself down in the gastown area, having a few beers with old pal Boris Mann down at the Bryght offices. He was nice enough to invite me to some of the Thursday night BBQ lovin at his offices, and introduced me to the ever-sought-after “Save On Meat” store around the corner from the offices. Photo by Roland Tanglao Afterwards, I stuck around and hung out for the Drupal monthly Vancouver meetup and learned both about Drupal 6.0 and some of the Install Profile work that the guys at Bryght have contributed back. I’m in the process of setting up a new website with a different focus than this one, and I’m debating using Drupal as the core technology instead of WordPress. Boris suggested I swing by tonight for some cheap-meat marinated in Drupal. One of the more interesting things I overheard during the evening was everyone’s recent […]

A few months ago, I wrote a flickr plugin for wordpress that integrated with a few different image galleries including Lightbox and Greybox. As last count, 126 different blogs were using the crossroads plugin to show their flickr images in their posts. While updating my blog theme last night, I realized one of the current problems I have with most of the themes I downloaded. Typically, a theme will present the full content of a few blog entries on the main page. A few of the “cooler” themes I’ve seen only show one post on the main page, which is sort of a neat idea if you don’t write very often, but on blogs with multiple entries per day, it becomes easy for readers to miss posts. A more common approach I’ve seen on blogs is to show the latest entry in full and also show a few other entries […]

Well, it’s only been a little over a week since I open sourced the plugin used on this website. So far, based on the flickr API key statistics, it looks like 25 people are using it, which is pretty cool. A couple of people have emailed me a few suggestions, so I’m gonna try to release a new version soon incorporating some of them. If you are using it, then drop me a line and let me know!