As you can see, I’ve been trying to push out some of these plugins that have been on my plate for a while. The Media Burner one is now officially in beta.
Media burner automatically extracts media files (MP3, FLV, YouTube, etc) from your blog posts and creates a site-wide player.
An example in actionIf you want to test it out, click on “Media” in the menu bar up top of this site, click here to test it. Head on over to the main page listed below for more information or if you want to download it.
The standard WordPress plugin database just fell over, so I have no way to tell the world about ...
Ok, clearly you guys are full of awesome today. The last person was indeed Rebecca Bollwitt.
Let’s see if you get this one.
If you know it 100% for sure (as I bet some of you are), then please save this for people who aren’t and want to guess! ...
Ok, you guys nailed round one. That cat is indeed Cid, part of the Raymi and Phil family.
So, I have a harder one for you. Name this person.
Bonus points if you can point me at the original photo or blog entry. ...
It’s here, Northern Voice 2008. Tonight is the big social down at the Tiki Lounge in East Vancouver. I’ll be heading down with Rebecca, John, and Keira for some drinks and a full roast-pig. I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to say at PhotoCamp, but I’ll spend some time thinking about it during the day and see what I can come up with.
Photo by Gary on FlickrEvery camera in my house is currently dead, so I’m frantically bouncing between doing laundry and charging equipment. I went to the mall to pick out some new clothes tonight, but turns out I’m just way too picky. I’ve ...
So, I didn’t start this challenge, but I gladly played along with it. I just checked, and I”m still in the #1 spot for Vancouver Blogger. The festivities tonight start at 6pm, so I’m assuming that’s when Northern Voice officially starts.
I was sort of expecting someone to fly ahead at the last second, and maybe that will still happen. But unless something major changes or Google does another index, it’s looking pretty good for camp Duane.
Anyone want to concede defeat at this point? 🙂 ...
Yes, it’s true. I’m officially addicted to vitamin C. I’m not sure how it happened really. I started taking vitamins recently to go along with my diet. Since the store had these fun sugar-free grape ones I thought, hey, what the hell. Turns out, they are like the best tasting things ever.
They recommend two per day, but I’m sure I had at least twenty over the course of the day today. It’s basically impossible to OD on vitamin C, so I’m not worried at all. Unfortunately though, the sweetening ingredient in these little bad boys is sorbitol, which is a type of sugar alcohol. Sugar alcohols ...
Well, this is interesting. I gave a few individuals an alpha version of the Viper Cache plugin I’ve been working on. It has just been reviewed on Anieto2k, one of the largest plugin sites. The author compared it against all the WordPress plugins available today for caching. The full write-up is available here.
The article looks like it is in Spanish so you’ll just have to settle for the pictures. Based on a few guesses in the translation, it looks like Viper Cache is the lowest in memory out of all four, and allows around 1330 pages per second on the test machine compared to the second place ...
Wow, what’s with this weather? It’s been absolutely gorgeous this winter. I’m lucky enough to have a bedroom with basically a full-wall window view of the downtown core, and every morning the sun reflecting off buildings wakes me up. It’s been rather nice having sunshine instead of the dreary rain Vancouver is known for in the winter.
I went out to Joey’s last night on Burrard Street to have some dinner with friends. It’s your typical Earl’s type restaurant with token hot girls and funky music. The food was pretty tasty though, with Cajun wings actually being served with a real hibachi ...
So a friend of mine pinged me online the other day and told me he had been laid off from a local company. I didn’t ask too many details because I was a bit busy at the time, but since then a larger picture has emerged.
Apparently the local company decided to pack up and head south of the border. And while a lot of permanent employees were laid off, they also slaughtered the co-op students as well. As someone who used to be involved in the co-op program, I can tell you that this is a pretty low blow. These students have precisely four months to earn enough money to get them through another full ...
You gotta admire people who can make fun of themselves. Here’s Michael Bay (director of Armageddon, Transformers, etc.) in a new commercial.
Thanks to John Bollwitt for showing this to me. ...
Yes, it’s that time again — Northern Voice, Canada’s awesome personal blogging conference, is kicking off this weekend down at the University Of British Columbia. I’ll be attending the whole event, starting Thursday night at the social, and finishing sometime on Saturday.
Friday is of course “MooseCamp”, an unconference where people come together and share ideas. I’ll be spearheading a discussion on WordPress plugins during one session, and will be giving a talk during PhotoCamp. PhotoCamp is organized and chaired by resident photo expert Kris Krug, and he has been organizing these ...
Yes sports fans, it’s 3:46am and yours truly is still wide awake. I’ve been lying in bed since around midnight try to sleep, but it’s just not happening. I caved in and popped a sedative a few minutes ago. I think I have to cut myself off from doing anything on the computer on Sunday nights and just read or watch movies instead. Whenever I get involved in something on my blog or some coding I’ve been meaning to do, I just have a really hard time turning my brain off when it’s time to go to sleep. Maybe I need to lay off the caffeine for a bit as well. Who knows.
Needless to say I’ll ...
There are a lot of different ways you can increase the speed of your website, even if you have relatively cheap hosting. If you’re lucky, your blogging platform already has a caching engine built in (Drupal does). If you’re unlucky, and running something like WordPress, you have to do a bit more work.
Caching makes a website more responsive because it takes an expensive operation (such as a long database query) and stores it so that next time it doesn’t have to recompute it entirely. For example, when you go to this website, normally Apache would execute PHP, parse the WordPress code, do ...
As most of you know, there are several popular methods for obtaining statistics for your blog. While Google Analytics is probably the most comprehensive one I know (with the added benefit of being free), it is limited somewhat by the fact the the statistics are not real-time. For most practical purposes, that limitation isn’t a big deal, but it’s sometimes nice to be able to see what’s going on within your website in real time.
On the recommendation of a friend, I splurged the $30 to finally see what Mint was all about. If you haven’t heard of it, Mint is a commercial statistics package ...
This has been a bit of a mystery for me over the last few months. I’ve slowly watched my technorati rating go from about 180 down to where it currently is, sitting snugly at 156 (although it was 159 yesterday). Considering it’s been climbing non-stop since last year, I’ve been a bit confused as to why it’s started to drop.
After doing some research, it appears that technorati has been busy changing things on their backend. Recently, they made it so subdomains no longer count towards main domain scores. This has hurt the rating of quite a few large blogs.
Prior to that change, technorati ...
Toshiba just withdrew their support, which basically means it’s completely empty over in the HD-DVD camp right now. Remind me never to be an early adopter again.
So, stay tuned for the HD-DVD burning party at a campground near Chilliwack. ...
So, it’s only been about 5 days since I started, but I thought I’d drop a quick update. As most of you know, I am a big supporter of low-carbohydrate diets, mostly because a great deal of research show they are superior for treating things like diabetes and heart disease, but also because I once lost a great deal of weight (with relative ease) by just giving up carbs.
Effectively, the last few days have really been a transition from a moderate carbohydrate to a low-carb one for me. I’ve been keeping accurate food, weight and activity logs, which should help me figure out what’s working ...