Photography Contest Update

It’s nearing the middle of August and I’m sad to say that although there are 4 members who have joined the Flickr group, no one as of yet, has submitted any entries. Up for grabs is a free, 1 year Flickr Pro membership which will be awarded to the person who submits a photograph that best represents Web2.0 in the real world.

To enter this contest, click on the image shown above, or the one on my sidebar. The contest ends on August 31st but if there are no entries by that time, I will extend the contest for another month. Web 2.0 surely has to exist in some or fashion outside of the interweb right?

Some Ideas I Had – Feedback Needed

I just wanted to pass along some ideas I had concerning this site. Your feedback to these ideas or perhaps some of your own would be highly appreciated. The first idea is, creating a live chat area where visitors of this site can get together to chat about the various topics this site covers.

The chat room could be available 24/7 or I could schedule chats which would occur at a specific date and time. I was going to give this a try tonight using Meebo, but I experienced an enormous amount of problems.

The second idea is attaching a forum to the site. The forum would contain sections that would cover the various topics covered on this site. It would open up yet another, community avenue for this site where like minded individuals can get together and talk about what’s going on. I’m not sure if this site has enough traffic, or if the readers of this site would have any interest in becoming a participating member of the forum, so do me a favor and let me know if you like the idea.

If I decided to attach forum software to this site, I would us Vbulletin. Vbulletin is still the best forum software in my opinion and I have a few years of experience using it. I know of an Ajax powered shoutbox which could be used by the forum members as a chatroom, which would solve idea #1. The only problem with using Vbulletin is the price. It currently costs $85.00 for a lease of one year. I’d be willing to chip in $20.00 towards the price, would anyone else be willing to donate towards the forum? If so, let me know.

Those are the ideas I had floating around in my head and I figured I’d toss them out here to see if there were any takers.

Simple Content Creation Using Texty

For webmasters who do not have the luxury of using a WYSIWYG text editor to publish posts, Texty as mentioned on Techcrunch comes in real handy providing a way for anyone to use a rich text editor to create dynamic content.

Synopses:

One of the best features found within most dynamic content management systems is the text editor used to write articles. These text editors give users an abundant amount of options while providing an ease of use factor, allowing virtually anyone to style, format and configure articles without having to know HTML. With that being said, there are still a ton of static websites that are being used today which require users to edit the page within a text editor of their choice such as Dreamweaver or CoffeeCup, require HTML knowledge to create, and last but not least, an FTP connection for uploading those pages to your site. Texty aims to eliminate most of these mundane processes. Continue reading →

Ajax Edit Comments 1.1.1.0 Released

Reader Appreciation Logo Ronald Huereca has released a new version of his plugin, Ajax Edit Comments, which gives users and guests the ability to edit their comments similar to the way that comments can be edited on Digg.com The latest version includes a couple of bug fixes, most notably dealing with UTF-8 encoding.

The following issues were addressed in this release:

Admin were able to edit, but non-admin couldn’t. This was caused by the timer offset in the WordPress admin panel.
MySQL errors resulted in the comment unable to save. This was caused my blogs and MySQL database not in UTF-8.
Some characters were being screwed up when saving to the WordPress database. This issue was caused by non-UTF-8 back-ends.
The blog would be inoperable in Internet Explorer due to multiple session headings being called.
Random loading comment failure on WP 2.2.2 installs.

The issues (with the exception of issue number 4) can occur on a case-by-case basis depending on blog configuration and character set.

Be sure to visit The Readers Appreciation Website to pick up the updated version or to grab it for the first time.

Email Subscription Now Available

Email Subscription Options Page I’ve been meaning to do this for awhile but time hasn’t been on my side. As of now, you can now subscribe to this blog/site by way of email. I realize that not everyone uses a web based feed reader or a stand alone feed reader, so I have given those readers the chance to subscribe via email. Using FeedBurner, I was able to make the HTML based emails look pretty similar to how the articles look on this site.

Emails will be sent out everyday between the hours of 11PM and 1AM. If you would like to subscribe to this site via email, click on this button or alternatively, you can Click This Link To Subcribe. Those of you who do subscribe, please provide me with some feedback to let me know, how it works out for you.

Turn WordPress Into Personal Hub

Wordpress.com Logo Sean Aune from Mashable.com has put together a useful list of 30+Tools that help turn your WordPress blog, into a personal hub of information. Using your blog as a central hub, allows you to keep in touch on multiple networks using one site.

I’m not sure which of these tools I might install onto this WordPress install because I think, most of the subscribers to this blog are looking for useful information, not a series of posts which are nothing more than clippmarks that I have found on the web. However, installing one or two of these might help out on those days when I can’t think of anything to write, yet I need to put some sort of content onto this blog.

With more of our lives being lived online, it’s nice to centralize our media as much as possible. New aggregated social networks are springing up, but did you know you can do much of this already from your blog? These 30+ WordPress tools will help you display and run more of your digital life from WordPress itself.

Some of the tools include, Blogmark Integration, Facebook Comments, StumbleCrumble, MeeboMe Plugin, WP-ICQ-Status, MasterWish, Phoogle, and Facebook Photos. Check out the entire list by reading, 30+ Tools to Turn WordPress into a Personal Hub

If you happen to install and use any of the tools listed in that article, please let me know how they worked out for you.

Break.com Unviels Customizable Video Player

As reported by Mashable.com , Break.com has unveiled a new feature which allows users to customize the embedded video player to their liking similar to YouTube.

You must have a registered account on Break.com before you can create your own embedded player. Users can choose between a preset design, or you can customize the player through a series of background colors and text.

Break.com is my favorite video site that I have been watching for over two years now. I’m happy to see them keeping pace with the other video sites out their on the net. This is a crowded space to be in right now but, I feel that Break.com will hang around for quite a long time as the videos they have on their site are first class comedy. Here is a video, which highlights the new customizable video player.

http://view.break.com/345588 – Watch more free videos

iWebTools Visual Page Rank Checker

Using this tool will enable you to view all the links along with the pageranks on the page that you require to view.

For those that do not have the SearchStatus FireFox extension which shows you a sites pagerank along with it’s Alexa ranking, can use this site to figure out the page rank of not only that web site, but of all the sites that link to that particular page.

Giving this tool a try using my URL, I noticed just how many sites I link to which have a page rank of 5 or higher. The visual pagerank checker loads the website in question and then places little pagerank icons next to every link within the website. What is interesting about this tool, is that, I can actually view the page rank for a tag which is linked to Technorati. For example, the tags blogger, podcasts, seo, and twitter all have a pagerank value of 6.

Give this tool a whirl yourself and let me know what you think. http://www.iwebtool.com/visual_pagerank

Zeusbox Releases Free FeedIcon Set

Zeusbox has released a free RSS Feed icon set under the Creative Commons 3 license. The icon set contains 34 PNG icons which range in size from 16 pixels to 32 pixels. Zeusbox has stated that they will update the icon set, so if you have any requests, be sure to visit their site and leave a comment. Zeusbox asks that the requested icons be related to FEEDs. You can download this stylish icon pack by clicking here.

Ajax Powered Password Strength Meter

Code and Coffee has put together a password strength meter using Ajax to check the strength of a given password in real-time. Google and other web services are picking up on the trend of using these meters to inform new users, just how strong their chosen password is.

Using Code And Coffee’s demo page, I typed in the password, ( password ) and the meter read, VERY SECURE. Obviously, the algorithm needs some work, but the good news is, you can actually change the way the algorithm works. Code and Coffee decided to base their password algorithm off of Intelligent Web. Their algorithm calculates how many different combinations there are for a password, as it’s being entered, then determines how many days it would take to crack the password. The algorithm returns a percentage that is turned into a GUI for end users to see.

Code and Coffee has released the javascript file along with the demo.html page that you would need, in order to add one of these password meters to your site or service. There is also a detailed explanation as to how the code works which can be read, by clicking here.

Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff

The Musings Of Jeff Chandler

Month: August 2007