Category Archives: Gadgets & Apps

A new website for under $60.00

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On Thursday of this past week one of our company websites “broke.” That’s my non-geek analysis. It wasn’t the first time and we knew it wouldn’t be the last, so –with the support and encouragement of our IT department– we decided to just flush it and start over.

At noon on Friday I installed a new WordPress theme ($59.95 from StudioPress) and started copying and pasting content. By four o’clock, I was pretty much done. Here’s a screen shot of the work-in-progress:

Learfield Communications is comprised of two operating divisions: Sports and News. We have a corporate website; a website for the sports division; one for the news division; and one for each of the networks that make up the news division.

The news division site was a challenge because we really didn’t have any dynamic content for the site and I hated putting up a “brochure” that never changed.

The WordPress site we tossed together in a few hours on Friday afternoon won’t win any awards but it will allow us to do things we couldn’t before. Like video. It’s becoming much easier to shoot, edit and host (yea YouTube and Vimeo!) video, so it makes sense to include it. WordPress has endless plug-ins for this task.

And WordPress is just a very good content management system, at least for our needs. I’ll be able to show folks in our marketing department how to create and update pages which makes it possible to keep the site fresh and current.

WordPress is very social-network friendly. Flickr, YouTube, Twitter… wherever you have content, you can quickly incorporate it.

The effectiveness of this –or any– website will be measured by the quantity and quality of the content and ease of interaction with the people who visit it. WordPress delivers.

It would have been easy to spend a couple of months a  few thousand dollars getting a simple site like this developed. I can now take that money and time and go improve some more of our sites. [END OF COMMERCIAL]

All I need is this bowling ball. And this ash tray.

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Steve Rubel lists five ways in which he is simplifying his technology:

  1. Eliminating any bookmarks, software/webware that I haven’t used in the last seven days
  2. Cutting back to two devices for everything – a laptop and a cell phone. Period, end of story
  3. All critical data seamlessly syncs between these two devices. If a service doesn’t allow me to sync stuff via the cloud and access it both online and off, it’s toast
  4. He’s dumped tons of of stuff: RSS feeds and virtually every email newsletter
  5. Setting up lists on Friendfeed to help me find signals in the noise

That sounds really good to me. I’m feeling more cluttered every day. Too many atoms, too many bytes (bits?)

  • #1 will be a snap for the bookmarks. I’ll have to nut up to kill some of the software I’m not using. Wish me luck.
  • #2 is equally appealing. I could get by with my MacBook and my iPhone. But the big iMac at work belongs to the company, so… and the Mac Mini at home really gets very little use.
  • #3 The whole Mac/Mobile Me experience has made me very reliant on sync’ing. I have a couple of apps that don’t but not many.
  • #4 is pretty easy to do. Got my RSS subscriptions under 50. If I add one, I’ll try to find one to delete
  • #5 I’ve never been able to get with the Friendfeed thing. I’ll take another look but…

Mobile Media

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Hard to beat the iPhone for audio and video if you want immediate and easy upload to YouTube. The stills are not as good as the Casio delivers. (Can you guess which took the photo below?)

sunset

Posterous is fun and easy but not sure that it gives me much that Twitter does not, especially since YouTube now talks to Twitter. There is something about seeing the media nicely presented, in-line on the Posterous page, but you have to get folks there. I’m looking forward to seeing how Tweetie gets video from the iPhone to my Twitter stream.

It all gets a little confusing with literally too many choices. But I do like being able to share the media quickly, even a some sacrifice in quality. I’m guessing I’ll wind up using Twitter, YouTube and Mobile Me for on-the-fly. The blog will get posts like this, after I’ve had a time to reflect and look more closely at the available media.

Sheryl Crow Posterino

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I started playing with Posterino a couple of weeks ago and finally got around to creating my first poster. More on that in a moment. For those that missed the earlier post, from the Posterino website:

“We shoot a lot of marvelous pictures, bury them deep down in the file system of our computers and most of them never see the light of day again. The solution is simple: Compose a “best of” poster every couple of months and pin it on the wall in your hall.”

For my first poster I decided to use images of Sheryl Crow. I’ve collected a bunch over the years, almost all taken by others. (You’ll recognize your photos, I hope)

posterino-sherylcrow500

With enough time and patience (and Photoshop), you could create this montage one image at at time. With Posterino, you decide the size and layout of the poster… pick the group of photos you want to use… and hit go. If you don’t like the result, you shuffle. I didn’t spend a lot of time arranging image. I liked the randomness Posterino provided.

Then you just send the image off to a print site and you have a nice poster to hang on your wall. I sent this one to uber-fan Ann (who took some of the non-Sheryl pix in the group).

Oh, one more thought on this. While lots of people have some of the images included in the poster… nobody has them all. Except me. And, now, my friend Ann.

My first iPhone video

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Forget for a moment that I have the iPhone in portrait orientation, and check out the quality of this brief walk through the newsroom. I’ve uploaded videos to YouTube from all kinds of cameras: Sony Camcorder; Flips; my beloved Casios; the MacBook iSight.

But I don’t think I’ve ever ended up with a clip that looked and sounded this good. I know, could be some Cupertino Mind Trick but I think I’m correct on this point. And the iPhone has YouTube option built right in.

iPhone jumps the shark

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waslshiphone200Missourinet reporter Steve Walsh showed up for work on Thursday with a brand new iPhone. Like most of the folks in the newsroom, Steve is a long-time radio guy who remembers what a splicing block is used for.

All of our reporters know how to post stories to the web and about half of them are getting their Twitter on. But it was nice to see Steve invest his own hard-earned journo bucks in the latest tech. (I’ve encouraged him to take advantage of the 30 day grace period and upgrade to the new iPhone)

I can’t wait to see how Steve uses the iPhone to cover and report the news. To help him along, I thought I’d make a list of some apps that might be useful. I have these on my phone but the list is far from comprehensive and I welcome your suggestions in the comments.

  • Google News Reader
  • Tweetie – my Twitter client-of-choice
  • TweetMic – For recording audio and linking to Twitter
  • Camera – Comes with phone. Stills and video
  • Photogene – Great for cropping and tweaking still images

Steve does most of the heavy lifting for the Missourinet blog which can be found at Missourinet.com.

iPhone MobileMe

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iphone-returnI got a brief look at the new OS for the iPhone yesterday and must say I was impressed. Copy and paste works smooth as buttah. And a bunch of other stuff I didn’t get to play with but the feature that made me squeal like a 12 year old girl was one I had not heard about. From the iPhone website:

“If you misplace your iPhone, MobileMe can help you find it. Log in to me.com to view a map that shows the approximate location of your iPhone. If it’s nearby, have it play a sound to help you find it, or display a message on the Home screen to help someone return it to you.

Your iPhone contains information you don’t want in the hands of a stranger. So if you lose your iPhone and displaying a message on it hasn’t resulted in its safe return, you can initiate a remote wipe and restore factory settings. If you eventually find your iPhone, you can restore your data by enabling your MobileMe account on iPhone.”

How about this option? If you know your phone is stolen and being used by the thief –or someone he sold it to– you turn the phone on and make it play a pre-recorded sound clip: THIS TURD STOLE MY IPHONE! Over and over.

My new phone arrives this Friday and I confess I’m a little giddy with anticipation.

PS: If you click the headline of this post it displays the “related posts” feature we added yesterday. One of which is from a year ago, titled: “Why no iPhone for smays.com.”

World’s first Bluetooth webcam

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webcam“The new Ecamm BT-1 combines high-quality video and sound with complete freedom from wires. The new webcam integrates advanced technologies to allow video and sound to be sent through the air to most any Mac. The BT-1 streams 640×480 H.264 video and AAC audio to video applications such as iChat and Skype, taking advantage of Mac OS X’s rich media capabilities to provide a seamless wireless webcam experience.”

This rascal is about half the size of an iPhone. As for video and audio quality? We’ll take her for a test-drive in the morning down at the Coffee Zone.

Searching smays.com

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If you’ve used the search feature here at smays.com since the move, you’ve probably noticed it’s not working very well. We’re hoping this straightens itself out as the Google bots crawl find everything again. If there’s a particular post you can’t find, email me (link in sidebar) and I’ll go up in the attic and try to locate it for you.

UPDATE: Just switched from Google search widget to WordPress widget and it seems to be finding everything fine. Gotta love that WP.

“How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live”

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That’s the title of an article by Steven Johnson in this week’s Time Magazine. Here are a few snippets:

  • “This is what the naysayers fail to understand: it’s just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorker article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit.”
  • “Instead of being built by some kind of artificially intelligent software algorithm, a customized newspaper will be compiled from all the articles being read that morning by your social network.”
  • “It used to be that you compulsively checked your BlackBerry to see if anything new had happened in your personal life or career: e-mail from the boss, a reply from last night’s date. Now you’re compulsively checking your BlackBerry for news from other people’s lives.”

But the real money-shot of the piece (at least for me) is Johnson’s prediction (is it still a prediction if it’s already happening?) on Twitter’s influence on advertising.

“Today the language of advertising is dominated by the notion of impressions: how many times an advertiser can get its brand in front of a potential customer’s eyeballs, whether on a billboard, a Web page or a NASCAR hood. But impressions are fleeting things, especially compared with the enduring relationships of followers. Successful businesses will have millions of Twitter followers (and will pay good money to attract them), and a whole new language of tweet-based customer interaction will evolve to keep those followers engaged: early access to new products or deals, live customer service, customer involvement in brainstorming for new products.”

This is the best thing I’ve read on Twitter to date.