August 10, 2005
Stream Podcasts to your Mobile
Now you can stream a podcast to your SprintPCS phone using Pod 2 Mobile's Pod2Mob software, which is currently in beta. The company says it only works with SprintPCS because "they have the best data package," which allows for unlimited data transfer - handy for streaming long-winded podcasts.
(via Dave Winer's Scripting News via TUAW.com]
Posted by jetrotz at 12:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 22, 2005
Moblog & My New Treo 650
Yesterday, I became the proud owner of a Cingular Treo 650. This is an upgrade from my 2-year-old Sprint Treo 600. The biggest advantages of the new device is the muchly improved screen and backlit keyboard. The other advantage is that I'm on Cingular/AT&T's network. The GPRS network from Cingular already seems to trump Sprint's CDMA technology. And Cingular actually has an SMS system that works in timeframes of seconds, not hours. The other great feature is the higher-resolution camera. Shutterbug that I am, I had tried and failed to setup my old phone to transmit photos to my blog. But with the new phone, Versamail setup with my Trotz.com email, my account at Flickr.com, and good ol' reliable Moveable Type, my mobile photo blog is now up and running. The picture quality won't be great, but think of this as a modern take on Lomography. And it will probably be the first location we post pictures of Baby Trotz when that blessed event occurs!
Posted by jetrotz at 08:01 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
March 21, 2005
Kudos to CNN
Nice to see my employer, CNN, getting a tip of the hat from USA Today. CNN has created the first regularly scheduled segment on the blogosphere. Seen weekdays during Judy's Wooruff's Inside Politics, the brainchild of new CNN head John Klein launched on February 14th. Klein is quoted:
"We want to demystify blogging," Klein says. "We want to peel back all those layers and also do a reading of the blogs that our audience doesn't have the time to do."I couldn't agree more. Yeah, if you're reading this blog you probably have already heard most of what they talk about each afternoon - but the segment goes a long way toward educating the other 99.999% of America what blogging is all about. PS - They are using a couple of spiffy Macs for the segment. What's not to like! ;-).
Posted by jetrotz at 07:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 07, 2005
Blogging Soldier Gets Busted
While it's OK for a journalist to snap photos and speak his mind about what's happening on the ground in Iraq (see Kevin Site's Blog), this National Guardsman's honest talk about his experiences there have reportedly drawn the ire of THE MAN. BoingBoing reports on the demotion of guardsman Jason Hartley due to refusal to obey a command (stop blogging) and violation of OPSEC (operational security). Read his email about the whole process, and check out his blog - it's a very good read.
Posted by jetrotz at 07:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 21, 2005
RSS Madness
This is a site update. I've added a pretty slick feature to Trotz.com, a set of (for now) four headline aggregation pages, implemented with the spiffy PHP program 'zFeeder'. Listed on the left rail of most pages of the site under 'B L O G R O L L', these pages assemble RSS feeds from some of my favorite sites. It's a whole lot easier to check out these sites here, and visit headlines I'm interested in. Check them out, and let me know what you think.
The categories include:
DailyGeekOut: Sites like BoingBoing, Engadget, Gizmodo, TheFeature, Screenhead, etc.
News Feeds: Includes feeds from CNN.com and SI.com (where I work), The New York Times, The Boston Globe, etc. Easy way to glance at the top news of the moment.
Mac News: As a big Mac-geek, I need my daily dose of Mac news, tips and rumors. So here it is. Macslash, TUAW, etc. Good stuff.
MCE Feeds: I've been fooling around with Windows XP Media Center Edition for a while now, so this page lets me keep up with The Green Button, various Microsoft employee blogs, and hardware/software news from the gadget sites.
This is what got me going here. CNN.com (plus Money.com and SI.com) recently launched RSS feeds. Members of my team were involved in that effort, and I started thinking a lot more about how to use these. I've tried RSS Readers, but found that going to another application was always somewhat annoying - I'd rather do this from the browser. Part of the CNN RSS effort involves distributing these feeds to MyYahoo. So I spent quite a bit of time aggregating my favorite sites into pages there. I realized then that there were tools made for Moveable Type to do this, and tried a few. I eventually settled on zFeeder, a simple-to-install PHP system to acquire, organize and display RSS feeds.
Being PHP-based, the pages display the most recent RSS data, throttled by settings in the zFeeder admin system. So if I set updates to 60 minutes, you can hit reload all you want and the system will only go out to fetch new data based on that setting. Nice!
Posted by jetrotz at 07:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 19, 2005
Google: Just Say 'nofollow' to Comment Spam
Google blogged yesterday regarding a new initiative they are leading with the support of the major blogging software developers to implement techniques to block comment spam. This will be achieved through the use of a 'rel="nofollow"' tag in links. This will ultimately reduce the value of spamming our beloved blogs and hopefully stem the tide of these efforts. Until this is implemented, I'll still rely on the wonderful MT-Blacklist plugin. It rocks.
Posted by jetrotz at 07:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 22, 2004
Blogging from Iraq
The photographer who captured what could be the Eddie Adams moment of Gulf War II has posted a personal explanation of those events, addressed to the members of the squad he has been working and living with for many months. 'Kevin Sites | Blog' is a must read, offering insight into not only how a journalist must function in a war zone, but into the human side of this conflict. Now, in what is reportedly the first New York Times news story built entirely around a blog entry, the Gray Lady is covering this report (free registration required) in detail in today's edition.
Posted by jetrotz at 10:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 18, 2004
Now Playing with Fire!
In searching out cool things I could do with this blog, I happened upon the concept of using Kung-Tunes, a spiffy app written by a fellow living in Japan. Not being a PHP wizard, I struggled to get this to work correctly. Googling away on the subject, I happened upon a summary which looked intriguing. Damn - 403 forbidden - no help. I checked the Google cache, and viola! A *great* guide to using the HTTP-post feature of Kung-Tunes to send my currently playing iTunes track to a 'track-back' url in the blog. Confused? Read on for the background I grabbed from the Google cache.
kung-tunes primer, borrowed from s-phase.com
It really is straightforward. First download the application from here. Then check out the author's instructional blog entry.
This is oriented to Movable Type users who have the TrackBack function built-in. Normally this is a cool way for weblogs to easily refer to one another by pinging to a .cgi script. The latest version of Kung-Tunes takes advantage of this by using the "HTTP POST" method to ping iTunes info to the mt-tb.cgi in your Movable Type installation.
So, once you've downloaded the app, go to your Movable Type website's control panel and select the appropriate blog (assuming you have a couple). In the sidebar on the left, select "Manage/Categories" and create a new Category called "nowplaying". Click on the "Save" button and wait for the screen to refresh. Now "nowplaying" is added to the list of Categories you already have running. Click on the "Edit category attributes" link next to the "nowplaying" field. Here you can add a description of "nowplaying", but the key is to scroll down to the section "Incoming Pings" and click the "On" radio button for "Accept incoming TrackBack pings?" Click the "Save" button. The screen will refresh and you'll see below the "Incoming Pings" section a new section headed "Trackback URL for this category". In the box below will be an URL that looks something like:
http://www.yourfavoritewebsite.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/4
This will vary depending on how you installed Movable Type, and the numeral after mt-tb.cgi will vary (I think). Copy this URL into your clipboard.
Now go back to your blog's management sidebar and click "Templates" and select "Main Index". At this point, for prudence's sake I'd copy the original "Main Index" template to TextEdit in case you goof. Now Kung-Tunes's author doesn't recommend just cutting and pasting the HTML that inserts your iTunes track info directly into your template, but assuming your template HTML is straightforward (e.g. the standard column layouts), this is quite doable. I have a heavily modified version of one of the templates that come standard with Movable Type and knew exactly where in the right hand column I wanted to insert my "Now Playing" section. Here's how it looks for me:
<div class="sidetitle"><br /> Now Playing<br /> </div></p> <div class="side"> Below are the tracks I'm currently listening to on iTunes 4:<br /> <p><MTPings category="nowplaying" lastn="5"><br /> <$MTPingExcerpt$><br /><br /> </MTPings><br /> </div>
So the "MTPings category" is the new "nowplaying" category we created where "lastn" refers to the number of most recent tracks you've listened to.
Now open Kung-Tunes and select the "Preferences" panel from the Kung-Tunes Menu. Make sure the "Upload" tab is selected and that the "Upload Method" is HTTP. Paste in the TrackBack URL into the "URL:" field. Make sure you delete the "http://" from that URL. Kung-Tunes automatically inserts this and otherwise you'll be left scratching your head why you keep on getting "Type 6 Errors" whenever you try to upload iTunes data to your blog. It took me an hour to find this boneheaded error. Click the "Save" button. As is advisable with any program, if a "Console" is available, open it if you're having trouble; it's much easier to spot silly syntax errors if you can see what the application is telling the server.
Otherwise, the defaults in this panel are fine. Next, select the "Formats" panel from the menu and delete everything from each of the fields and paste
title=itunes&url=foo&blog_name=myblogname&excerpt=^t by <b>^p</b> (^a)
into the "Format for currently playing track" field. You can play around with the tags later if you want to customize how the tracks are formatted. Also make sure to enter your own blog's name where you see "blog_name" above. It's the name you specified in the Movable Type control panel. Click the "Save" button.
You should be set now. Fire up iTunes. Kung-Tunes should show your track info. Click the "Upload" button and a small bit of text with your track info that's saved in your /Library/Preferences directory should be sent to your Movable Type installation's "mt-tb.cgi" and published on your website.
This primer isn't radically different than the author's own directions, it just clarifies some points.
Posted by erich at May 04, 2003 03:27 PM
Posted by jetrotz at 10:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
1,000 Words
So, I installed the MTPhotoGallery Movable Type plugin today. See the results at the upper left of the home page of the blog. Spiffy, no?!? This plugin allows display of image files based on various parameters. In this case, I've set it up to pull a non-thumbnail sized image from our honeymoon photo gallery. There are a few hundred pics in there - so repetition shouldn't be too frequent. On top of that, I installed the MT-Rebuild module. That let's me setup a cron job to regularly regenerate the blog, and update the picture. It's supposed to update just after midnight - but it seems to update more frequently. More reading on CRON required now. Yawn...
Being only an amateur geek myself, I had to do some serious googling to figure out how to edit the crontab, and more frustratingly, how to exit the editor within my ssh connection. For those geeks out there, here is a recap of the commands.
Crontab editing commands:
crontab -e - generates a new crontab if none exists, or edit the existing one.
crontab -l - lists existing crontabs
crontab -r - deletes all existing crontabs
Once you are in the editor (vi? em? I just don't know what it is, actually), you can type 'i' to begin inserting copy, and ctrl-c to return to 'command' mode. Once you have your entry correct, typing :x exits, saving changes while :q! exits, ignoring changes.
Here is the crontab I have running for this blog to run each day at 12:05am:
05 00 * * * /mt/mt-rebuild.pl -all
Posted by jetrotz at 11:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack