Trotz.com

Greetings and salutations. I’ve been longing to redesign ye olde Trotz.com for a few months now, and found it so very simple to quickly install Wordpress 2.0, pick a nice theme, and add a handful of enhancements during my lunch hour. I’m very pleased with the result - much cleaner, hopefully eaiser to use (note the font size control at the top of the right column). Shout-outs to Jerik One (developer of the Lush theme), PhotoMatt (creator of the Sidebar Widgets architecture), and the creators of all these fine widgets: Weather widget & Plugin, the FlickrRSS widget, Last.fm Covers, XboxLive Gamercard, Netflix widget and plugin, the Category Cloud widget. Please take advantage of the comments feature to tell me what you think!

Update: I’m aware of some problems with the navbar appearing in Internet Destroyer Explorer. I’ll work on this after our evening out tonight - if the margaritas don’t do too strong a number on me.

Tags: blog, widgets, wordpress

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]

Tags: blog, Miscellaneous, wordpress

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!

Tags: blog, wordpress

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! ;-).

Tags: blog, wordpress

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.

Tags: blog, wordpress

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.
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Tags: blog, wordpress

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.

Tags: blog, wordpress

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.

Tags: blog, wordpress

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.
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Tags: blog, wordpress

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…
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Tags: blog, wordpress