April 07, 2008
New Guadalajara Reporter site launches
A project I've been involved in since last October has now launched. The Guadalajara Reporter (where Megan works as a staff reporter) has launched the all new GuadalajaraReporter.com. Most of the content on the site is for paid subscribers only, but all newly registered users get a 1-day pass to the News section. Give it a try!
How about a little background on the project? This project has been 1 1/2 years in the making (although my involvement only began about 6 months ago). To begin with, the Publishers of the paper decided that their former site, which they'd had since 1999 was in need of a complete overhaul. After over a year of trying to work with a developer, they hadn't gotten much further than the initial site visual design.
In October of last year I approached the Publishers and proposed taking over the development of the site. My proposal included moving all of their existing content and users databases to a new system based on the open-source content management system Joomla. I also proposed to set-up a ad server based on the open-source tool OpenX. These two foundational systems would cost the company nothing and even with the inclusion of some commercial extensions for Joomla, the cost for software would be minimal.
Over the last 6 months I've worked very closely with the Publishers and have brought the site in less than half the time as the previous developer worked on the site and at the same budget as the initial developers visual design only.
The site is being hosted by the always wonderful Dreamhost.
Also, since the site just launched last night and since we are with a new host, you may still see the old site for the next day or more.
April 06, 2008
Someone pry that gun from his cold dead hands
Charlton Heston, crazy old coot, gun nut, finally dies.
January 14, 2008
Lame Show: Lame Predictions for Macworld
In this episode of the Lame Show Eddie and I try to predict announcements for this weeks Macworld Expo. We also answer some reader mail and have our usual fun with Picks of the Week and our usual complaining with the Lame List.
Also, I missed listing our two previous episodes, so if you didn't listen to them, here are the show links:
[Episode 23: Christmas Cheers & Jeers]
[Episode 22: Year in Review]
December 04, 2007
Lame Show: You can now purchase Lameness from our in-flight magazine
Back from a short break, and Eddie has his first Mexican Moment. We discuss the wonders of consumerism at 30,000 feet and move on to important topics like Mac OS X Leopard and Amazon's Kindle. I advertise a few items available for a limited time at eBay and we make our usual Lame List and Picks of the Week choices.
November 29, 2007
Photos from Cuba
We recently took a trip to Cuba and have just uploaded a gallery of photos for your viewing pleasure.
October 08, 2007
Lame Show: Zune not Lame?
A better sounding Lame Show (thanks to my new mic) this week when we talk about a lot of music related topics. We don't add the new version of the Zune to the Lame List and the picks of the week are both about new releases (although we haven't heard one of them yet).
October 02, 2007
Updated Photo Galleries
Megan and I have finally added some photos to our Living in Mexico - Year Two gallery. We've begun the process of transitioning our galleries to Picassa Web Albums from Google.
I like the application, but not as much as the custom solution that we had built to host our galleries on my own server. The big issue right now is that we can't find a tool to upload our photos to a self-hosted gallery software. I had used a iPhoto plugin called Photon (no longer being supported or developed) which allowed me to upload photos to our old galleries that were in a Movable Type blog, but unfortunately I can't get Photon to install on my new computer's version of iPhoto. We looked at moving to a dedicated gallery software, but the iPhoto pluggin that would be allow us to upload to that software is also not being developed. The obvious advantage of hosting our own photos is that there is no meaningful space limitations on my webhost (I currently have over 250 GB of available diskspace). Picassa Web Albums only gives you 1GB of space for photos. The other advantage is being able to customize the look and feel of our galleries.
Anybody have a killer self-hosted gallery solution that works well with iPhoto?
September 27, 2007
Lame Show: Ringtones are Lame
Another audience feedback starts off this show and we have plenty of lame things to talk about and a few lame jokes to tell. For the first time in a long while, we both have musical picks of the week.
September 10, 2007
Lame Show: Non-lame Listener Feedback
In our second episode after our summer hiatus we read and discuss our first reader feedback. We also talk about Apple's latest iPod announcements and have a very lame "Lame List" nominee and a couple good "Picks of the Week".
August 27, 2007
Lame Show: Let the Lameness continue
Eddie and I finally got back to recording the Lame Show again and this one turned out to be a good one. Because of the significant hiatus we have a lot of not-so-new topics to cover including the iPhone, but we did manage to talk about a few newer topics such as the new iLife. Go checkout episode #17!
On a completely unrelated topic, I do plan on actually writing on the blog more, so please keep you eye on this space. Updates are forthcoming, I promise.
