Jason Rundell

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One of the great things about WordPress is the ability to plugin new functionality effortlessly through it’s backend interface. Most of the popular plugins get updated very frequently and WordPress does a great job of letting you know this by highlighting which plugins have updates.

If you’re like me, this highlighted number screams for attention and you just love hitting that automatic update. This type of behaviour is fine for personal blogs which get very little traffic, but if your employment is based around blog performance for your company this can be a very dangerous move.

There are good updates and then there are bad updates

Keep in mind, these updates that come through are mostly from people who’ve created their plugin through their spare time and depend on their community for feedback on performance and issues. So when an update goes out the the WordPress world, there’s no guarantee that it’s gone through a stringent testing process.

README

Most plugins when they upgrade will have a log of what has been changed (a ‘changelog’) and these notes are available through a link under the plugins page. Make sure to read through this and gauge if upgrading is really necessary. Security fixes, performance boosts, and must-have new functionality are usually the only things worth upgrading for but you’ll have to judge on your own what’s best for your situation.

Have a development version and production version of your blog

It’s a pain, but it’s definitely necessary to have a mirror copy of your blog. Having this copy, your development copy, is where you can break stuff and not sit in suspense after you upgrade and start hitting refresh on the homepage – praying that your baby is still whole. When upgrading plugins, all you need to copy to the development server is the wp-content folder and I usually do an entire database dump because it’s fast, but you’ll need to configure your environment to take into account for any URL changes for you development domain.

For further information, please refer to the following:

WordPress.org Codex: Managing Plugins

The Google Buzz API was released in Labs recently and I felt like distracting myself with some fun. In a matter of 2 hours I had my own little Buzz feed widget going. Here’s the code I’m currently testing with:

View the working demo HERE.

Just make sure to change ‘/jasonrundell/’ on line 23 with ‘/[your buzz name]‘ and you’ll have a widget that will display your public Buzzes on any page.

Aside from the several object properties I’m using in this example widget, there are many more available to you to use and manipulate. Let me know what you come up with ;)

I half watched and half listened to the  the Day 1 keynote videos of Google I/O today and among the plethora of new and exciting features discussed was Google Web Elements.

Most of us have already used the copy and paste embed code for Google Maps and YouTube, but I think we should start paying more f attention to the other web elements listed currently on the Google web elements site. How can we best utlize them? The Checkout and Wave (now that Wave is public) elements look especially interesting to me.

Do you have projects that could use some Googleizing?

Cudos to @Chrishenanigans and @feliciaday for sharing the Trololo Cat YouTube video. I was almost in tears at work when I watched this vid!

Just look at this sexy machine!

Click the image for full specs and more screenshots.

And here’s some specs:

• Full HD 1080 60i HD Video (1920×1080) (note that it’s 60i and not true 1080p)
• 8 Megapixel Photos (3MP effective CCD)
• 10x Advanced Optical Zoom (video)
• 9x Optical Zoom (photos)
• 2.7 – inch LCD Display
• Exclusive Sound Zoom Audio Recording Mode
• High Speed Sequential Shooting
• Video and Photo Image Stabilizer
• Video and Photo Face Detection
• Object Chaser
• 38mm Angle of View
• Mini HDMI Output
• SDXC Memory Compatibility (over 64GB SD cards)
• MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 Movie Recording Format

My wonderful girlfriend, Donna, bought this as an early birthday present for me. She’s so rad. I can’t wait to try this VPC-CS1 out and start creating some interesting content for the blog Donna and I will be running together about our travels and experiences in Australia.

What initially turned me onto the CS1 was a review on the GizWiz episode 1042 via the TWiT Netcast Network (I love TWiT!). I started Googling for all of the CS1 info I could find and found a great little review by RGS (Random-Good-Stuff.com). After that, all I could think of was having this bad boy camcorder for my own use! Donna and I even managed to get Sean Ward of SeanWard.net and SeanWardSuperParty.com excited (twitterpated) about the VPC-CS1, enough to blog about it!

After calling Sanyo Canada, Henry’s, and BestBuy Canada all I was able to find out was that the VPC-CS1 would be in Canada, maybe, sometime in April. This was unacceptable! I wanted the cam in time before Donna and I were to leave for Brisbane, Australia (April 2nd). I WANTED IT NOW!

I’d had given up all hope of getting the Xacti CS1 before April 2nd until I wandered into a Black’s photography store by my work.

View Larger Map

I noticed this store had quite a selection of Sanyo Xacti camcorders and enquired about the CS1 (which was of course absent from the displays). The man there was incredibly helpful! He said it would be very unlikely that Blacks could get a CS1 to me in 7 days, but I could check out a photo and video site called B & H. When I got back to work and took a look on the B & H site, lo and behold the CS1 was in stock! And available to ship to Canada via UPS/FedEx in 1 – 2 business days!

Donna and I ordered the cam last night and anxiously await it’s arrival :)

Do you have a blog? Do you shoot video and images? What camera do you use? Are you thinking of getting a new one?

Let me know what’s up!

There’s only 6 days left to vote for my friend’s video on the Doritos Viralosity site! Please go and vote!

Playing to positivley change the world is already a reality Jane! You just have to spend less time in virtual worlds and get out there and do something you’re passionate about. Educate yourself and travel. Changing the world around you in a positive manner is a personal choice and not something you can trick kids into doing.

I enjoyed Jane’s optimism in this TED talk and I’ve been a gamer since I was 7 years old (27 years old now), but I firmly believe gamers will never be a resource to be tapped to change the world in a positive manner because the rewards from the real world are not the same as the rewards in their virtual worlds. World of Warcraft spends so much time in the game to win notoriety, weapons, and armor. I don’t know about you, but I think millions of people playing to win material objects of value and notoriety just sounds like the same thing going on right now in the world. Of course, I’m trying to apply that type of gaming in a very literal way to what Jane wants gamers to do. However, World of Warcraft is so HUGE because of exactly that model.

The more time spent – the bigger the reward. Jane’s badge/achievment approach is a bit off. You get badges/achievements as a side effect of doing quests and missions. The badge/achievement system does not work well as the reward. If I spend 2 hours a week helping a local farmer growing potatoes and I reach collecting over 2,000 potatoes, my reward should be a card that I can use at any grocery store to earn a 2% discount on potatoes, a new level of ‘Potatoe Picker level 1′, plus a badge like ‘Green Potatoe’. After 20,000 potatoes my discount would grow to 4%, or whatever, a new level, and a new badge ‘Hot Potatoe’. That sounds kinda cool, but take a moment to consider the amount of social restructuring we would need to pull off for something like that.

Here’s another game we could all play that’s actually possible right now: Donate $20 to save a baby’s life in a 3rd world country during the month of April.

Instead of playing this game every month, gamers spend it to keep playing online games for 1 more month. Now, I’m not trying to villainize gamers, but instead trying to point out that something deep down in society is critically flawed. I think a catastrophe is necessary to really smack us all on our asses. After, we will get back up, and rebuild but will we also keep repeating the sins of our parents?

Do you use Google Buzz? Do you follow Mashable.com on Google Buzz? Then the following idea I sent via email to bizdev@ might be of interest you.

Dear Mashable,

To start, I’d just like to say that this is an idea for you to use and not a business proposal. Now onto the idea :)

I’ve been following @Mashable on Google Buzz since the 2nd week Buzz launched. I like your approach to it but I have been noticing a lot of comments in Buzz from people who have preferences as to what content they would like to see from you. Also, I’ve read a lot of comments in back channels about how your updates take up so much page space in their Buzz feed every day (this is a common problem shared among other Businesses/Celebrities who Buzz).

I would like to suggest the following idea to you:

Why not create multiple Buzz streams that deliver specific content? It’s an an idea very similar to how you can create Twitter lists. Examples of Buzz streams you could set up:

@MashableSocialMedia – Buzz articles that appear on http://mashable.com/social-media/

@MashableMobile – Buzz articles that appear on http://mashable.com/mobile/

@MashableVideo – Buzz articles that appear on http://mashable.com/video/

@MashableAndroid – More granular than @MashableMobile, Buzz only articles that are related to Android

@MashableiPad – More granular than http://mashable.com/apple/, Buzz only articles that are related to Apple’s iPad

… etc etc etc.

I think readers would really enjoy being able to choose the content they consume in Buzz.

With your @Mashable Buzz account, you can create a digest of what’s being published in these channels. And when new articles are added through out the day, you can just Edit the original daily digest Buzz.

As for posting your periodic questions to users, why not post those within the related Buzz channels? I theorize with the content specific Buzz feeds you will have less of a “throw it at the masses and see what sticks” effect and instead have a higher percentage of quality conversations.

Personally, I can deal with muting the @Mashable topics I’m done with reading or have no interest in, and I have the patience to manage my Buzz stream when it fills up. However, take some time to think about the possible negative effects of ‘Muting’. I never Mute the Buzzes from friends – only from Mashable and news sources. Not muting is sort of like Bookmarking in Buzz. If I don’t mute it I can go back at any time using search to retrieve the Buzz.

Thanks for taking the time to read my email :)

Cheers,

Jason Rundell

I’d really like to see this idea to be adopted by them, so please let them know and maybe they will listen :)

You may not have heard of jwloh, but odds are you’re already a fan of his Social.me social media icons. They’re 30 free icons under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

I needed a Google Buzz icon to add to a site I’m working on, so I used jwloh’s icon template PSD and added these:

24px by 24px Google Buzz social media icon

24px by 24px Google Buzz social media icon

48px by 48px Google Buzz social media icon

60px by 60px Google Buzz social media icon

You can find jwloh’s Social.me social icon set here and his Aquaticus.Social.Social icon set here.

Or if you want to download the set from here with the added Google Buzz icon:

Social_me_by_jwloh.rar

Social_me_by_jwloh.zip

I’ve been working on a video contest project in PHP and it involves user’s submitting their videos from a YouTube link. I needed to show just thumbnails of the videos without having to use a full YouTube embed code. I really didn’t want to get my hands dirty with any kind of YouTube API though. So with a little bit of searching I found that YouTube creates multiple dynamic thumbnails for all of their videos when they’re uploaded.

For example purposes, I will use the incredible, mind-blowing, face-melter music video by DragonForce “Through the Fire and Flames”.

The URLs

In order to properly form a URL for the image, first you’ll need to grab the video’s ID. You get this from the YouTube video’s URL.
This DragonForce’s URL is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jgrCKhxE1s, so it’s YouTube ID is 0jgrCKhxE1s.

Now here are the URLs you have available …

120×90 image – Choice 1
http://img.youtube.com/vi/[YouTube ID]/1.jpg

http://img.youtube.com/vi/0jgrCKhxE1s/1.jpg

120×90 image – Choice 2
http://img.youtube.com/vi/[YouTube ID]/2.jpg

http://img.youtube.com/vi/0jgrCKhxE1s/2.jpg

120×90 image – Choice 3

http://img.youtube.com/vi/[YouTube ID]/3.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/0jgrCKhxE1sg/3.jpg

120×90 image – Default Choice

http://img.youtube.com/vi/[YouTube ID]/default.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/0jgrCKhxE1s/default.jpg

480×360 image – High Quality (HQ) Choice
(does not need to be an HQ video to have an HQ image)

http://img.youtube.com/vi/[YouTube ID]/hqdefault.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/0jgrCKhxE1s/hqdefault.jpg

480×360 image – HQ Choice 1

http://img.youtube.com/vi/[YouTube ID]/hq1.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/0jgrCKhxE1s/hq1.jpg

480×360 image – HQ Choice 2

http://img.youtube.com/vi/[YouTube ID]/hq2.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/0jgrCKhxE1s/hq2.jpg

480×360 image – HQ Choice 3

http://img.youtube.com/vi/[YouTube ID]/hq3.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/0jgrCKhxE1s/hq3.jpg

If anyone knows any other tricks, please share! :)

This post is a response to the following tweet:

@ju_bro: I just blogged about this, http://bit.ly/ghwfn, here, http://bit.ly/uLO1X Does Wente’s articles describe your uni experience?

Tweeted on September 21, 2009

Thanks for posting this Julie.

Margaret Wente’s argument in her article, to me, sounded very weak. She only interviewed two people and gave a few obscure and unsupported statistics (I always treat stats with extreme skepticism, especially when no background is given on them. As an aside, what is up with online articles not having any references??? I’m sure plenty of writers use web sites for research now).

I can’t really comment on the state of today’s post-secondary education, as I have none. The reason for that being mostly because I have never had the strong desire to take any courses. However, I think I do know what a great education experience is all about (from high school).

Please correct me if I assume that high school, college, university, and etc all have the experience of learning in common, as well as having students and teachers. I think the relationship between teacher and student is very important to learning and that both share the responsibility of education with the majority of the responsibility being on the student – not the teacher. The student is always in the driver’s seat with the teacher being the passenger. Over the life of the student, he/she will have many different passengers and it’s up to the driver what they take away from their passengers. This is why i see most of the responsibility of learning being on the student.

The teacher has a responsibility too though. As a passenger, you have an obligation of being accessible and patient. You’re not the one that’s driving, so you never know if you’re going for a quick trip to the store, or mud-running in a four-by-four. You can provide navigation, problem solving in all kind of situations, or just be there to listen.

As the teacher, you have the advantage of giving knowledge and wisdom. As the student, you have the advantage of choosing where you go and how far you make it.

The best year I had in high school (and it earned me honors) was in grade 11 where I actually spent time to stay behind class and ask questions. I really learned that there is no such thing as a stupid question, and that after I graduated, I would never see the faces of the students who gave me drity looks for enjoying my studies and so their approval of me mattered for shit in the long run.

Don’t mind the stares

- David Bowie

My experience in grade 11 sound very similar to what Julie Breau says in her response to Wente’s article:

I encountered the best and most encouraging teachers. And smart too! They had brilliant research projects of their own – though probably neglected because of all the time they spent with us -, and offered thought-provoking and enriching classes. I was never turned away when asking for help and further explanation. I would pop by my professors’ offices to chat about class, current issues and career preparations.

So why is there this general opinion of the education system being so terrible? Where is the real disconnect between a smart student failing in a class led by a professor who earns six figures a year?

I think, you won’t find it in statistics. I think, it is a deep social and philosophical issue. I bet, if you looked at the curve comparison between the evolution of technology and the evolution of the institution and methodology of education, you will see two very different curves. The tech curve is exponential and steep, where the education curve would be plateaued and slow. I think, that technology and education are irrevocably entwined. That technology is now moving at an exponential rate and we will continue to see the discontent a large portion of people have with the education institution.

So Wente: It’s easy to ask a couple people their opinions and then point the finger, but what have you really learned and does that give you the right to share your findings?

I started following @googleanalytics today and noticed their bio: “Tech support in 140 characters or less doesn’t work…”.

This makes sense, but to prove them wrong, here are some canned answers they can use for free:

1. Press F5 to refresh.
2. Restart your computer.
3. Upgrade your browser from Internet Explorer 6!
4. It works in Chrome.
5. Do not copy and paste someone else’s analytics code on to your site.

Sorry for not updating sooner. I’ve been very busy at my day job and afterwards with work on the next Project Peru site. My mind has been a-buzz all week!

So no, I didn’t win jack from the MoonFruit contest. Didn’t even get a “wow, this guy’s site idea sucks balls!” (or something along those lines) tweet from @moontweet.

Only one of my friends tweeted about it and left a comment on the site (thanks @DonnaVitan!) even after I e-mailed a bunch of people that I figured would totally help me out. Am I bit tweaked about that? Ya of course. Don’t want to make a sob story of a blog posty, but WTF?

What the hell happened here? Why was this such an epic fail in networking? This is something that will haunt for quite a while I think.

I know the people I e-mailed when to the site, and some people from Twitter went to the link I tweeted about (who knows if @moontweet was one of them). In 6 days, the site received 136 unique visitors, with 900 page views. That’s about the only thing that I found remotely successful about this little endeavour.

Sorry MoonFruit, I will work on my lame YouTube video acting and solarizing Photoshop filters for the next contest :Pem

Oh and the icing on the cake was that they ended up giving out morn 3 iPods after the creative contest was finished!