Online search giant Google recently made its foray into the formal social media sphere with its Google Buzz service. Tied into the popular Gmail web-based email client, Buzz was rolled out to Google’s approximately 146 million most active users, the company saying that a social network has always been beneath the surface of its email technology (WSJ.com). But even with the current social-media craze, many users were unhappy with what seemed to be an intrusion on their everyday social routines. We’ll look at some of these users’ comments and I’ll espouse what I see to be some of the possibilities that we might not be hearing over the Buzz. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, I know it’s probably too early to be talking about this, seeing at Wave is still in its preview. But I’m a little bit disappointed in it. This is probably just because the web app isn’t feature complete. Still, at this point I can’t see myself using it as broadly as it was represented in the announcement video.

For one, it’s just confusing to keep track of who is writing/changing what when you have multiple people working on the same wave. It’s also tough even to reply to other wavelets that are sitting there. Some of the UI still seems really rough and not at all intuitive. Maybe they’re working on this.

But I think that that is my biggest issue with it. It’s so confusing to work in that I just get turned off to it. At least in IM you know who is talking when. In Google Docs you can save and edit – though the changes by other people don’t display in realtime. I guess the collaborative part of it is the point. It’s a realtime wiki, basically. And I suppose that’s okay. But it certainly doesn’t feel ready for all of the other tasks it was suggested for when Google premiered it.

Oh well.

I’ve still got a few Wave nominations. Anyone want one? First come, first served. (You can also tweet @joelgoodman)

These are the slides for my week 2 class. It’s all about stylesheets and how to use them this week.

I’ll use these slides during my class on 07 September 2009.

I’ve started to migrate my sites to DreamHost. It’s been awesome so far, and I’m glad to FINALLY be with them.

Getting over to DreamHost has been a plan of mine since college, I just haven’t been able to afford it/have already had hosting.

In any case. DreamHost was super easy to setup, provides tons of space and bandwidth (unlimited) and is pretty affordable when you purchase in bulk. It’s also super fast. A lot faster than my previous host.

If you’re interested in using DreamHost, please use my email joel [at] thegoodmanblog [dot] com or click through this link. And, I’d love to answer any questions you have.

Ummmm… that’s about it. This weekend is going to be about getting everything moved over. Jessica has a new job and it makes her work some evenings. Which is sad. But I am hoping to use some of that down time to write music. I’ve been feeling the urge to write for a few weeks, so hopefully this time will be productive for me.

Hopefully there are some other exciting changes happening in the next few months, but nothing I can talk about yet. I have a couple cool projects going on and some other prospects in the works. Stay tuned.

DeanFields.com

Hey, hey. We just launched a new site built on WordPress and using my Prodigious theme.

I built the site for this guy called Dean Fields. He plays some pretty awesome folk-Americana-alt.country sort of music that you should check out. And you should also check out his fantastic new site.

A couple of things: Contrary to what the listing in portofolio says, we didn’t use the Gigs Calendar plugin (which is fantastic, by the way). Dean had a thing going with this ArtistData.com website and he organized all his shows there. The site was a bit tough to work with but I was able to get a raw XML feed to parse for the Upcoming Shows feature. That’s probably what took the longest. The “all shows” view is just an iframe from Artist Data — which I kind of hated to do, but it was the easiest and nicest looking solution.

As far as browsers go, I haven’t done much debugging for IE7 yet. But if you’re here reading my blog you probably don’t use IE7 regularly. Looks great in Safari and Firefox.

The “photo” on the front uses the jQuery Cycle plugin. It’s super cool and I’ve used it on a couple of other projects.

In any case, go check out his new site and his music!

www.deanfields.com

Yeah, that last post. Forget it.

I totally forgot about WordPress’ XML-RPC features and that I could use a service (like PixelPipe) to update it. I looked into using this new service called Posterous – but it was too restrictive in having to verify emails to be able to post that I had to abandon it. Doesn’t work so well when I have 6+ people needing to use the service to update the blog and Twitter.

But PixelPipe offers a common email upload and will update everything including YouTube. So. Awesome. That’s the plan. I’ll have to do some testing (and I think LunarPages breaks the XML-RPC capabilities… I can’t get it to work on this or any blog on my server) to see what the formatting is like, but I think this will be a better solution.

Pretty close to being done. I think I’ll end up putting it live on Wednesday of next week, when we start going out to the fairgrounds to hammer fence posts and do preliminary festival setup.

[sneak peak]

I tried to make it look more Twitter-y, I guess. That wasn’t really intentional, but it’s the direction it took. I’m using a plugin called Fresh From FriendFeed and Twitter which is a ridiculously long name. The author doesn’t give enough options in the backend, so I had to modify some of the PHP for this one project. It’s a little sad. I wish I could’ve just left it, but it was so convoluted.

Basically, the plugin monitors your twitter feed and imports your latest tweet and creates a post out of it. Cool right? Well, the instructions in the backend are a little hard to understand. I’m all for making language in your posts/docs sound cool, relaxed and comfortable (see how I write on agapefest.com), but not when you lose clarity of meaning. I’d like the settings to say things like: “Import each Tweet as a post. (We’ll refresh to keep you current.)” and “Import your tweets once a week/day/month” instead of the craziness he has in the backend.

One of the cool things about the plugin is that it automagically parses media from Twitpic and YouTube (and others) and creates the embed code while inserting it into your new post. Well, it would be cool if the images were given any classes whatsoever. Or if the layout had any classes whatsoever. Really. No classes. Metadata is there for the alt attributes… but not one class. So custom styling is a no-go without poking around in the plugin code and adding your own for each item. Annoying.

Also, every post title begins with “Fresh From {Service Name}” and you can’t change it in the graphical config. Once again, you have to poke around in the plugin code. Oh, and on top of that, by default it adds a filter to redirect all of your meta links (including permalink in headers) to the service URI. That means “leave a comment” takes you out to Twitter to leave a reply. And there’s not option to turn it off. It’s a cool idea, and definitely useful in some cases. But a on/off option would be killer.

So, I’ve had a few annoyances, but had no other recourse short of learning PHP to a degree where I could write my own plugin. Not conceivable for me at the moment, though it’s on my list. That, or the time will come when Twitter is ubiquitous and I won’t have to deal with so many visitors not having an account.

Apart from all the headaches, I’m pretty excited about this little experiment next week. Hopefully the plugin will refresh quick enough to keep things going (documentation doesn’t exist. No FAQ. Just a FriendFeed room that you, again, have to search through to find what you need — if it’s there at all). Otherwise I really may have to write my own plugin. Maybe I will for next year anyway.

Yes friends. A group of us on good ol Twitter livechat during LOST every week. Tonight’s episode is rumoured be Miles-centric (which I’m excited about) and should be FAN-tastic.

We’re loving the show this season. It’s been so great. So many questions answered, so much action… just. Awesome.

So, this is a formal invitation, If you live in and Eastern or Central timezone (or equivalent–we had someone in Venezuela join us last week, and we have a chatter from the Great White North every once in a while), come chat with us a few minutes before show start.

I’ll tweet out a link tonight, so if you’re not following me on Twitter, you’d better start!

Hope to see you there tonight! It’s gonna be awesome.

Brand spankin’ new in time for Easter to be ending. This is my new blog design for WordPress, my personal favourite platform to blog on.

It’s been about a year since I debuted a new design and I’ve felt long over due for a new style. I think this design (entitled Keep Calm) better represents my personality. And my Anglo-centrism (yeah, ask me about it).

I’m doing some tweaking to some aspects of it still since I developed it locally without my remote server setup and all its widgets and content. Widgets always cause problems And apparently so will Firefox. (It looks fantastic in Safari and other Webkit based browsers) In any case, it’s mostly solid and I kind of love the way it turned out.

Let me know what you think in the comments! Even if you’re not as ecstatic with it as I am, it’d be great to hear your thoughts.