I live in the South, land of the fried okra, and apparently even my Chicago-born mother isn’t immune to the siren song of sizzling oil. She recently gave me some zucchini grown by her friend Dina, and suggested I prepare them with her recipe for Fried Zucchini Cakes.
Normally, I like my vegetables pretty plain, with some salt and pepper and maybe some butter — simple and fast. But I was feeling especially Betty Crocker-y, so I thought I’d give them a shot. Read more
Okay so this is massively outdated. The Webby Awards, which recognize online excellence, were held in early June. Here’s a listing of this year’s winners.
What’s great about the Webbys is that everyone is limited to five words in their acceptance speeches. No exceptions. Here are some of my favorites from this year’s event:
“Wait, we didn’t charge anything?” – Trent Reznor, Webby Artist of the Year
“Thank God Conan got promoted.” – Jimmy Fallon, Webby Person of the Year
Read more
My friend Tricia is a great photographer and really sweet girl, so of course when she asked me to help her re-launch her portfolio site I said yes. Previously, her site had been a standard Flash-based site – the kind used by many photographers – and she wanted something different and easy to update.
She’s already blogging on Wordpress.com, so I suggested she use a self-hosted Wordpress installation as her portfolio site. It will be easy for her to update, she can add functionality as her site grows and it’s much, much more search-engine friendly than her old Flash site. Read more
This map displays museums, parks, historical areas and other things for people to do in NW Georgia.
Some of the winners were announced recently in the Georgia Press Association Better Newspaper Contest, and yours truly was involved in a couple winning entries. The Rome News-Tribune, where I am Web editor, competes in division B, for papers with daily circulation of 15,000 – 40,000.
I won an individual award, placing third for best online news project. They haven’t announced yet which project won, but I’m thinking it’s either a page of local candidate information from the November general election, an interactive map of attractions and recreation in Northwest Georgia, or a special site I made to house all our coverage of the 2008 Coosa Valley Fair.
I recently finished working with a client on a project that had a lot of requirements. She wanted to be able to share videos online, with minimal fuss and no technical skill, and wanted the videos to be accessible only to those she wanted to see them. It was a pretty obvious choice to use WordPress, because of its ease of use. Here’s a list of the other applications and plugins I used to set up their site.
Convert videos to FLV
SoThink Flash Video Encoder
One of the few things the client had to purchase to make the site work, encoding software not only makes the video viewable online, it also drastically reduces file size. SoThink’s video encoder is $45 and is designed for Windows. But if you have a Mac, try iSkysoft Video Converter.
Upload the videos to the server
FileZilla
Each video file was at least 50 MB, so transferring files with FTP was the logical choice. There are any number of free FTP clients available. Though I use FireFTP on my own computer, it’s a FireFox extension and the client uses IE. So I recommended FileZilla, which is a great free FTP program.
Display the videos on WordPress
Wordtube plugin
I tried several different plugins for displaying the FLV files. I finally settled on this because it has an easy user interface that makes it simple to add videos to the backend, and places an “insert Flash video” button in the post creation window. It works in conjunction with the JW FLV player from Longtail Video, which is free for noncommercial sites.
Keeping it private
WordPress Password plugin
This plugin protects your entire WordPress site with a universal password. Just give it to anyone who you want to access the site. You still have to enter your own password to get into the admin pages. It’s also easy to change the password if you ever need to.
Social Homes