Okay so this is massively outdated.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
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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.
I know I’m a total nerd. But not everybody is quite as geeky as I am, and you might not know about Diggnation. It’s one of the most popular internet shows, and is distributed by podcast network Revision 3. In the show, two guys talk about some of the most popular stories on social news Web site Digg.com. The hosts are Kevin Rose, one of the founders of Digg, and Alex Albrecht, a former Tech TV host and friend of Kevin.
The two of them recently went on Jimmy Fallon’s new late night talk show and pretty much took over the whole thing. They were funny, self-deprecating and interesting.
For a couple guys who usually film sitting on a couch at home, with two cameras, they didn’t seem nervous at all to be on national TV. Of course, they have some practice with an audience; their live Diggnation shows are extremely popular and well attended.
Check out this video to see Kevin and Alex on the show, which also gives you an idea of what Diggnation is like. Then head on over to Revision 3 and download some episodes. They’re free, so you’ve got nothing to lose.
I’m always looking for a way to display photos that doesn’t require coding or installing scripts, something that anybody can use. I think PictureSurf could be a good option.
Here’s an example:
Free Photo Gallery by Picturesurf
The free photo gallery maker can be used as an online tool, or installed as a plugin on Wordpress. The Web site also promises versions for Drupal, Joomla, Movable Type, Blogger and others are coming soon. Because this blog uses WordPress, I installed the plugin.
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