FRIED ZUCCHINI CAKES

• 3 cups shredded zucchini (for me this was about 3 large)
• 1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese
• 3 tsp. parsley
• 1/8 tsp. garlic powder
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp. salt
• dash pepper
• 1 cup flour
• 1 Tbs. minced onion

Mix the ingredients together. Drop by spoonfuls into hot oil. Fry until golden brown. For me, this recipe made about a dozen portions.

Okay so this is massively outdated.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

“Can everyone get closer together.” – Flickr, community award

“Shinehart Wig Company thanks you.” – NBC.com Full Episode Player, broadband award

“Dude we got an A.” – Edutopia, education award

“I didn’t kill newspapers, ok?” – The Huffington Post, politics & blog award

“Robot sharks with lasers in space.” – Wired.com, science award

“Airna, will you marry me?” – Volkswagen Innovations, banner ad campaign award

“Read a freakin newspaper please.” – Detroit Free Press, sports video award

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.

One of the easiest ways to get started with Wordpress is to cutomize a pre-made theme or template. I pointed Tricia to ThemeForest, which I’ve used before, because the themes there are inexpensive and high quality. She chose one called PhotographerDream.

It features a nifty rollover effect on the home page, where it automatically displays the most recent images added to the portfolio. The top navigation displays a lits of categories, as well as pages and a link to Tricia’s blog.

The theme as purchased was purple and pink, but Tricia preferred a more understated black and grey scheme. I showed where to edit the stylesheet to make the changes, but being tech-savvy, she did all the customization herself.

The whole thing was completed in a weekend.

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.

Obviously, I’m really proud of this individual award, but I’m prouder of the first place award for a project I was in charge of. Our paper’s staff came in first in the Best Photo Gallery on a Newspaper Web site category.

The gallery was a collection of pictures from the first day of school here – every single school was represented. I was in charge of planning and implementing the gallery.

I had myself, two interns and three photographers available to hit every school. Before the day, I divided the county up into zones, and planned routes for everyone to get the schools in their zones. Most of us had 4-5 schools to photograph.

As the photos were turned in, I worked on the gallery. To present the photos, I chose the Simpleviewer flash gallery program. It’s free, and allowed me to use XML to post captions with each picture. One of my colleagues, education reporter Elizabeth Cady, even contributed her handwriting to be the header of the page.

This thing took HOURS to complete, and I’m so proud it was not only recognized, it was recognized as the top gallery that was entered.

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.

One of the kids, while learning how the newspaper works, had this question: “Where would the internet get news if there weren’t any newspapers?”

The question is so perfect you have to wonder if he was coached. Because what people who are celebrating the death of newspapers don’t seem to get is this: News doesn’t just fall off a conveyor belt onto the Web. Trained, qualified professionals provide the news that you read on Google and Digg, and bloggers wouldn’t have anything to comment on without news agencies.

Plus, you need the power of newspapers, magazines and TV networks to really dig into the news. These companies have resources that individuals can’t match, and the quality of the news would quickly slide downhill without them.

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.

Stephen Fry — The fourth most popular account on Twitter (after Barack Obama, CNN and Twitter itself). Stephen Fry is a British actor, comedian, national treasure, etc. He’s done a lot of work with Hugh Laurie, including the classic “Jeeves and Wooster.” Sample tweet: “In the meantime I’m childishly amused by waiter who’s just told me about promotion: in his accent ‘two vodkas and you get a turd free’.”

Jimmy Fallon — After years on Saturday Night Live, Jimmy Fallon recently took over for Conan O’Brien on NBC’s Late Night. Sample tweet: “Watching Conan’s last late night. Really funny. Really nice. I really enjoyed him on late night. He’s gonna be great on the Tonight Show.”

Leo LaPorte — In many ways, king of the geeks. He spent years on Tech TV and now runs a podcasting network called This Week in Tech (TWiT – not related to Twitter). Sample tweet: “I have to say I’ve never understood Olberman’s appeal. And I’m a flaming liberal. I can only imagine what conservatives think.”

John Cleese — British actor and comedian who’s been in everything from Monty Python to Harry Potter. Sample tweet: “There’s an interesting 50%-50% split here – people who think pet hates = animals, and those who know it means what you love to hate.”

Levar Burton. How can you not love Levar Burton? He’s hosted Reading Rainbow for like 25 years, and was Geordi — the banana-clipped engineer — on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Sample tweet: “WTF? My rating on IMDB has jumped by over 700% this week. Must’ve been the guy wearing the Reading Rainbow tee-shirt on The Price Is Right!”

John C. Dvorak — Another Tech TV alum, John C. Dvorak seems to relish his cranky reputation. He is a regular panelist on TWiT, and also appears on Cranky Geeks, No Agenda and Tech 5. He writes for Marketwatch, too. Sample tweet: “WOZ on dancing with the stars!! WHAT?!?!?”

Michael Ian Black — A comedian who instigated a “Twitter War” with LeVar Burton. He’s best known for doing VH1’s I Love The… series. Sample tweet: “If you thought Vermont maple syrup would be less expensive in Vermont than at Trader Joe’s, you were wrong. God, were you wrong.”

Jeff Cannata. An actor, Jeff Cannata is best known as one of the hosts of the video podcast Totally Rad Show, where he and two other guys review movies, games, TV and more. Sample tweet: “Just watched Man on Wire – so glad it won the oscar! Such a beautiful expression of the power of art.”

There are plenty of other celebrities and semi-celebrities on Twitter – these are just the ones I follow. The awesome Mike Rowe also recently started tweeting, but hasn’t used his account much, so I didn’t highlight it with the others. But if you like Dirty Jobs, check him out.

Here’s an example:

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.

PictureSurf is really easy to use. Just upload your photos, give them captions if you like and make some choices about size, colors, etc. The app takes care of all the geeky bits. If you’re using the Wordpress plugin, you do all this in your post admin. If using the Web site, the app gives you a code you can copy and paste into whatever page you’re working on.

One note: To upload more than one photo at a time, you’ll need Flash Player 10. Otherwise, you’ll have to use a browser-based uploader that allows only one photo at a time. And if you try to use the Flash uploader with an older version of Flash player, it doesn’t work.

What it looks like:

Your form will look a little different because of the styles on this page, but it’s pretty much what you see above. And now for the code:

<table style=”border-collapse: collapse;” border=”1″ cellpadding=”5″ width=”300″ bgcolor=”#ffffff” >

<tbody><tr>
<th colspan=”2″><font color=”#000000″>xx of xx precincts reporting</font></th>
</tr>

<tr>
<th bgcolor=”#dddddd” colspan=”2″><font color=”#000000″>Office 1</font></th>
</tr>

<tr>
<td width=”240″><font color=”#000000″>Candidate 1</font></td>
<td width=”60″><font color=”#000000″>xx</font></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><font color=”#ff0000″>Candidate 2</font></td>
<td><font color=”#ff0000″>xx</font></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><font color=”#000000″>Candidate 3</font></td>
<td><font color=”#000000″>xx</font></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><font color=”#000000″>Candidate 4</font></td>
<td><font color=”#000000″>xx</font></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<th colspan=”2″ bgcolor=”#dddddd” width=”300″><font color=”#000000″>Office 2</font></th>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><font color=”#000000″>Candidate 2</font></td>
<td><font color=”#000000″>xx</font></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><font color=”#000000″>Candidate 3</font></td>
<td><font color=”#000000″>xx</font></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><font color=”#ff0000″>Candidate 4</font></td>
<td><font color=”#ff0000″>xx</font></td>
</tr>

</tbody></table>

Obviously, this can be used for any table you need, and to make more categories, just copy and paste.