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Weekly Live Internet Video Show

I have never made a peep about this side project here on my blog. For about eight months, now, I have been doing a weekly live video broadcast. The only mention it has gotten from me has been on Twitter, right before going live.

The Super Wicked Awesome Show
with Chris Tingom and Brian Shaler

Every Monday evening after work (6:30pm MST) Chris and I fire up a live video stream and chat room. We talk and joke around. We showcase great stuff we have found around the Internet during the previous week and weekend. We’re always good for a laugh and you’ll probably see something very cool that you’ve never seen before! Though, we don’t always show content. It just depends on how the conversation goes. The goal of the show is simple: Bring a half hour of awesomeness.

The main reason I haven’t been heavily promoting it is because it has been a slowly evolving side-of-the-side project. For the first 5 months, the web site was simply black text on a white background, saying “Super Wicked Awesome” with a timer until the next episode.

Lately, we have been recording the shows and posting them on the Super Wicked Awesome Blog. It didn’t make sense to spend time week after week and only reach the 10-100 people who would tune in throughout the live episode.

Tonight, the show took another gradual step forward. We are now providing a podcast feed, with iPod/iPhone-compatible video downloads. I submitted the feed to iTunes and it may show up in a week or two.

We’re toying with the idea of giving away free stuff. Does your company have cool stuff to give away? Let me know! We have a small but growing international audience.

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Sharing is Caring

I did something interesting to this blog. And by “interesting” I mean it’s interesting to me, but mostly because I’m a developer.

In the sidebar, at the bottom, there is a widget sharing cool blog posts from Phoenix-area bloggers. I use Google Reader and decided to start “sharing” items I liked. Google Reader provides widgets to share public feeds and it’s easy to create a feed and a widget for your “shared items.”

That is cool and I could have used it as-is, but the way it works is you drop some JavaScript code on your site and it will dynamically pull in the recent items when the page loads. To the end-user, this is fine, but what if I want search engines to reward those bloggers when I share their posts? It would also help, SEO-wise, to have pages on the blog updating more actively, however in a very minuscule way.

Time for the nerd talk…
To do this, I took the URL used by the JavaScript widget code, noticed the feed data is formatted in JSON in that file. I wrote a simple PHP script that runs on the server, fetches that file, finds the JSON part of it, decodes the JSON, builds the HTML presentation of the items, and caches that output in a file.

When a user requests a page on this blog, it serves it from the local file and reconnects to Google at most once per hour to update the text. That way, I’m actually decreasing the number of times Google is queried and not hitting it a bunch of times from one location (who knows, maybe they would block my IP).

So when you visit my blog, make sure to glance at that section of the sidebar to see what’s happening elsewhere in the Phoenix blogosphere!

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Sofa Jumping

SofaJumper.com

I traveled every month of 2008, sometimes multiple times a month. To cut costs and to make more travel possible, I’ve started crashing on friends’ couches. My employer BitGravity will cover a couple nights at a hotel when I visit the Burlingame headquarters, but I can save them money and stay longer (1-2 weeks) if I stay with friends.

The best part about it, though, is the fact that all of the people I stay with are really awesome individuals. There is always so much happening and so much to catch up on.

On a recent trip to New York, I found myself staying with a different friend every night, because most of my friends were traveling, hosting other visitors, or otherwise unavailable. In a conversation about this exciting couch-hopping trip (9 nights, 8 different places) with Mike Germano, he suggested that I tell the stories of these incredible hosts as I hop around.

And so, SofaJumper.com was born!

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A Goal For 2009: Blog-a-day For a Month

I made a video-per-day for a month a year ago, and it proved to be an invaluable exercise for all my future video production endeavors, especially live video. It also helped with my public speaking confidence and clarity. During that month, the videos themselves varied in quality and usefulness, but quite a few people told me they enjoyed most of them.

If you have followed this blog for long enough, you might remember that I was featuring blog posts from Phoenix bloggers every week for a couple of months. I may or may not get back into that, but when I travel, it’s hard enough to keep up with what’s going on in Phoenix. Reading all the Phoenix blogs I can find, filtering out the most interesting ones, and blogging about them proved to be a little more than I could squeeze into my schedule permanently.

I usually do these types of exercises with no end date, but this time, I’m going to make it exactly one calendar month. Starting today, I’m going to write about something every day. I might not write every day, but something will be posted every day here on this blog — meaning I may write stuff in advance and save it for days I don’t write. Also, since it is mostly about posting regularly, the posts may be short and they may even be video.

After January 31, I can guarantee I will not keep up the blog-a-day, but after that, my average posts per month will hopefully be higher. That’s part of the reason I call this an exercise. If you can run a certain speed when you’re out of shape, running every day for a month will very likely result in a faster pace thereafter. Until you get fat and lazy again, that is!

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Flash 10 Beta – 3D Twitter Visualization

Adobe released a beta of their next version of Flash Player. Flash 10 introduces quite a few new features, including native 3D support. There is no patch for Flash CS3 in order to create Flash 10 content. Developers can download the latest version of the Adobe Flex 3.0 SDK, and compile Flash 10 SWFs from the command line. Because Flash CS3 is not involved in this process, you cannot use an FLA (You compile directly from AS files).

Twitter Cloudy
(If you don’t have Flash 10, it will show you a video and links to Flash 10)

While you could make 3D objects in Flash 8 and 9 (using Papervision3D), it would still require quite a bit of time to learn how to use Papervision3D, and utilize a 3D modeling program. I created the spinning globe from scratch with about 40 lines of code.

I can’t wait until I get a chance to do more 3D stuff with Flash 10!