While at Gnomedex this past weekend, there were numerous mentions of “PodCasting”. I had heard of this briefly in the last couple of weeks, but had not looked into it yet. There seems to be a lot of buzz around this simple but interesting concept. Basically, it’s an application of audio enclosures within an RSS feed. A special aggregator automatically downloads the audio files (perhaps overnight) and pushes them to the MP3 device. A lot of people are now publishing internet talk shows and other content in this way and it seems to be gaining a ton of momentum. I’ve…
I finally got around to upgrading this site from MovableType 2.66 to 3.11 (the latest). I wanted to upgrade just to get the latest plugins and to explore the new capabilities. Plus it gave me an excuse to back up my site which I’ve done only sporadically. With improved handling for comments, I might turn them back on. In fact, a day after upgrading, I got my first comment spam, but it was easily deleted from my approval queue before it hit the site.
For a while now I’ve been using Textile when writing weblog entries. Textile — the “Humane Web Text Generator” — lets you use simple markup tags in your text rather than trying to write HTML by hand. For longer articles, I tend to write them in straight HTML in my editor, running them through Tidy if needed prior to posting. This past week I switched over to Markdown which I’ve found to be an excellent replacement. Based on the ideas of Textile and other methods, Markdown’s goal is to present text that is perfectly readable as-is and looks even better…
Today palmOne announced the Tungsten T5 which is the latest in the handheld (i.e. non-Treo) family or PDAs. It's kind of a sad day — the first product release since I left. This should be a nice product with full 320×480 display (no slider like the T3) and a total of 256MB of storage — 160 MB flash drive and about 55MB of usable RAM. The flash drive is being touted as a way to store and carry your files with you, kind of like a USB keychain drive. Compared to comparable PDA devices, that's a good chunk of on-device…
The Gnomedex conference continues today… The Future of Online Content started well including discussions about the lack of individual blogging voices from big publishers (like NYTimes). Jason Calacanis gave some good insight behind Weblogs Inc; he mentioned being prepared for lawsuits which led to an interesting discussion (including apparently a cease-and-desist order from palmOne, probably about the Treo 650 pictures on Engadget.com). This panel could use more focus – kind of wandered all over the place with a lot of strong personalities. Wil Wheaton gave a great talk after lunch. The talk was primarily reading from his books. At first…