Why Flickr (still) Can't Be Beat

Submitted by Steven Burt on Mon, 2006-12-11 11:45.

I have been a long time user of Flickr - well, long in the Web 2.0 sense of the word - in that I happened to stumble upon its initial release at the O'Reilly Etech conference three years ago. At that time, its numbers were pretty small but growing rapidly. Tim (who also attended Etech with me) was the only other person I knew on it, but we quickly spread the work to the folks we worked with.

Since that time, I've used flickr almost exclusively as my online photosharing tool of choice. On occassion, I've installed Gallery a time or two (for clients) as it affords a way of not being connected to the flickr community - which is a desireable thing for many schools. But, for myself, Flickr is one of those few sites I visit often - adding my own images and checking on the goings-on of my friends and their families. I even managed to get my 92 year old grandfather to add a comment or two to my photosets!

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Podcasting Setup, Recording and Cofiguration

Submitted by Steven Burt on Tue, 2006-12-05 12:28.

Podcasting

The other day, Tim Wilson pinged me on IM to ask about how I'd setup Windows to record the Ed Tech Coast to Coast podcast. He was preparing to give a series of presentations on podcasting at the TIES conference. His site, The Savvy Technologist , gives a great rundown of all things podcasting.

My process is a bit cumbursome, but works pretty well. The biggest drawback is that it takes two computers, though the second one could be replaced by a recording device and then I could use the first maching to to do the edit on. Here's what I do:

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Akismet Anti-Spam Module

Submitted by Steven Burt on Sat, 2006-12-02 22:58.

Bill Fitzgerald over at Funny Monkey (who also does work developing Drupal tools and sites for education) recommended I install the Akismet module for Drupal developed at phpMX.org . It was a fairly simple install:

  1. Download Akismet module and upzip
  2. Created an account at Wordpress.org in order to get an API key
  3. Upload the module into the /modules directory in my Drupal install and enable it
  4. Configure akismet in administer > settings (and enter the API key)
Once I completed those steps it seems to be working flawlessly - at least according to the logs page.
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Favicon Generator

Submitted by Steven Burt on Fri, 2006-12-01 16:00.
Often, I encounter Web-based "tools" that help me do something rather silly, rather quickly. This is the case with Favicons. For a lot of graphics work, I don't want to open up Photoshop, etc. I just want to clip a simple image and have it converted to a favicon (the address-bar/bookmarks graphic icon). Once of the easiest tools I've found is at Dynamic Drive . All I had to do was upload into their Web-form a jpg (in this post as ico.jpg) and it outputs a favicon.
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Managing Comments

Submitted by Steven Burt on Fri, 2006-12-01 13:03.
One of the most frustrating aspects of blogging is, of course, comment-spam. In the past when I've used MovableType and earlier versions of Drupal (pre 4.7.x) I've had difficulty with significant comment-spam. So much so that I've just shut down comments altogether. This time, I've begun afresh using the captcha plugin for Drupal. Feel free to go ahead and try to post a comment to this post (or any other on the site). The captcha plug adds a required math field to the post-comment form. That is, users are asked to complete a simple equation (eg "What is 5+7?" and have to answer it correctly before they can post a comment. In this case, I've allowed anonymous users to post directly to the site (without moderation) - <gulp!>. We'll see.

Installation and setup was very simple:

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