By now, everyone is, of course, quite sick of seeing the buxom ads deployed to entice new players for Evony. Being rather burnt out on everything else available on the market, I've been giving it a try. No, there isn't any comely wench in-game, of any sort, that I've found. But, it is free, after all, right..? Right?

Except they nerfed medals...

You can play for free until you get out of newbie-mode by trying to advance beyond Knight, which requires these medals, see?

What happens when the inbred nature of the internet gets into bed with new and media? They feed on each other. Right now you can see it happening as Slashdot virtually erupts a stream of meta-data traffic over an article about sniffering browser history without javascript, and references to the NINE YEAR OLD bug that continues to remain exploitable, as obvious references in the comments will tell you, quite hillariously:

What is the sound of a billion souls crying out in the dark "how did I get here?"

After listening to some of the other podcasts that are out there, I decided that the time has come for me to give it a try.

I recently downloaded Audacity, which offers voice-activated recording features and accepts the line-in that is currently carrying the mic from an old over-the-ear gaming headset I had sitting around. I have to increase the Gain quite a bit to hear myself after recording through such a low-end mic, but it gets the job done.

In order to run a podcast, however, you need more than just a few mp3's.

In about two hours, I worked out a way to run podcasts from Xaraya using only Xarpages, a new articles pubtype and a couple of templates. Continue reading to see the actual templates and get started setting up your own podcast using Xaraya!

What does it mean to get "Slashdotted"?

If you have been online for a decent amount of time, you probably know about the news site for geeks called Slashdot.

From this, you may surmise that getting "Slashdotted" involves getting your site linked to in an article on Slashdot, resulting in a significant increase in your site traffic.

You would be correct. Very correct.

You may also surmise that this increase in traffic results in a corresponding increase in sales/leads/etc.

While developing the PokerEnlightenment site, I was exposed to an issue with using the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor to insert Flash when using IE. Apparently, IE likes to rip up OBJECT/EMBED/PARAM tag contents and restructure in funny ways. After some googling, I came across a post by Spocke, the main developer of TinyMCE. As specified in his post, I added the media plugin to TinyMCE in the advanced config and IE suddenly started to behave itself.

For some time now, I have been picking away at the idea of connecting the Mailman mailing list server to Xaraya. If I could get Xaraya to read Mailman data, including the list of members and the archive of posts, I could provide a powerful (and free) listserv to Xaraya members by automatically adding them to a mailing list in Mailman that is associated with membership in a specific group in Xaraya (ostensibly the default Users group, but any group could ostensibly be used for various purposes). Furthermore, I could automatically establish user accounts in Xaraya for all listserv members in Mailman, run via CRON to keep a Xaraya group and a Mailman list in sync together.

However, it's been an uphill battle getting at Mailman from anything but the command line... until now!

Over the years, various people have scoffed at my aspirations of political involvement. Astrologically, I am a Leo, and I fulfill that stereotype quite well, if I do say so. Leo's are typically attributed with leadership skills and a strong inclination to use them. I am no exception. I was a supervisor almost as soon as I was hired on in many of the jobs that I have held over the years. Let's say that I just... have a tendency to take over.

As of this month, I am now officially a member of the Xaraya PMC (Project Management Committee), the body responsible for maintaining and supporting the Xaraya platform and it's developer communitee. Together with Marty Vance and Chris Powis, we will be responsible for ensuring that Xaraya continues to be the most viable web platform available.

Xaraya is free and Open Source software (FOSS) licensed under the GPL. 

Stay tuned for details about the Xaraya PMC and what it will be doing to start building the community. Not all of the developers have to work on the code; some of them have to work on the bigger picture.

It is my privilege and pleasure to serve alongside my fellow committee members. I look forward to posting here about my many successes with inspiring other leadership within the Xaraya community. This incredible tool is available to give web developers what they will find missing in any other FOSS platform on the market today. Welcome home and thank you for voting!

A while back, I posted about how I was using Ping.fm to cross-publish my articles from Xaraya to my various social networking profiles.

I had been experimenting with direct use of the various API's made available by Facebook/MySpace/etc., but it was becoming a long and arduous process.

Then I discovered Ping.fm and have been using it ever since.

However, I was not able to publish the code snippets that I used to accomplish this for you, my readers... until now.

While it may be crass and narcissistic to refer to yourself directly in the third person, you can bypass social mores by indirectly referring to yourself through use of the proverbial "we".

By emphasizing group solidarity, regardless of it's actual existence, you can safely distribute responsiblity for your statements. This is done through the simple expedient of substituting "we" for "I" in your statements.

Many popular fantasy novels portray characters traveling through some medieval city who stop for a quick bite to eat and purchase a meat pie from some street vendor.

A meat pie?

Wasn't sure how I felt about that, especially in light of half-remembered comments about kidney-pie, none positive.

But then I found out that we have a meat pie place here in Austin, and I've been burning with curiosity ever since. You'd think they would have sold the damn things at RenFest, but I don't recall seeing them.

Introducing Boomerang's Gourmet Veggie & Meat Pies.