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!

After spending several weeks getting familiar with the various API systems available for interacting with social networking sites, I was starting to get tired of the disparate arrangements provided and the spotty feature fulfillment. I succeeded in setting up a micro/status blog that cross-posts status updates to both Twitter and Facebook.

Remote publishing to Twitter took an hour or two to get working correctly by using CURL to interface with it.

Remote publishing to Facebook took about two weeks, but that was mostly due to my persistence in wanting to publish status/micro blogs instead of normal ones.

Remote publishing to MySpace was looking like it would take until the MySpace developers got their API working correctly. However, in the process of trying to figure this one out, I stumbled on Ping.fm.

Ping.fm is, essentially the uber-cross-poster that I have been looking for. Setting it up took less time than setting up a direct Twitter cross-poster. Now I don't have to keep hunting down API's and libraries for using them to cross-post anymore; I just add them to my profile on Ping.fm when they become available.

I recently started using Twitter, by proxy through Ivory Tower using an Articles publication type. But I only send Twitter the status update, whereas on Ivory Tower I publish my status as well as my mood and what I am listening to (both optional).

So I got the crazy idea to scrape the Ivory Tower status updates for an archive of what I was listening to. This would, essentially, be my playlist...

I thought that I would be able to complete the task in about 10 minutes by making a new base module template and calling the Articles API in it for a list of  the entries that I wanted, then loop through them and output in the middle.

Another reason that I was doing this is because it seemed so stupidly simple that there was no reason that it should not exist on the site, so I set out to try and find one.

I failed. It really was stupidly simple, taking one new template file with four lines of uncomplicated template tags. I spent more time adding design than getting the data on the page. And it really did only take about 10 minutes to figure out and implement.

RTFA to see the template. Click here to see the Playlist!

After my earlier success with getting Xaraya to talk to the Twitter API, I set my sights on completing a matching component for Facebook.

I knew from the start that the code I would need would be simple. Typically, a developer will spend a few hours just to crank out several lines of code, and this was no exception, perfectly in keeping with my expectations.

Publishing to Facebook is a tricky endeavor, but it is now an accomplished feat that you can read about on my Facebook profile even though I never publish to it directly or even visit it myself.

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.

After spending several weeks posting status updates to the site that include my mood, I decided that I needed to begin using a broader vocabulary to describe my emotional state. Aside from producing a boringly repetative pattern, I simply felt that my range of emotion encompassed more than I was taking the time to specify.

How best to make this process easier to facilitate?

LiveJournal has a rather large array of emotions to choose from when posting content. The list is large enough that I felt it worth replicating, for convenience. After all, the end goal is to cross-post blog entries to my various profiles, including LiveJournal, so it only makes sense to use data that it is already trained to expect.

Keep reading to find out how I ended up implementing the feature...

A designer friend of mine recently recommended Firebug to me, for Firefox. Designers do not know that we developers have been using and abusing this tool for years. Apparently, nobody told the designers about it. Whether that was done in vengeance for inflicting us with the need to learn Photoshop, who knows. The point, though, is that too many web designers are not aware of the gnifty little tools that are available for simplifying their education about HTML/CSS.

Regardless, the issue needs to be corrected. Designers? You know who you are: you've gotten good enough at making digital newsletters (you call them websites) that you are beginning to finally learn how it works underneath the browser. You are beginning to grasp that, perhaps, you have not actually been a web designer all this time, just a designer. Actual web design requires you to understand how the tools work in a more technical aspect. And Firebug is one of the best tools for helping you do just that.