Rawvoice Inc. has released the newest update to BluBrry Powerpress podcasting plugin for Wordpress. I’ve been using the beta for a few days and I have to say it’s a great update!

Some of the new features from the blog post below:

The 1st new feature added is a podcast statistics summary to your WordPress dashboard that gives you a quick look at your podcast statistics.

The 2nd new Feature allows our hosting customers to have their ID3 Tags written to their media file automatically during the publishing of their media.

The 3rd new Feature allows podcasters to Category Cast, podcasters can now setup categories as independent podcast feeds

The 4th and final update which is the most important is our new 3 Step Podcast Publishing Process as demonstrated in a video.

Check out the full announcement and the Video on the Blubrry blog

I’m sitting here in the motel room just about to take off for home. I attended Wordcamp Columbus yesterday morning and I have to say, there are a lot of very smart people using and adding to wordpress.

I recorded some sessions and will have to go though my notes, but expect some good changes here at MikeDell.com (not a major redesign) Just some tweaks to functionality. I learned something I never really thought about before (yes, I’m thick sometimes). That is, that Wordpress and other CMS (Content management systems) are around so you DON’T have to worry so much about design if you get it right. All you need to worry about is creating content.

I’ve learned about some great plug-ins which I will check out in the future. I also got to meet some great people from automattic.com (the people behind wordpress.com)

More to come about Wordcamp Columbus 2009 soon. I have 400 miles to drive and all day to do it. Hit “track me” to see where I’m at on my trip.

Since it rained all weekend up here in Traverse City, I decided this was a good weekend to get a bit geeky and do some computer stuff.

First thing I did was install a 1 TB hard drive in the Vista machine (yes, i do have a very good working Windows Vista machine). The machine came with a 160gb hard drive that was about full of podcasts (both the ones I do and the ones I listen to and watch). This is the first time I’ve messed with SATA drives. I was a bit perplexed that Dell put 2 drive bays in but only had a power cable for the second bay and the data cable was only for 1 drive. I wasn’t sure what to do with it.. I went to all the computer stores (Best Buy, Staples, office depot and Radio Shack) to find a double data cable (which I guess they don’t make) I went ahead and bought a single cable because they were cheap and I wasn’t sure if the computer had a place to plug in another one or not.. Well it did and after tweaking a bit in the settings for the bios, it was up and running.

I then decided to download and install Ubuntu 9.04 (just released). I partitioned the new drive with 800gb in NTFS and 200gb in EXT3 (which is Linux) and installed Ubuntu. Now I have a dual boot machine with lots of storage.

Ubuntu installed with no problem and everything worked out of the box. That wasn’t the case the last 3 times I’ve installed linux on this machine. I was never able to get the sound to work right for input and that made it hard to record podcasts on it. This time, the Griffin iMic worked and I’m able to record. Overall I’m happy with ubuntu. I’m going to try to live in it for a while on the desktop (I’m typing this in Ubuntu) Another nice thing is I have access to all my vista files because this version of linux supports NTFS just fine. So I can get to everything I have in windows without using windows.

The rest of the geeky weekend will be spent on the ham radio stuff.. I need to program my shack radio with all the repeaters around here. I’ve had the radio for 3 years and only programed a couple of frequencies in it. I suppose it’s time. Also, I installed Ubuntu on an old laptop for our 15 year old. That will make it harder for him to trash the OS with viruses like he did in vista.

I might even get around to recording a podcast.

Have FUN!
-Mike

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Just got about 10 ebay sales going on for some ram chips and other stuff laying around here that need to be sold.

Check them out at http://shop.ebay.com/merchant/radiomiken7lmj

Also selling a ham radio.

Not much else going on today.

-Mike

I’m now feeling the Christmas spirit.. I’m done for this week at work and only work 1 day next week and 2 days the week after. Now that’s the way it should be! I would like that schedule all year around.

We don’t have to travel much this year for the holiday. Only trip planned is a trip to Grand Haven on the 25th and home on the 26th. The Teenager is heading to Florida this weekend for 2 weeks so the house will be quiet and it will be nice to get some stuff done.

One of the projects I have is to re-arrange the Ham Shack / Podcast Studio / Office in the basement. My plan is to take an older PC and make that the Podcast only machine. With that one, I will just have the audio apps and have the mic / mixer hooked up to it. That way I can can go back to Windows Xp and have castblaster work the way it should. The Vista machine will be the one I use for Skype and patch that into the mixer so I can record directly in castblaster. The Vista machine will also be the Video machine (along with the macbook sometimes) . I will also use that for my writing.

The other project is to get the wife’s new cloths hanger…err… I mean Treadmill setup in the house. It’s currently in the garage and it’s only 9 degrees out there now.. Not a good place to work out in the winter.

I hope to get the office/studio done on Sunday so I should be able to try out the new podcast machine and put out a podcast on Monday. I’m also going to be working on the new and improved Strange Today show. That will be starting season 2 the first week of January. Stay tuned to that (www.strangetoday.com)

Hope your year end / Holidays are nice and I hope you have time to spend time with Friends and Family or just get your stuff done.

Have a good one! (or two if you wish!)
-Mike

PS. I will be on the Geek News Central 24 hour podcast at http://geeknewscentral.com at 3am Hawaii time (8am Eastern time) on Sunday morning pimping the Ham Radio Podclass (www.hamradioclass.org) – Come join me there!

Excuse me if this seems too direct, but someone has to say it.

I don’t want the Forward that you think is so funny. I spend a few minutes a day weeding though all the jokes that people send me. Some are funny, most are not. I get upwards of 200 messages a day and it takes a lot of time going though the spam and adding jokes to that doesn’t help.

I think it’s rude to bombard people with jokes instead of a well thought out “letter” of a personal nature. Besides, Most likely, I’ve seen it before. Sorry, but most of the jokes going around on email have a life of their own and have been going around and around for years! Same with that funny video, photo, PowerPoint, or whatever. If it is something new, and you want me to see it. Post it someplace (see below) and send me a link.

Don’t send me the chain letters and virus warnings. No, Bill Gates is not going to send money to someone just because this email goes to 1000’s of people. It doesn’t mean I don’t like you if you send me a stupid chain letter about friendship and I don’t send it back to you. I just don’t do that. The virus you heard about via some sort of forwarded email is likely from last century or non-existent. I can take care of my own security just fine thank you. If you get something like that, please go to snopes.com and check it out before you send it to others. Please don’t send it to me either way. If something says “Send this to everyone in your address book” Please, just delete it.

IF you still MUST email me something that was forwarded to you, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE clean it up. Cut and paste is your friend! Cut the funny/important forwarded message into a new message and write something personal to show that it really did come from you. If I see “Fwd: Fwd: Fwd:” in the subject line, it gets deleted. No questions asked. I don’t want to have to work so hard to figure out what you sent me. Also, if you just hit forward on these messages, you are exposing everyone in the chain’s email addresses (also rude). Also forwarding to a bunch of people in the “to” box or the “CC” box exposes all those email addresses. Please use the “bcc” which stands for Blind Copy.

With all the free services out there, you can share all the stuff you would be sending out in email without bombing someone with a large attachment. Also, know this about me, I don’t care how cool you think that big attachment is, I don’t see it. PERIOD. Don’t ask me about it, don’t be mad, I just don’t look at things like that.

A better way of doing that is to use the free services available in this new Web 2.0 space. They are easy to use and as a bonus, the people you send the link to (instead of the video, photo or whatever) do not have to have special software to use it. I know that most people have high speed internet now. But, some of us (like me) don’t have high speed all the time. In my case, I use my BlackBerry handheld as my email when I’m away from a computer. At other times I use it as my access. It connects to the network at 1xRT speed (about double dial up) most of the time. Sometimes it’s faster but it’s still not fast enough to download that BIG video you have. It will, however, do just fine downloading your link. When I do get to a high speed connection, I might just look at it.

Here is a list of free stuff that will help you distribute your “stuff”.

Blogs:

Podcasts:

Videos:

Photos:

Websites:

Just to be clear, I didn’t write this to piss you off. I just want people to think a little about the person on the other end of that email. I don’t like you any less if you do send me something every once in a while. I’m just trying to help. Really I am

-Mike

Hey, If you do a podcast and use podpress, here is a new plugin from the people at RawVoice / blubrry. it’s called powerpress. I’m using it here and will be switching my other podcast sites over to it.

Check it out at: http://www.blubrry.com/powerpress/. Seems to work great so far and I really like the player it puts in the posts. Check it out on my posts below.

Here is what Dr. Wordpress had to say about it: http://www.thewordpressdoctor.com/2008/08/20/blubrry-powerpress-plugin-for-wordpress/

The guys at Rawvoice and Blubrry really know how to make something simple but powerful!

Kudos!

-Mike

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (0.0KB)

I test out Ubercaster

Let me know how it sounds! mike@mikedell.com or twitter.com/mgdell

More shownotes later.

-Mike

I’ll have the site back in good shape soon..

I just spend the last 2 hours upgrading wordpress on 5 sites. 4 of them went without problem. #5 (This one) was a problem. So, 1.5 hours of messing with the database in phpMYadmin was what it took for me to be able to log back into BenzoidReport.com

I suppose if you are seeing this, it worked..

Now to go work on redesigning strangetoday.com

Have a good day!

-Mike