Go to http://www.yahoo.com/ and at the top of the page click on the exclamation point at the end of the Yahoo! logo; make sure your speakers are turned on.

Pure genius.

Following the Blogger removal of my brothers weblog I have since been helping him get his own domain set up hosted by MediaTemple.net, switched over to the WordPress software and configuring a new look and feel to his site. I used a preexisting theme (simply called “basic”) which I modified the images, PHP, CSS and XHTML into something that would work best for Brian as well as fall in line with something that he liked.

His new domain is taken from the name of his previous Blogger site (see the cached version) called: Two Wheels and Other Things; with a dot com thrown on the end which he now owns. His site is now independently hosted on rented web server space which is completely controlled by he and I alone. The only reason the site should ever go down is if the web host experiences a catastrophic power outage or he forgets to pay his hosting fee, both unlikely.

It’s Personal

I would just like to reiterate my feelings towards services like Blogger. I don’t like them, especially blogger, since it is a closed propitiatory format with little to no customer support (see: sending your help request into the great internet abyss never to be seen again). If you don’t feel comfortable going the route I have shown Brian - to a full blown web host with your own hand coded site; and you don’t have a techie friend to help you figure it all out; and you feel you MUST use a free blogging service… Let me be biased and recommend the WordPress.com platform.

Get your press on…

WordPress.org and WordPress.com are essentially the same… organizationally. WordPress is an open source product meaning many community developers are organized and focused on making the product better. If you mostly want to go at it on your own with a web host and your own install of WordPress, you venture over to WordPress.org to download the software and use their support forums if you have any issues.

But if you don’t want to go at it alone, you can visit WordPress.com and get set up with their blogging service and enjoy all the power of WordPress with none of the geeky server stuff. Keep in mind, they tack “wordpress” on the end of your address instead of “blogspot” and you have a little less flexability on what you can control. If you are hesitant to do so because you have years of content on Blogger, Movable Type, Live Journal or TypePad - fear not:

If you already have a blog elsewhere and would like to move it over to WordPress.com, we provide several import options that can import posts and comments.

The major difference between Blogger and WordPress.com that I have found is the massive amount of forum support as well as a quick to respond WordPress support team all centered around a very powerful software engine.

As for the web host, I have been using Media Temple for quite sometime now and have come to enjoy their unparalleled customer service (a rare attribute in the web hosting industry). They are quick to respond to issues and have gone above and beyond for me and others to make sure everything is working correctly (especially if it was their mistake).

Square One

In the end, it just really sucks that Brian had to go through this the hard way. Hopefully Blogger brings his old site back from purgatory so we can get all of his previous articles back and imported into his new weblog. Otherwise, it’s starting from square one all over again: http://twowheelsandotherthings.com

Note: We are still waiting to hear from Blogger (or their parent company, Google).

Update - 06.04.2008: Brian’s blogger site has been reinstated. Once it went live again I promptly logged in and exported his entire blogger database out of blogger and imported it (including comments) into his new [self hosted] WordPress site. It took all of 5 minutes… He has since shut down the blogger page with a link to his new weblog.

If some of you are wandering this direction a bit confused by what happened to my brothers weblog, I’ll try to break it down for you.

This morning Brian woke up to a flood of concerned emails and a weblog that would not load. Well, it would load, but it gave a cold heart stopping message stating that Two Wheels and Other Things had been removed. Technically, yes, it has been removed but what they could have said is that his weblog is actually under review because Blogger’s automatic system flagged it as a SPAM site. A simple “Temporarily Unavailable” would have been nice. When asked to comment on the situation, Brain had this to say:

Poop!! (Translation: I’m very frustrated and disappointed in this service. Apologies all around, I hope to have things back up and running soon.)

A quick search on Google indicates that Brian isn’t the first legitimate weblog to get snagged in Bloggers auto SPAM net. Even Bloggers own site says their system isn’t perfect and they continue to fine tune their SPAM bot algorithm to avoid false positives.

Because this system is automated there will necessarily be some false positives, though we’re continually working on improving our algorithms to avoid these.

The hard truth of the matter is that this is the price you pay for using someone else’s free service. A free hosting service attracts the not so tech savvy who don’t want to spend the time figuring our how to set up their own domain and weblog (not realizing just how easy it really is). It also attracts a bad element that forces the service to take such drastic measures to keep the service legitimate and honest. Though you pour time and effort into your content on these types of services, in the end you don’t own any of it.

So as we wait for Two Wheels and Other Things to come back online, I will be helping Brian get ready to make the transition to his own domain and the blogging platform Wordpress. There he will be held to only his own Terms of Service and the only automatic system scanning his website for content will be the Google index.

Without my calendar I would be lost, there’s no question. I live by my iCal on my personal laptop and even more so since I purchased an iPhone. Having my important dates moving between my mobile phone and laptop has become an essential part of my everyday life.

Up there with iCal is the simplicity and ease of use of Google Calendar. It has had the ability to subscribe to my iCal feed from my personal computer for quite some time; a handy feature when I needed to check up on an important date. Though one draw back is that any iCal subscription in Google Calendar is read only; a frustrating limitation when I need to change a date, time or create a new event.

Obviously, even though I like iCal and Google calendar - it’s not very productive to use both when the conversation between the two is not a two way street. Especially when you have at least six different calendars like I do.

Enter BusyMac with their system preference BusySync. Loaded with a slew of features to help you sync, subscribe and publish your iCal with various calendar protocols and services; BusySync has finally allowed me to fully connect my iCal with Google Calendar. I can add an event in Google Calendar and have it show up when I get home in my iCal and vice versa.

I was reluctant, at first, to drop the $25.00 on something that was only a preference pane. But during the trial period I found how convenient and reliable it really was to have a connection between Google and my iCal. I also found a coupon code (Hint: Daring Fireball) that knocked off five dollars. I always suggest doing a google search for coupon codes before you buy something online, example: BusySync Coupon. Doing this always makes it a bit easier when you find a deal on something, and it’s no different than looking for coupons in the Sunday paper.

The thing about most caricature is that they all pretty much look the same in style and proportion. They accentuate facial features and have similar cartoon qualities even when drawn by different artists. I normally use a caricature of myself as a profile image (avatar) for most social websites.

Damien Weighill is an artist who is breaking the mold of non-realistic portraiture with this interesting project. Drawn from a submitted photograph and his imagination Damien illustrates people, real people. You can send your picture to him and he will create a drawing of you for his weblog titled Your Face and, if you make the cut, for a tea towel he plans to have printed (space is still available).

Real people don’t read your blog.

A fact that I wasn’t made aware of when I signed up for these things; It now seems so obvious.

If you are reading this and you do happen to be a real person then why not send me a photo (one which includes your real face) and I will draw a picture of you and post it here to serve as everlasting proof that sometimes facts are wrong.

You can view all of the faces Damien has drawn so far as well as his portfolio of other work. Maybe I’ll see if he’ll draw my portrait…

We take snap shots of vacations, events and every day occurrences. We record our experiences through imagery and video; but what about all those hours spent cooped up inside the office, cubicle farm or the meeting room? Is it really all that boring? Sure, you spend a lot of time at work; it’s the same scenery day in and day out, nothing special. But what if you tried looking at it from a different perspective? Maybe through the eyes of your first day… or a visit to someone else’s office for the first time.

Office Snapshots is a weblog that collects pictures from places people spend most of their week. Though, most of the images are of Web 2.0 internet startups/companies, some are readily familiar to everyone. You will find Web 2.0 offices like Craigslist, Google (Zurich), Threadless and Tumblr. They also have some large corporations as well: GAP Inc., The New York Times, Adobe and my favorite Pixar. (Who wouldn’t want to work at Pixar!?)

Call me a nerd, geek or weirdo… but I find these pictures pretty interesting. It’s a view into a professional world that isn’t familiar to me where others work (and sometimes play) in their own everyday “mundane” environments. Mostly, it turns out to be a case just like dog owners look like their pets. I was surprised to see the Craigslist HQ look like it did, but then it really makes sense when you think of what their website looks like.

It makes me wonder how interesting people would find the office I work in… and how interesting your office might be.

I’ve been using this website the past few months to track shipments for work as well as my personal shipments. It’s called Track the Pack and is a free service that allows you to track packages from UPS, FedEx, DHL and USPS all in one simple and organized website location. Paste the tracking number, give it a name and then sit back and watch your package travel across the embedded map, marking each stop along the way. They also offer iCal / RSS Feeds, a Firefox extension, a Mobile version (for iPhone and iPod Touch) and a branded version for your company to offer tracking services to customers.

Try it out: http://trackthepack.com/

* Bonus points if you can find the geek reference in this article… good luck. (Hint: “ePostage”)

Well, the rumors have been floating around the internet for a few weeks now; Flickr is going video and it’s all true. Flickr’s video service went live and I must say, first impression is it’s fairly impressive. You are limited to 90 seconds (only available to Flickr Pro members) of footage but as John Gruber at Daring Fireball put it:

The Internet is going to complain loudly about the 90-second limit, but to me, it’s analogous to Twitter’s 140-character limit: a constraint that enforces brevity and encourages creativity.

And I couldn’t agree more.

The visuals fit in nicely with my love for the simple, intuitive and unobtrusive. You can have standard horizontal video as well as vertical clips which fits in with that of the standard static image formats. If this takes off I would entertain the thought of switching from Vimeo to Flickr for my video hosting and linking. I’m sure I’ll have more words for this as detail develop and I play around with it some more.

Now I really can’t wait to get a digital HD video camcorder…

A quick announcement at the end of the Flickr Blog post regarding static image uploads:

Bonus (for those who’ve read this far): We’re doubling the size of photos that can be uploaded — 20MB per photo for pro members and 10MB per photo for members with free accounts.