JoeAudette.com

I had not looked at Imeem.com in quite while, once upon a time it was mostly about groups and the convenience of a chat client that worked across services. Now its something totally cooler. You can create playlists and share them not only on the imeem site but on other social networking sites like Facebook or even embed them into your own site.

Wicked Cool!

Great post today on the Microsoft Port 25 blog. Very entertaining graphic about the "software wars"!

I had never seen this before but it just struck me as fascinating and it gave me a smile. So I googled "Software Wars" and found the larger original here.

I first read about Yahoo Media Player a month or so back and I bookmarked it with the intention of using it on my site. I don't know why I waited, I must have just been too busy or absorbed in other things I was working on. I mean its a 2 minute job to integrate it, you just add a script to your page or in my case to the layout.master file in my mojoPortal skin like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js"></script>

and thats all there is to it. Any page that has links to mp3 files now autmatically have little play buttons next to them.

Click the image above or visit this link to see it on my site: http://www.joeaudette.com/therealitysaladband.aspx

If you click a play button the player comes up at the bottom of the screen and has a playlist of all the mp3s linked on the page.

Pretty cool and so easy a caveman could do it.

In my last job before I started my own business one of the benefits was a membership to the YMCA and we used to take a break during the work day and go workout at the Y. I really liked this because when you work in front of a computer for hours and hours a day you don't tend to get much physical excercise and over many years you find yourself feeling really out of shape. So during my first year in business for myself I joined a nearby gym and made it a general habit of going to the gym 3-5 days a week and power walk on the treadmill to get some cardio excercise.

I was really disciplined about it for the whole year and I figured by the end of the year I was not in too bad physical condition. So I was surprised when I went and spent an afternoon walking around the Renaissance Festival with my Dad and then my legs were sore for the next 3 days. I mean after a year of vigilent treadmill power walking I thought I would be in good shape.

I think the problem is that treadmill walking is not like real walking, there are different muscles used to coordinate walking on real terrain. So this year when my membership at the gym came due for renewal I didn't renew. Instead I now go to a nice hiking trail only 5 - 10 minutes drive from my house. After a month of walking there I'm glad I made the switch. Walking through trails is much more enjoyable, I get fresh air and sunshine and I think it is therapeutic for my vision as well. When you focus on an array of computer monitors all day your vision is always focusing in a narrow range of depth and walking outside give you opprotunites to focus your vision on objects of varying distance. I also find that during the walks I can ponder difficult technical problems and come back with fresh ideas to try.

I didn't get to make it to the Mono Summit again this year, really wish I could have. Last year it was due to the sale of my house and moving, this year I just couldn't afford the trip to Spain. Maybe next year it will be in the US again, if it is I'm determined to attend and finally get to meet some of the good folks in the Mono community in person.

I'm wondering if any of the Mono folks or Novell folks will be at the MySQL conference in April. MySQL has been kind enough to offer a booth to the  mojoPortal project so I will be there demoing mojoPortal both on Windows and on Linux with Mono using MySQL. (Huge Thanks to Todd Stone for donating to help fund the trip!)

I'm really hoping the CSS Control adapters are working by then (hint hint to Marek :-])

I would also love to be sporting one of those cool "How Cross Platform is your .NET" t-shirts or even giving some away if they are available. (hint hint to anyone who can help)

Anyone else going to be there? I hope so. Let me know if you are. I can get up to 3 more people into the event free if you are willing to help me man the mojoPortal booth. There will be one pass to the sessions that we can share betwen us.

Thanks to the nominations from the mojoPortal community, we are a finalist in the 2007 Open Source CMS Awards in the category "Best Other Open Source CMS"!  (other means non-PHP)

See the full list of finalists here:

http://www.packtpub.com/2007-open-source-cms-award-finalists

Its very exciting to be among the finalists and its all thanks to your nominations!

Now we need your vote again since the first round of voting was just nominations, so please go and vote for mojoPortal, it would be wonderful to actually win in this category!

Voting ends October 26, 2007

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.3.6, its available now on the download page.

New This Release:

• Open ID Authentication
• Windows Live ID Authentication
• New Captcha Provider with support for Subkismet Captcha and reCAPTCHA
• Initial Support for XStandard editor (requires free browser plugin)
• New Swedish Translation by Christian Fredh
• 2 new Right To Left skins contributed by A.Samarian

As always, be sure and backup both your database and your site before doing an upgrade, see additional upgrade tips here. Please post in the forums if you have any difficulties.

I've just updated mojoPortal.com with the very latest code and have enabled authentication with Open ID and also with Windows Live ID. It is now possible to register or sign in to mojoportal.com using either of these services.

Tip: If you are already a registered user of the site and you want to associate your Open ID with your existing site account you can do so on the My Profile page after you login with your current credentials.

For those interested, a good place to get a free Open ID account is at MyOpenID.com.

I really think single sign on is a huge thing the web has needed for a long time. I hope it catches on so I can use the same password at most sites. Now mojoPortal makes it easy to setup sites that support these single sign on services.

The code has already landed in svn in my sandbox and I will be merging it to trunk in the next few hours. Any testing would be appreciated. I would like to make a new release with these features very soon.

Hey friends and supporters of mojoPortal, there's only one week left so if you haven't already please take a moment to nominate mojoPortal for the 2007 Open Source CMS Award by PackT Publishing.

It will take a lot of nominations even to get accepted into the contest so every vote counts. We are competing against projects with much larger user bases and much larger communities so mojoPortal is kind of an underdog. If we don't get enough nominations we won't even be in the contest.

There are 3 categories in which to nominate mojoPortal:

Overall Winner, Open Source CMS Award

Most Promising Open Source Content Management System

Best Other (non PHP) Open Source Content Management System

Please nominate mojoPortal in all 3 of these. Nominations are allowed through August 31, 2007

I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.2.3.4, its available now on the download page.

New this release:

Setup System

A lot of work has gone into the Setup routine this version to make things much smoother for installation and upgrade. As I mentioned in my previous post, setup is now driven primarily by xml config files so that third party developers can easily make their own features participate in the setup process and you can even leave out built in features. I had mentioned in the previous post that I didn't have automatic schema creation and upgrade working in Firebird Sql, but now I have got it working so creation of the database objects is fully automated for clean installation and upgrades in all data layers. You just create a database, set the connection string, make the Data folder writable by the web process and the setup does the rest.

The initial pages that get created are also driven by xml config files so you can specify what pages to create when packaging builds of mojoPortal based applications and you can put instances of features on the page. There are also xml files that allow adding additional items to the Administration Menu. You can even customize the Setup page with your own branding in the header.

Google SiteMap Generator

Also as mentioned in a previous post, we now have an automatic google site map feature.

Other improvements...

Added an Error log viewer in the Administration Menu
Changed the Child Page Menu rendering to be more like a Site Map of pages beneath the parent.
bug fixes for bugs reported since last release

As always be sure and back everything up before doing an upgrade and post in the forums if you run into difficulty. When you upload the new files to the web I suggest you upload the Setup folder first before uploading the rest of the files. That way you can be sure all the setup scripts have arrived on the server before the Setup routine gets invoked.