Registered for Podcasters Across Borders 2009

December 30th, 2008 by Will | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments

I just posted on the CastRoller blog that I will be at Podcasters Across Borders this year. I wan’t able to attend last year, so I am really looking forward to the event this time around.

When I attended for the first time in 2007, I only knew one person there: Bill Deys, and it took me a while to get to know other people there. I had a great time at Podcamp Toronto last year, knowing a good number of people before hand really helped me to have a good time.  The community is very welcoming, I’m just a person that takes a while to feel comfortable with people.So now that I know a bunch of people there, I know that I’ll have a great time.

Today and tomorrow are the last days you can get the early registration price for PAB, so if you aren’t signed up yet, you should go and register. And while you are at it register for Podcamp London as well!

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Get an OPML File of your Flickr Contacts’ Photos

December 17th, 2008 by Will | Posted in code | Comments

I find it difficult to keep up with all of my Flickr contacts’ photos through the RSS feeds that Flickr provides. It is too easy to miss good photos when you subscribe to the main Contacts feed from Flickr. And it is too annoying to subscribe to each individual feed in my reader.

So I came up with the idea to write a tool that generates an OPML file for each of my contacts. That would certainly be better, that way I can choose to see all the photos from all my contacts, or browse each contact individually in Google Reader. And I could use this Yahoo Pipe that also manipulates the feed to give you larger photos instead of the thumbnail, and filters the photos using PostRank to get just the best photos.

The tool is here: flickropml.spaetzel.com. You just have to give the tool your Flickr ID, and it will generate an OPML ready for you to import into your reader of choice.

Now on Wordpress 2.7

December 11th, 2008 by Will | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments

I just upgraded both spaetzel.com and blog.castroller.com to Wordpress 2.7. I must say, this is quite the dramatic improvement. Congrats to the Wordpress team, they certainly are a team of very talented developers and I look forward to whatever they release next.

Sending a photo through Posterous

August 19th, 2008 by Will | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments

Posted by email from spaetzel’s posterous

Just giving Posterous a Try

August 19th, 2008 by Will | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments

Posted by email from spaetzel’s posterous

Living Full Time with FriendFeed

July 30th, 2008 by Will | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments

Image via Wikipedia

Ever since Google launched the 2nd version of Google reader, I have been using it exclusively as my feed reader. At one point I had over 700 feeds in reader, but usually I kept it around 300 feeds.

I’ve been finding that I haven’t been actually reading most of the posts in my feeds. I get far too many posts coming in one day that I don’t have the time to read them all, I needed a solution; a better way to read my feeds and ensure that I read the good stuff, and don’t waste my time with anything else. I wanted to join the conversation and see the conversation that is happening on the web. Enter FriendFeed.

On FriendFeed, I was able to add the people that I care about, and have everything that they publish to the web appear in one place. FriendFeed has a large number of controls that let you filter what it shows to you, and it automatically sorts the items in your feed to keep the items that have the most conversation on them appear at the top.

I have now set FriendFeed as my homepage and now I can see what is happening with the people I care about quickly and keep myself involved in the conversation.

I haven’t completely abandoned Google Reader but I am now using it much less and have only kept the Feeds that I want to read 100% of the posts. I now only have about 70 feeds in GReader.

In an upcoming post, I’ll list off the GreaseMonkey scripts that I use to make FriendFeed even more useful.

Zemanta

July 30th, 2008 by Will | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments

Image by chucks via Flickr

I just installed the Zemanta plugin for Firefox. It is a cool little plugin that suggests a number of articles, tags and photos to go along with the blog post that you are currently typing.

This entry exists purely for me to test out its functionality. I’m assuming that it will do a pretty good job of finding posts that are related to itself.

Liberal Response to Bill C-61 ( The Canadian DMCA)

July 17th, 2008 by Will | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments

A friend of mine from high school, Trevor Orsztynowicz wrote to his MP in Vancouver regarding bill C-61. She send back an excellent reply that show that she understands the issues completely:

This Bill does not serve either consumer or creator well.  It prescribes narrow, punitive solutions to a complex problem.  In fact the Bill could well have the effect of curbing the use of digital technology, to the extent that it becomes useless. This would be a pity!  As well implementation of the measures in the Bill would be nearly impossible, unless one abandons all privacy rights or imposes locks on the digital technology that severely limits its application.  How to monetize digital technology to reward the creator and allow free and open use by the consumer is challenging

Read the rest of her letter on his blog

A .net Library for Getting AideRSS PostRank Data

July 10th, 2008 by Will | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments

With today’s announcements of the updated PostRank API and PostRank.com, I felt that it was time that I finish up and release the .NET PostRank Library that built for CastRoller.

The library is a simple wrapper for all of the PostRank API calls. Usage is pretty simple, and I’ve included a sample program to get you started.

I’ve released it under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License meaning that anyone is free to reuse and modify the code, as long as the attribute me as the original author.

Read more
Download Version 1.0

It’s a Twittering World

July 6th, 2008 by Will | Posted in Uncategorized, daily life | Comments

Back on June 3, I was interviewed by a reporter, Amy Fuller from the Waterloo Region Record. She wanted to interview me for an article she was writing on Twitter.

She selected me because of the Waterloo Twitter meetup that I organized in April. She said that her brother gave her the idea for the article.

We had an enjoyable conversation about what Twitter is, what you can do with it and what people have gained by taking part in the conversation on Twitter.

You can read the article here.