November 8, 2007: You Say You Want a Revolution
Well, let’s say it’s a revolution of sorts. I glance over engadget and tuaw daily and for some time I’ve noticed this annoying trend where a post that covers, say, a product will link it to a tag on their own blog instead of the site of the product itself. For example, tuaw recently covered Quicksilver going open-source. As I read it I thought to myself wow, cool
so I proceeded to click the linked Quicksilver text expecting it to take me to the official Quicksilver site (http://blacktree.com/?quicksilver) to read about the news but instead I ended up on a tuaw page listing all posts tagged quicksilver
(http://www.tuaw.com/tag/Quicksilver/).
I was briefly annoyed because I knew better. I should have just opened a new tab and found a way to the official QS site on my own but then I thought of how many times I asked myself why they do this in the first place. Obviously, it’s to draw more hits to their own site but, honestly, doing it by annoying your regular readers seems like the wrong approach.
But then I thought, ok, maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m just making a bigger deal about it than most people would. So, going back to the Quicksilver news: awesome. I decided to throw in a comment for support… but then I just couldn’t let go and wondered again how people felt about the way the links are done so I asked as part of my comment (#5) where I essentially express my gripe.
So my day goes on and I forget about it until the next day when I remember and check to see if anyone responded. Well, as it turns out, it’s not just me. Plenty others agree with me and then it floored me when I saw one by Mat Lu, the contributor of the original post, letting us know that from now on application name links will go offsite. Wow! How cool is that? Little old me doing my part for a better blogosphere. I knew one day I would find my purpose and, honk my hooter, did I ever.
Back on Earth
Seriously, I have been up to more good than posting comments on blogs. This summer I got involved with a group trying to kick off a low-power station in town. The funny part about this is I found out because Carrie sent me a link for an upcoming sound-editing workshop at the Civic Media Center but I was a bit busy when I got it so I just glanced over it and jotted down the date and time knowing nothing about what this was for. I essentially parsed audio editing workshop and everything else got forwarded to my trash bin.
So I showed up and met some of the folks involved. I ended up sitting next to Barry, the person running the workshop, and after introducing himself he turned to me and asked So, what kind of radio show are you looking to do?
. I don’t remember what I said exactly but it was probably something along the lines of Umm.. radio show?
. In any event, after getting the details of where I was, what was going on and who all these people were, the idea started sounding pretty cool. Since then, we’ve been busy trying to work out all the details and finally it looks like we’re about to go on the air any day now. We have a WGOT google group so anyone interested can request to join. And, boy, do we need people. We’re still short on shows. We have allotted ½ for talk radio and ½ for music and, it turns out, people want to do more talk shows than music shows. For the time being we’re just trying to record hour-long programs to fill any empty slots with the expectation that, once words gets out, plenty of others will want to submit a proposal.
All shows are pre-recorded for the time being since there’s no studio space (all we have is a shack at the bottom of the tower). We hope to eventually have space to do live shows with call-ins, possibly do live-broadcasts from events or maybe even webcasts once the current legislature mess clears up.
The last steps are to choose a scheduler that handles uploads and plays out to the transmitting gear (we’re looking into Campware’s Campcaster for this) and to finish setting the wgot.org domain and station site. Lots to do and, as usual, not enough time.
Back with a Bang
Aside from trying out a part-time career as a DJ, Calvin and I are back on the Bang Chemistry side of things working on some music. Our good friend John contracted us to write a track for his company and we finally completed the arrangement last week. It took some hardware and software upgrading but we’re pretty excited about the possibility of getting back in the groove, like our old Friends of Fido days. Well, we might never be able to reach that kind of groove (we used to crank out several songs in a week) but we’re still looking forward to playing with the toys on time outside of work / school and other projects.
Back for more Soup
Finally, I’m getting my fingers all dirty in some PHP + AJAX sauce to revamp No Soup For You. Right now I’m trying to revive the backend which had turned into a horrible mess. My hope is to improve the front-end and add more dynamic toys like embedded google maps, etc. I’ve been meaning to learn about all this crazy AJAX stuff anyways and, so far, it seems simple enough.
On a related note, I accidentally ran into the site Virtual Gainesville done by some local developers and I just couldn’t help by wonder about the similarities between their restaurant guide and No Soup For You. Shame, shame. I’ve since revamped some things and put some time into updating restaurant info, deleting places that are no longer around, adding a simple tweak to support javascript-less devices (hello, Blackberry users) and throwing in some simple code to adjust the viewport for the iPhone. I figured that would be enough for now to keep it distinct from the imitators. But, honestly, yet another listing of independent restaurants doesn’t hurt anyone.
Besides, they do say something about imitation and flattery, right? Right.