This weekend I will be heading out to Fort Wayne, IN with five of my friends. We have a hockey game and lazer tag planned, but I hope we do more than just that. Also, I’m writing this post using Flock, the coolest thing I’ve seen since ScreenToaster.
I recently stumbled upon www.screentoaster.com which is a new site that will record your screen via a Javascript function. I signed up for a beta test of this site yesterday and got to try out the online screen recorder today.
I can say that this is a brilliant idea that works really well and is handy for me. ScreenToaster allows you to screencast from anyplace that has an internet connection. Not only does the website allow you to save the screencast instantly, but it also automatically publishes the file as a flash video. Flash video is the best because it’s cross platform and degenerates nicely (older computers can usually display the videos without errors).
You can record the entire desktop or just an area very easily. Also, it’s nice to know you don’t have to have 3 different programs for each OS if you want to record your screen. Like some screencasters, ScreenToaster doesn’t slow down your graphical display as much. I don’t know how it really works, but it’s amazing and I really like this online screen recorder.
So I have created a Podcast out of interest in the topic. It is located at http://www.jeffreyrobertlange.com/podcastgen/. I submitted my feed link to iTunes, and with much prayer, I have gotten full integration in the iTunes store! If you open iTunes, click on iTunes Store, and search for “Jeffrey Robert Lange” in the top right search box, my podcast shows up! Even cooler, it also suggests my name after you type the “R” of Robert. I’m totally amazed. Now, to update WordPress.
I was elected webmaster this past semester for SAE, which is pretty exciting. The old website was pretty boring and some of the internal links were broken. If you went to the members page, the only way to get to any other page was to hit the back button in your browser. All of the links on the page were broken. I decided that I wanted to have a nice looking page that had good structure, and also showed off how cool our supermileage car is. After I got FTP access to the server for the SAE website, I got to work. As always, I worked on the index page first by getting a good layout, creating links, and getting a nice background image. After that, I duplicate that index file about seven times, rename each instance to something like “gallery”, “about”, etc. I then modify each page to look like it’s supposed to. I got rid of everything except for the header and footer on the gallery page so that the Flickr slide show would fit on the page.
If you want to see how it looks, check out the New Valpo SAE Page at www.valpo.edu/student/sae/index.html
Being an active member in the StumbleUpon community, I run across all sorts of websites. Some of them provide eureka moments, which makes me happy. There are other “suggestions” that just don’t make sense. For example, I once stumbled on the CNN homepage. Who hasn’t heard of CNN? I might be crazy, but I always thought of StumbleUpon as a discovery site, a service that provides a medium to easily distribute a link to an unknown page.
Personally, I find it wasteful and irritating when I come across these commonly known pages like CNN, BBC, and Digg. Even people that don’t get online that often know about these pages. Whoever you are, please stop submitting these pages as “new found glory” and don’t destroy the name of StumbleUpon. It’s the sense of discovery that makes this service great. Please, please don’t turn this into a garbage delivery service. Also, it is a waste of StumbleUpon’s resources. They could be providing better, faster service without these redundant pages.
Maybe I’m overreacting, but this does happen every once in a while.
Like most well formed websites, WVUR wants to add more graphics to their pages. Jeremy came up with a way to grab a random picture from the SourceStock image folder, which is working quite well. One issue with the site, or rather valpo’s server in general, is that you can’t see the files you upload until an even hour. For example, if you upload a picture, it will be uploaded right away, but it won’t go to the live site until 4, 6, 8, 10 pm. If you upload a picture at 4:05, you have to wait until 6 until the stage loads it. However, the CMS runs on MySQL, which is an ever refreshing database, so if we write a blog and the picture we want is already live on our server or another server (aka Flickr), the picture will show up right away.
On a whim, I suggested that we set up a Flickr account for WVUR and just upload pictures there. Jeremy wondered how easy it would be to have everyone upload, though. Whenever you introduce another feature, it shouldn’t require a new login or page to go to, that’s just a simple rule. Jeremy, on a whim, wondered if Joomla, the CMS we use for WVUR, made an component that would allow upload to Flickr. We couldn’t find one in the twenty minutes we spent looking, but we did find a PHP script that would do the exact same thing. Sweet! If that turns out to be a hassle, we could always just make a page that has Flickr in a “frame” (technically a wrapper) on the WVUR page.
What does this mean for our audience? More pictures, and faster! Woo!
If you go to Google Translate and type in “heath ledger is dead” and translate that english phrase into spanish, well, let’s just say Heath Ledger doesn’t translate so well.
Is this a glitch, or does Google want Tom Cruise dead? It makes me wonder.
This worked at the time of this post. I don’t know how long it will work, since I’m not Google.
So I uploaded a funny ad onto my Flickr account, and was pleased to find my photo on Remove Poke.
How cool is that?
Do you get invitations to applications that you know you will never add? You can block these annoying applications from sending you requests. Watch the video below to see how.
http://revver.com/video/617759/affiliate/131148/block-facebook-applications/
So I’ve been using this application called StumbleUpon for some time now. It’s great. You click a button and a random website appears based on your interests.
This produces amazing results most of the time, but when you stumble as much as I do, you see a lot of the same crap over and over.
First we have the web comics,
the demotivational posters,
o rly? posters,
funny pictures,
movie traliers,
300 refrences,
and every cat picture you can imagine, including the LOLZ Cats.
Don’t get me wrong, these are hysterical, well, the first time around. What really drives me crazy is that people re-post other’s content on their sites and play the content as their own. That, my friends, is a no-no. I would consider it plagiarism.
So what are you, the stumbler, supposed to do when you encounter these no-good pages? Give them a thumbs down 
. Don’t just pass over them. Show the rest of the world that this page is a piece of crap and help it to get buried.
