I originally started this blog just before the first BarCamp Boston, back in may of 2006, and I’ve helped organize / volunteer at a number of them as well as given a few talks.
This year BarCamp Boston 7 returns to the NERD center on April 7th and 8th – hope to see you there.
Maybe I’ll give a talk on the Official.fm Feed Generator, or the WPGPlus plugin – I’d love to get some hacker help with the latter in particular.
One of my consistently favorite podcasts of the last few years has been The Waiting Room, a new music show out of Cardiff, Wales. The show is broadcast on a number of internet radio stations, but I generally listen to it as a podcast, so that I can timeshift and listen when I have time not when it is being broadcast.
They’ve been hosted for some time now on Official.fm, a site which allows users to post tracks and playlists, make them downloadable, make them embeddable, and the like.
Official.fm does produce an RSS feed of a given user’s tracks (there’s a little grey RSS icon at the lower left corner of a user’s page), but the structure of that feed doesn’t work for podcast clients, including itunes.
A while back I made a Yahoo! Pipe that would translate the appropriate official.fm feed into something that Downcast (my podcatcher of choice) would be able to handle, but it annoyed me that this still wasn’t usable in iTunes. (iTunes requires that the enclosure file end in an appropriate extension like .mp3, which means the /download style links Official.fm produces cannot be used in an iTunes feed).
So this weekend I hacked up the UnOfficial.fm iTunes Feed Generator (github page). It takes an official.fm username (and some other metadata used by iTunes) and creates an iTunes appropriate RSS feed.
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Inspired by seeing comments in Google+ about the need for a WordPress cross-post, I whipped up a quick WordPress plugin: WPGPLus.
For now, since the Google+ API is read-only, I’m borrowing inspiration from Luka Puši?’s GPlus Bot and Dmitry Sandalov’s Twitter 2 Google Plus script.
This means emulating the Google+ mobile web experience using Curl.
WPGPlus adds a box to the post edit screen where you can choose yes/no for publishing to Google+, as well as a place for a message to be used in the body.
(If you provide a Google+ message it is used; if you provide a post excerpt it is used; otherwise post content is used).
Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think!
This last weekend I finally got drafted and posted Closing the Books on WordCamp Boston 2011 over on WCBOS site.
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I was very happy to find out this weekend that I will be speaking next weekend (1/21/12) at Western Mass Drupal Camp in Amherst.
I’ll be walking through a case study of the site ISITE Design recently designed and built for the JFK Jr Forum at the Harvard Institute of Politics (The Forum site is new, the Institute of Politics site is existing).
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