Empire Avenue Said I Had To Add This
{EAV_BLOG_VER:36da61abfb9dae1a}
That's how they verify that I actually have a blog, that I'm a real person, and that I'm paying attention to their instructions.
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Jul 2011 0 comments
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Oct 2010 Drop.io Acquisition Spells Bad News for Many Music Podcasters
The recent announcement by Drop.io that it will soon cease operations has been a bit of bad news for some music podcasters. These show producers, many of whom are members of the Association of Music Podcasting, use the service to allow independent musicians to submit their songs.
According to the Drop.io blog we have until December 15 to move files out of our accounts. Many music podcasters have already looked for alternatives, including Soundcloud and Dropbox. However, I haven't found either of these services to offer the same ease of use and simple interface for the musicians. They may provide me with a place to receive tunes for review and possible inclusion in the show, but they don't offer much in simplicity for the person doing the submission. I love Dropbox for personal and business use, but I don't want artists to have to open yet another account simply to upload a few songs for my show.
Even Mashable reported that Drop.io offers:
"...file hosting and sharing service of considerable renown in Web world, particularly among those who espouse the need to keep things simple."
Why the closure? Drop.io reports:
Today, we’re proud to announce that we’ve struck a deal with Facebook. What this means is that Facebook has bought most of drop.io’s technology and assets, and Sam Lessin is moving to Facebook.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be winding down the drop.io service. As of this week, people will no longer be able to create new free drops, but you’ll be able to download content from existing drops until Dec. 15. Paid user accounts will still be available through Dec. 15 and paid users will be able to continue using the service normally. After Dec. 15, paid accounts will be discontinued as well.
Though I use Facebook, I'm becoming quite annoyed by the many acquisitions that it has made. These often [read: usually] cease the existence of other services that I use. The technology is then used in ways that I would never find myself participating at my Facebook account.
Perhaps I'll return to using the cforms plugin for Wordpress that I had used in the past. I found it to be buggy and unreliable, but at least it was simple for the artists. Perhaps there have been improvements made since I used it last that will show it to be a good alternative.
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Oct 2009 WordPress Adds Themes Optimized for Mobile
According to WordPress, there are more than 60 million page views that come from mobile phones per month for WordPress.com blogs. With that kind of traffic, how your site renders on mobile devices could be a big boon to increasing engagement.
That’s why we’re excited to learn that WordPress (
) has just launched two new mobile themes for WordPress.com blogs that will be automatically displayed when a compatible mobile phone attempts to access your site.
For smartphones with top notch mobile browsers, like the iPhone or Android () devices, the theme will be a tweaked version of WPtouch, while other devices will sport a variation of the WordPress Mobile Edition.
From the sound of it, WPtouch is pretty spiffy and even includes custom header image scaling. WordPress also shares that, “visitors greeted by WPtouch will get easy access to posts, pages, and archives. They’ll get fancy AJAX commenting and post loading.” As for phones running less sophisticated browsers, the mobile theme will help your site load faster and display as much relevant information about your blog as possible.
Given that the new mobile themes are default, you don’t have to do anything to see the new changes made to your WordPress.com blog. However, if you’d like to disable the mobile themes, you can do so from your Dashboard under Appearance -> Extras.
While we think the news is great for hosted WordPress blog owners, we’re slightly disappointed that the mobile themes aren’t available for those of us who have self-hosted WordPress blogs.
via mashable.com
I've been using the WPTouch plugin on some of my blogs. It seems to work quite well. I have noticed a few other plugins will interfere from time to time, so I have to tweak it a bit when I try something new.
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Jun 2009 Posterous - Blogs, Views and Blues 38
Find the original post at Blogs, Views and Blues.com
Podcast: Download
Blogs AND Views
Wish you could simply email anything you wanted to an address and have it post correctly in your own blog? Posterous claims to be the "dead simple way to post everything online using email." They say, "You can attach any kind of file and we'll always do the right thing." Some of the key features include:
- Post a series of photos in one message and it becomes an image gallery
- Post a video file and it becomes embedded into a player and a download link right in your post
- Post an audio file and it gets its own player and a download link
- An RSS feed that can also be used to push your files out via a podcast or subscription feed
- Cross-posting or auto-posting to many other social sites, including Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, and more.
- Import existing blogs to the Posterous account
Another key feature that Rich likes: You can email your file to a service name, such as Twitter with the posterous address and it will end up on Twitter, as well... or any other of the recognized sites that you set up for posting. So, twitter at yourname.posterous.com will send it to Twitter, as well as post it to the Posterous site. If you want it to go to Twitter AND Facebook, send it to twitter+facebook at yourname.posterous.com. It will send to both.
If you like other's Posterous sites, you can subscribe to them. Then subscribe to your "My Subscriptions" feed and it will go directly to your reader or even email address with the contents of each of your favorite publishers.
There are many other features, visit Posterous.com to find out about the service.
Blues
Big James and the Chicago Playboys
"A Little Attention" (mp3)
from "Right Here Right Now"
(Blind Pig Records)
More On This AlbumOriginal guitar interludes are by Rich Palmer.
Blogs, Views, and Blues is also sponsored by GoDaddy.com. Visit today and use coupon codes blu16 or pod16 to receive up to 10% off your web hosting and/or domain name needs.
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Jun 2009 
Rich Palmer
I'm just a singer, songwriter, safety educator, public information officer, new media enthusiast, dad, husband, and fan of many things online.
