In January, I decided to really give Twitter a solid go. I signed in, found a few friends and started updating. Within a few days, I was really beginning to enjoy the community aspect of Twitter. I tied in my mobile phone and “tweeted” more frequently.

A couple of months later, the light bulb moment happened. I was at SXSW in Austin, Texas. It seemed like everyone there was on Twitter. So many amazing events unfolded at the conference, many of them driven by conversation on Twitter. Who can forget the botched interview of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg? Quite literally, the emotion of the crowd was driven by 140-character rants on Twitter. The sheer power of communicating in such a simple way was astounding.

Today, I think I’ve come full circle in my opinion of Twitter. It is fantastic and it is garbage. For community, it has few real rivals right now. But as web applications go, it is really nothing special. In fact, Twitter is routinely down and struggling because of the volume of traffic on the site and poor development. Yet it remains a constant for many people throughout the workday or weekend.

Twitter has its own language, built around tweets, tweeps and at-replies. But Twitter really is a simple thing. It truly is about the simple question, “What are you doing?” (Feel free to extend that to “thinking, feeling, studying”, etc.) And it matters, I think. Sure, not everything that happens on Twitter has intrinsic value. But I think the ultimate ROI can be significant. Follow the people you care about. Find new friends or re-connect with old friends. Leave the rest alone.

If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, you will get much more information about the things I am interested in, what is happening at work, at home and everywhere in between. Just hit http://twitter.com/davidrussell.

I’ll follow you as well. Let me know how to reach you on Twitter.

Twitter
David on Twitter

Technorati Tags: Twitter, communication, web

2008 Internet Ministry Conference
Prince Conference Center, Grand Rapids, MI
October 20-23, 2008

If you are going, let me know! I’d love to connect with you.

Note: Today is the last day to receive a discounted early bird rate and save $49!

Technorati Tags: internet ministry conference, grand rapids, michigan, web, ministry, discipleship, evangelism, digital

Okay.

The Stage

Allow me to briefly expound on my network and devices. My Internet connection is from Comcast cable with advertised speeds of 5Mbps/1.5Mbps. Lately, I have seen much faster speeds at fairly regular intervals, something I am not complaining about. Perhaps one hidden feature of the Apple TV is a handshake with the ISP that gets a hot connection for all those savvy HD downloads. Or not.

From the cable modem, I run into a Linksys WRT54G wireless router. The firmware is stock Linksys, last updated sometime last year, so likely up-to-date (haven’t checked though.) I use DHCP to dynamically assign local IP addresses to all devices except my main PC which takes the static local IP address of 10.10.10.100. If you see instances of a local IP addresses in any of the tutorials or articles linked here, be aware that you will need to modify that to reflect your own local network setup. Using hostnames for devices on the network seems to work without any problem on the Apple TV, even when connecting to a Windows PC using the local hostname. At least, it has been no trouble for me.

My main machine on the network is fairly modern, home-built PC running Windows XP Professional SP2. We have another PC and an old iBook G3 on the network as well, but all the hacks and mods done to the Apple TV were successfully achieved with the main PC. There are a couple of hacks that require frameworks and plugins from a machine running OS X 10.4. For those, I consulted friends who delivered the necessary files. I also had an install disc for OS X 10.4 that came with my wife’s iBook. I used that disc on one occasion. The hacks that require files directly from an OS X install disc or machine have to do with installing Flash, Quicktime and other rich media plugins in CouchSurfer, a WebKit-based web browser for Apple TV. We’ll get into specifics on that in a moment, but if you are not really interested in having Flash in a browser (you can still have the browser!) then you really don’t have to worry about having access to OS X as mentioned above.

Source

None of the hacks or mods that I used on my Apple TV were discovered or created by me. There is a fantastic community of folks who work really hard to make this magic happen. Up front, I’d like to give full credit to the folks in the Apple TV community who have made these things possible. Hat tip.

The majority of my information came from ATV4Windows and the ATV4Windows wiki, a site based on hacking the Apple TV using a Windows machine as the main rig. Much of the information compiled there has come from other popular Apple TV resources, like iClarified, AwkwardTV and others. As of yesterday, ATV4Windows has moved to a subscriber model. I wish the developer there lots of luck making money off of Apple TV hacks, but I prefer free information so I’ll try to disclose as much as I possibly can right here. However, I do plan on linking you up with many of the same tutorials I followed. I won’t reinvent the wheel. Unless that wheel now costs $15. If you do have a Mac that you’ll be manipulating your Apple TV with, no worries. There is a ton of information and iClarified currently seems to be one of the better resources. AwkwardTV is similarly geared toward Mac enthusiasts.

Enough yammering. Let’s do this.

The “Patchstick”

The patchstick is simple really, it’s a disk image that fits on any 1-4GB USB flash drive. When connected to the USB port on the Apple TV, the patchstick will install a few basic applications to help get you rolling with hacks and mods. The main thing you’ll need is SSH support. That’s the primary goal you should have at the onset. Get SSH up and connect to your Apple TV from another machine on the network. If you get there, the sky is the limit.

I used the Patchstick that is freely available from ATV4Windows. Since the author has chosen to hold the new version ransom, the older version of the Patchstick will have to do. Honestly, you only need SSH anyway. As of a few weeks ago, the tutorial he gives on the Patchstick page was accurate. I followed his steps verbatim. The new Patchstick he has made does install a lot of nice software, but at this point, it seems to be stuff you can do on your own (and for free). More than anything, I like the idea of having a more controlled install. Get what you want and only that. For another option, you can use this tutorial.

So I hope you have been able to get SSH installed on your Apple TV. Once you have that, connect to it using PuTTY (Win) or Terminal (OSX). Use the IP address of the Apple TV or the hostname, AppleTV.local. The username and password are both frontrow. You’ll have that memorized in no time. Trust me.

Once you’ve connected, you are ready to start hacking it up. What I did is not necessarily what you might do. Please browse the documentation at AwkwardTV and the other fine resources for Apple TV hacks. It’s only by knowing what is available to you that you can really make a decision about what you would like to achieve with your Apple TV. My goals once seemed radical, but as I studied I realized they could be rather easily accomplished:

• Have root control over Apple TV.
• Copy files to the Apple TV outside of iTunes “syncing”.
• Play media files encoded with alternative codecs, like DivX and Xvid.
• Play media files that use different file formats, like Quicktime, MPEG-4, AVI and WMV.
• Stream files directly from my PC to the Apple TV.
• Browse the web with a Flash-enabled browser (on the “bonus” list).

SSH

With SSH access to Apple TV, you have all the the root you can handle. All your base are belong to us. Again, this is a rather fundamental step in the process. For me, I was really quite excited just to get here. It was even more fun to connect to the Apple TV using WinSCP and browse the root files and folders. The main access point for the Apple TV seems to be in the frontrow directory:

/mnt/Scratch/Users/frontrow

You’ll become comfortable with the structure of the files and folders in the Apple TV fairly quickly. You’ll find it is mostly simple, although there are a couple of tricky folders with the same names under different paths. Just check the paths carefully when performing any modifications. Don’t just haphazardly hunt for folders to dump stuff in. You might dump something in the wrong place, which could lead to some frustration and troubleshooting.

ATV Files

This application allows you to add folders and files to the /frontrow directory and have direct access to these files from the Apple TV main menu. ATV Files will also play media files using the native Apple TV player, provided the proper codecs are installed. For that, we look at Perian.

Perian

Perian is really quite wonderful. I’ve used it on OS X since day one. It really is a Swiss Army knife for playing media in Quicktime on OS X. It works just as well on Apple TV. With Perian installed on Apple TV, you can really open up the device to become a more true “media center”.

CouchSurfer

If it’s sounds like a web browser, it probably is. And that’s exactly what CouchSurfer sounds like. Formerly known as SafariHD, CouchSurfer is a WebKit-based browser that will allow you to load and view web pages right on your television through Apple TV. The experience is nifty, but not really amazing. You’ll find yourself wanting a keyboard and mouse. Interacting with websites with the Apple remote and scrolling around the silly alphanumeric table quickly becomes rather mundane. There is a workaround that will apparently bring support for simple peripherals to the Apple TV, but I’ve yet to give it a shot.

I did manage to get the Flash plugin working with CouchSurfer. It was a pain to get there, because of the need for some proprietary Apple frameworks from the very specific OS X version 10.4. But I did finally accomplish it. It’s not exactly the experience I expected. I loaded up the fun hulu.com to try it out. Two problems emerged: 10 frames-per-second (at my visual estimation) and no full screen. I’m not sure if either of those problems will be repaired in later releases of CouchSurfer, or if there is just some weird bug with Flash in this environment, but it seems hardly worth my time to try and enjoy the tiny frame that most streams appear in or the sluggish frame rate.

It’s still cool! It just might not be quite the experience you thought you’d have.

Shared Network Drives

This one is amazing. Using the tutorial at ATV4Windows, I managed to get some of my media in shared folders accessible by the Apple TV! This means I can stream files right across the network from the original folders in which they reside without having to copy them to the Apple TV! I bet you can sense my excitement over this, and truly it is a notable accomplishment for several reasons.

1. You do not have to worry about the remaining space on the Apple TV’s native hard drive. Let’s face it, even 160GB can be used fairly quickly when it comes to media. I probably have half of that in photographs alone! And my music database isn’t far behind that. That’s not even counting the heaviest of all files, video.
2. You can maintain your current file and folder organization structure without concern for re-adapting it the Apple TV or having iTunes import and “manage” it all. Essentially, it all works right where it already resides.

The one problem with streaming from shared files across a network, particularly mine, is the latency that can often occur with slower networks. I’m on wireless-G here which both the Apple TV and my main PC use (my PC being wireless is a long story for another day.) So without having a hard cable in the house, other than from the modem to router, my network speeds are fairly slow compared to a nice 10/100/1000 wired network.

Streaming media to the Apple TV doesn’t always deliver smooth playback. I will experiment with some options (including getting everything hardwired—which for me means a visit from a cable technician to fix a few coax outlets) but until then, I have opted to copy over media with higher total bitrates directly to the Apple TV. They stream from that disk flawlessly!

That said, the option of playing back media on the Apple TV directly from a shared file or folder over a network connection is absolutely terrific.

In Conclusion

Like I said at the beginning of this now-lengthy article, I chose the hacks and mods that would give me the most value and that achieved the goals I set out to accomplish with my Apple TV. I just wanted to get a “media center” experience out of the device and I believe I have. I realize there are quite a few details missing from this article. I do have step-by-step instructions on each hack. If you have the slightest difficulty in tracking down a solid tutorial on any of the hacks I’ve outlined, please let me know. I can publish details about each. Obviously, this article’s length is well beyond the typical blog entry here and so I wanted to abbreviate it somewhat. It’s most important that you realize how potent the Apple TV really is under the hood. Yes, it takes a little time and energy to pull the greatness out of it, but once you do you will really be amazed at what you can accomplish with this tiny box!

Good luck with yours.

• Awkward TV

Technorati Tags: apple, tv, hacks, mods, modifications, software, SSH, WinSCP, Windows, OS X, Mac, media, Perian, codecs, CouchSurfer, WebKit, ATV Files

So I started researching a few of my options. I really like the idea of a Sony PlayStation 3 and started to just save up for one. Then I thought about Apple TV. It’s moderately priced, would likely handle the “iTunes” side of things in a cinch, would certainly have good hardware and likely good software. I’m no Apple fanboy. I like the diversity of operating systems and believe each serves well in unique ways. But I do love iTunes and the way it handles media (generally speaking). And once I looked at what the Take2 upgrade to Apple TV enabled the device to do, I was sold.

Using craigslist, I managed to locate a 160GB model at a decent price ($250, new-in-the-box condition). Once I arrived home, I noticed the factory restore the seller had initiated put the firmware back to the original version, Take 1 so to speak, so I started the upgrade option immediately. Once it was all patched up and rebooted, I toured the menu, set up access to my wireless network and shared iTunes resources from my main PC. Then I perused the features, watched a couple of YouTube videos and linked up my Flickr account.

Take 2: YouTube and Flickr

I am really impressed with both the YouTube and Flickr features. While it is not very efficient to have to “type” in searches using the tiny remote to scroll around a few rows of alphanumeric characters, once you are in, each experience is really great. For what they are, YouTube videos generally look great and even the sound seems improved. But the real winner here is Flickr. Wow! This experience is stunning. The speed at which they are able to grab really great looking images for viewing on the TV is impressive. Though it has a few imperfections, like a bad habit of cropping the top and bottom from photos, overall it really makes the Flickr experience even better. It’s so handy when family is over to start up a slideshow to view Andrew’s latest antics or talk about an event I shot. When Apple TV goes idle, it goes into a screen saver mode with a cascade of my photostream! So even when we aren’t using the Apple TV, it becomes a part of our lives just like the pictures in frames strewn around our rooms. That is such a nice touch and though seemingly insignificant, it really adds value to the experience for us.

iTunes Integration

Smooth as silk. Yes. It was just so easy. All my tunes, videos, and podcasts synced to the Apple TV in just a few minutes. The iTunes Store is there too, albeit in quite a unique form. The UI is really slick and geared toward simple manipulation with the remote. I can rent movies, even in HD, right from the store and begin watching within just a few moments. The picture quality of an HD movie is quite stunning on my Samsung 32″ 1080i HDTV. In fact, I’m probably more impressed by how Apple gets the image to look so good and still stream to me so quickly and with zero buffer! It’s hot. A couple of small gripes are the way movies are displayed in the store. Essentially they show the cover art as a thumbnail for each flick. It can be a little hard to read the titles of each movie. Once you hover the cursor over one, a plain text title appears as a caption, but you must hover over it. So I generally find myself hovering over each cover to see what the title is, as opposed to scanning the screen for what I want. Perhaps on a larger screen, this problem is less noticeable.

Podcasts are really well done on the Apple TV. I love browsing the store and grabbing at some of the top podcasts and just sitting back and seeing what happens or throwing on my personal favorites to listen or view. There really is some fantastic content in the podcast space. Apple TV makes accessing that content fairly simple.

Conclusion

Apple TV is okay. Apple TV Take 2 is quite good. I have extended my Apple TV to make it great and I’ll cover some of those modifications in another article. Stay tuned.

If you are in the market for a $300 media center, I’d definitely encourage trying out the Apple TV if you have a store nearby. You probably will not be disappointed. Are there better media players out there? Well, given the recent developments on the PS3 front and given some really interesting things I’ve seen done with a Mac Mini and given the impressive abilities of a Linux box running MythTV, I’d say there probably are better setups. But each has it’s own price, either in cold cash or in an investment of labor. I feel like the Apple TV is a shortcut on both fronts, time and money, but has a significant ROI. I’m happy. When I explain the mods, you’ll learn why I am ecstatic.

• Apple TV

Technorati Tags: Apple TV, Apple, take 2, media, itunes, PC, Mac, upgrade, center, TV, television, technology, podcast, movie

Breaking Update: Looks like Blockbuster might be trying to weave into the Apple TV space. (Article)

Many web standards enthusiasts from across the globe will do the same thing over the next day. Don’t be surprised if some of the sites you know and love have a plain look about them. It’s all for the opportunity to raise awareness about the importance of the semantic web and the standards that provide a healthy set of best practices that make the web a better place for everyone.

CSS Naked Day

Technorati Tags: css, web standards, dustin diaz

Not bad while paying for a 5MB/768k connection. Looks nearly three times that. I hope it stays this way for a very long time. (Well, at least as long as 14MB/s is good download speed.)

These notes are from a live discussion and may not exactly represent the orator’s intention. Each quote is merely a paraphrase and should not be taken as the literal presentation of the orator’s exact words.

If there is no name attached to a question, I was either unable to clearly hear the name of the orator or they did not mention a name. If there are any corrections, please feel free to leave them in the comments and I will correct. (The same applies to forum names.)

Q: Are there plans to extend Simple Commerce or add a more complex e-commerce system?

A: Yes. Internally, it’s Paul’s project. Though he set it aside briefly to help with EE 2.0. The EllisLab team needs it as much as anyone else.

Q: [Andrew] Will there be any future modules or upgrades to the 1.x branch?

A: [Rick] At this point, there isn’t a firm decision. 2.0 has taken a lot of resources and they’d like to keep things focused.

[Leslie] We really don’t make those decisions until after the product is completely developed. With MSM, similar approach. Even pricing and support decisions.

Q: Will the code stay open? Will it ever be encrypted/obfuscated?

A: [Rick] Always open. Never obfuscated.

[Leslie] That goes against the grain of our company values. We want it to be easy for you and we benefit from having such an honest community.

Q: Since you are implementing Ajax functionality, specifically pagination, within the Control Panel, will you release that as a module for use by developers in front-end development?

A: After-note from the editor: This answer came in fast and I had to move quickly past it. From what I remember, the general answer was that it would not be difficult for developers to adapt those things.

Q: [James Curry - UT] Rich-text editors? He has used TinyMCE in the past, but never found it stable enough.

A: [Derek J] We like the idea, but the issues with browser differences and instability we haven’t put much focus on it. Browser manufacturers seem to be adding RTE functionality in the browsers. We’d like to see what happens with that, but if that does not develop, we could look at an option.

[Leslie] It’s just not stable and we need such a high degree of control over the user experience. But we are “similarly optimistic” about this.

[Rick] This is really a philosophical issue. Should it happen when a page is rendered or when it is delivered into the database? I’ve always considered it a bad idea to have formatting inserted into the database. If you need to re-purpose content for some other platform, say RSS, then you need to have clean content to deal with. Sometimes folks in the forum/community seem to think that we are just against one idea or another. But often we genuinely analyze whether or not something is good for the product and then make decisions based on that.

Q: [James Curry - UT] Needs a hook for a custom logout.

A: [Paul] Added in 1.6.1.

Q: [A.J. - 'ajp'] For those of you that don’t have “chief” in your title, how do you feel about that? (Laughter.) Will there be a developer preview for 2.0 for those who create modules for EE?

A: [Derek A - Answering the second question] Yes, we will have a pre-release with very specific instructions to aid developers in updating their projects. There have been definite architectural changes and when

Q: [Paul H] I’m a designer who uses different solutions for client, but I really want to put all my eggs in one basket. Followed Boyink’s tutorial. Can you explain some benefits of EE/CI? How do you deal internally with the different products, EE and CI? Are there any additional products that might be coming up?

A: [Kurt - Answering the benefits] I’m a personal testament to the benefits of EE. (At a former company) we crafted web presences for clients and we used EE to quickly craft new features and custom functionality. We used other tools and never had any luck using them. With EE, it just worked. It’s a great tool to build a business on!

[Leslie] EllisLab is very committed to web professionals. It’s our history and where we are going. There really aren’t any other companies who offer what we offer. Most companies people compare us to are blog-centric or open source companies whose focus is quite different than our focus on web developers. We have no intention of deviating from our approach. We’re committed to that.

[Lisa] In addition to all the benefits Kurt and Les mentioned, with EE you’ll get great support from us and from the community. We are here to answer your questions and we won’t leave you stranded in a problem for weeks at a time.

[Rick] Proponents of open source tend to downplay the problems of open source.

1. There is no real support with many open source products.
2. There is no catalyst for open source developers to take care of bug fixes or other problems in a timely manner.

We are paid to take care of you and so that’s what we do. We are committed to grow and deliver exceptional products and continue to grow the community.

Q: [Dane Peterson] Never built anything in EE and just learned CI just last week. (bixbyheart.com) Champions the clear documentation of CI and the MVC model for his success and quick acclimation to CI.

A: [Derek A] My story is much the same. If CI has changed the way you develop apps, EE will change the way you manage sites.

[Leslie] We moved to CI out of concern for scalability, and while we have sites like iLounge that have TB amounts of transfer and enterprise-class environment [EngineHosting] we feel that the move to run EE with CI.

[Derek J] We don’t have document writers. Rick asks us to document as we develop so that the documentation is informative and comprehensive.

[Rick] I’ve always believed that it is very important for developers to document as they go. The two go hand-in-hand and it helps reduce confusion and poor docs.

Q: [Tom Myer - 'myerman'] The first application I wrote in CI was in four days and most of that was for Ajax stuff. Tells other stories. Is impressed with CI. 1.6 of CI had plugin and helpers, is it now extensible?

A: After-note from editor: Didn’t catch the exact answer, and probably not the exact question. Derek A. added a couple of remarks, mainly covering the extensibility of helpers in CI.

Q: [Ben Croker - 'BenC'] Rick, how did you start out and how did EllisLab/CI come about?

[Rick] I was in “audio” when I found the Internet and fell in love with it. I starting building websites, at first for fun, then for musicians, then for real clients. Nancy Sinatra was one such client. She constantly demanded updates to her website, so I learned PHP on a trip overseas and later built a CMS, “Power Trip” for her. I began to consider the market for this, though I thought at the time it would be just a side thing. Within six months, after appearing in MacWorld and some other big news, I knew I had to take a leap of faith and start this business.

Once pMachine was created, I noticed how clients were using the software and had the idea for this niche thing called ExpressionEngine. CodeIgniter was developed later as a result of browsing frameworks like Ruby on Rails and others. I was amazed at how awful the documentation for these frameworks was. So I decided to wade into building a framework of our own based on our code base and development practices.

Q: ['rockthenroll'] With 2.0, are there any new modules? Would you ever consider having an advisory board of select community members?

[Rick] Funny you asked about an advisory board as that sidebar was deleted from the EllisLab site last week and I have yet to contact those folks about the changes we are making internally. Thanks for the reminder. (Rick jots note. Audience giggles.)

[Leslie] What we realized is that we really aren’t great communicating with another group as a group, but we are great working with people one-on-one. We envisioned having a board of advisors that we could elicit feedback from, but we ended with a panel of people that we just wanted to work with.

[Rick] I’ve found that when you engage groups like this (advisory boards) with questions, it tends to be an energy sucker, yet we value the brainpower of the collective and it’s stupid not to tap that brainpower.

[Paul] Each day we get hundred of emails from folks who have ideas and send feedback about our products. And that is in addition to the Feature Request forum, so there is a large volume of information about the products that we manage.

[Leslie - Also commented about the volume of requests, advice and information.] The 1.x branch of the EE product is four years old. We are really focused on having really incremental build releases. Now, with CI, those developers can convert CI apps into EE modules really easily.

Q: [Eline] Historically, clients have had problems with the file upload function. Will you be improving this feature, specifically with images?

[Derek J] The short answer is yes. We are taking special measures to make file handling simpler for your client.

Q: [Jason - 'jloft'] I noticed a question mark on the CodeIgniter page. Now it’s gone. What’s up?

A: [Rick] We were developing a question mark. (Laughter.)

[Leslie] We are announcing the release of… QuestionEngine. (Laughter)

[Rick] But seriously, we wanted to convey that they had future plans to release new products, but took it down since they really have no imminent plans for such.

(end of session)

Technorati Tags: ellislab, expressionengine, codeigniter, sxsw, panel, austin, texas, tx

So far, I have the first two days of the conference all planned out. I’ll play the other two by ear and schedule as I go. I want to leave a little flexibility. I already feel like I’m quite maxed out! It’s going to be a blast. I will likely need a day just to recover from the insanity of it all.

I’ll log updates here as much as possible. I’ll also post @Twitter, assuming they don’t have any downtime, on Pownce and possibly on Flickr.

A few events I’m looking forward to are:

• The Flickrite Meetup at the Cathedral of Junk
• Google Party
• The 2008 SXSW ABX
• The SXSW Godbit Dinner

Of course, those are all evening (non-official) SXSW events. I will be attending a plethora of sessions. One session I’m especially excited about is the ExpressionEngine 2.0 Preview. Hopefully, I’ll get a few free moments to meet up with the EllisLab folks and thank them personally for crafting such fine products, ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter.

If you are at SXSW and would like to meet up, send an email: sxsw@davidrussell.org

Technorati Tags: sxsw, flickr, google, godbit, events, schedule, expressionengine, codeigniter, ellislab, conference, austin, texas

The Source of Information

I’m curious about how the source of information creates an amount of signal or noise. Since everything is either useful or useless to me, given that my experiences create such a filter, I should be able to find information sources that give me brilliantly useful information with little noise. And, in most cases, that’s where I aim.

But I have learned of other variables that play into the value of the information.

• Timeliness - If I receive the information in a timely manner, it is much more valuable than receiving the same information a day late. It might sound trivial to some, but poor information management could mean that you are simply not receiving good information when it is most valuable. Practically, we should learn to tap information resources diligently.
• Redundancy - Occasionally, we receive information from a wide variety of sources that are all saying the same thing. It might be a breaking news story, or a simple tidbit of water cooler talk surrounding the latest office memorandum. No matter the case, hearing information too often can be problematic. Practically, we need to pare our sources to prevent duplication.
• Volume - This is the toughest problem for information addicts. The tendency is to over-stimulate our minds with information in an attempt to feel complete. Yet, it is not humanly possible to gather and retain the level of information that most of us attempt to manage. Practically, we need to remove information sources, find the few quality sources that can make the difference and, most importantly, find contentment in retaining the top-level of information while disregarding the rest. Often, we gather for the sake of gathering and find ourselves rather inefficiently equipped with too much noise and not enough signal.

Certainly, the net can be cast much wider than that. Think about other ways that information sources bog us down.

The Use of Information

This is the benchmark for the value of information: how we use it. Good information is important. It can change a perspective, change a focus, or even change a life. Bad information is useless. It wastes time, resources and energy.

How we use information can determine its value to us and to others. Sometimes we mismanage good information and devalue it by irresponsibly passing it to people who are simply not relevant to the matter. We’ve all received that email CC from someone in the office. There are times when “out of the loop” is just fine! Other times we fail to pass on information that is pertinent to someone. We can so easily misuse information and cause conflict.

Managing information productively is an art form. It takes time to craft, but with experience you can manage wisely.

The Absence of Information

The final thought I’ve had is one that runs against the grain of the whole idea of information management: how can we remove information from our routines? And, if we do remove information, what happens?

This is more of an experiment than the other two thoughts. I’m intrigued by the thought that it might be very empowering to significantly reduce the weight of information that is passed to me each day. There is a delicate balance here. I don’t want to live under a rock and not take in information that has real importance in my life. But I do want to remove the sources of information that are reducing my margin for creativity and critical thinking. Much like a clogged artery that blocks the flow of resources to the heart, I believe our minds can be held captive by over-processing too much information. For many of us, turning off the television, putting down the book or logging off the computer would be a wonderful step toward improved information management. It’s a challenge that is hitting home with me lately and I’m constantly looking for ways to increase that margin. So far, I’m amazed by the little things that have returned on my investment. But I think there is a long-term reward as well.

You know, I haven’t been writing nearly as much as I’d like. I haven’t been playing guitar as much as I’d like. I haven’t relaxed as much as I’d like. Admittedly, it’s because I have not really taken control of information or explored ways to increase valuable information or reduce invaluable information in my life. Information management is a personal challenge and one that I’ve come to take quite seriously! If you are on a similar journey, or if you’ve been inspired to manage information more efficiently, let me know.

Technorati Tags: information, management, overload, productivity, life

This past January, Chris cast vision for a new paradigm at Highlands—a focus on the inner-city of Birmingham. I believe God will continue to do wondrous things at Highlands and I am excited that more of my friends will hear first-hand the unique work that is happening there.

Chris is one of the finest church leaders in the world today! He takes no credit for the success of Highlands, but I believe the church wouldn’t be what it is today without a pastor who gets on his knees and humbly prays for Birmingham to come to Christ! May we all find inspiration in his words to help us reach people for Christ in our own cities. If you have a moment today, pray for Church of the Highlands, Chris Hodges, his team and the city of Birmingham.

Shift: Chris Hodges Blog
Church of the Highlands (Flash required, unfortunately.)

We use microformats at theaterchurch.com to markup our contact information and events schedule. Visitors to our site can take that information from a page and into their address books or calendars in one simple click. It is also easy to work microformats into dynamic content by inserting them into the markup of your content management system. I have crafted our content management system to microformat our data at strategic places, like the small group directory, where visitors can add the small group leader’s contact information right to their address book. It’s completely hands-off, once a system is in place to produce the proper markup.

While it’s hard to gauge how well microformats are utilized, I think it’s clear that it has been valuable for us to offer this feature. It’s so simple to implement that the ROI is strong on the return side. And yet, as the popularity of microformats increases, we’ll be strategically prepared to deliver in the coming years.

I have several projects in which I’ve implemented microformats and I will continue to endorse microformats among my web developer peers. If you are not in a position to personally add microformats to a site you control, talk to your web administrator about getting it rolling!

If you are interested in discovering and using microformats on the Web, I recommend the Operator extension for Firefox. There are other options available. Some sites may make hCard or hCal content available through tools like Technorati Contacts or Events and tie the service into microformatted content on the host site. This is an approach I regularly take in making microformats accessible without the need for a third-party tool. Firefox 3 should support microformats natively, and I would not be surprised if other browsers followed suit.

Obviously, I think that creating content online is important. But adding value and meaning to that content through semantic markup, including microformats, is a great step in creating content that is accessible, modular and re-usable!

If you are interested in microformats, be sure to check out microformats.org. There is also an excellent book/blog on the subject called Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 from web expert John Allsop. I highly recommend it both as a great read on microformats as well as a technical resource.

Technorati Tags: microformats, html, semantic, markup, accessibility, content, open, operator

Last month, two updates were handed down that improved Flickr even more.

The first update was to Flickr Uploadr, the first-party upload tool that makes adding images to a Flickr account as easy as snapping the shutter. (Okay, almost that easy.) The new version of Flickr Uploadr has improved handling of uploads, adds the ability to title individual images, now allows re-ordering of images using click and drag, and maintains the other features like tagging and groups that were present in earlier versions.

The second annoucement was huge. Stats! I’ve longed to satisfy my craving for statistics from my Flickr account. Finally! In general, I find the stats provide enough information to keep me happy, but we’re not talking depth like Google Analytics. Still, I think it’s all I’ll need to keep track of traffic to my Flickr account.

Thanks, Flickr! Killer upgrades!

Technorati Tags: flickr, upgrade, update, uploadr, upload, tool, stats, statistics, metrics

OpenDNS is a service that allows you to change the route of your DNS requests away from your ISP. This provides a number of benefits, as outlined in the OpenDNS features. You might also be interested in a very simple explanation of how OpenDNS works.

The features I particularly enjoy are:

• Adult-site Blocking - It’s important to have these types of filters in place even when no one on the network intentionally uses adult sites. It avoids embarrassment and potential accountability issues, especially in the work environment. It also is a general measure of security for a network frequently used by kids.
• Statistics - I am a statistics fiend, so I really enjoy measuring network traffic and gleaning useful tidbits of data compiled from my DNS traffic.
• Speed - In both of my personal cases, there has been a noticeable increase in speed of DNS requests when I switched from public ISP DNS to OpenDNS.
• Customization - For the office network, it is nice to have a solution we can paste our brand into.

Since I first signed on, OpenDNS has provided excellent service for me. I’d encourage anyone with a computer and especially anyone who is an administrator for a home or office network to get started with OpenDNS. If you have access to your wireless router, it is simple to apply one change to the DNS settings and have all computers on your network begin using OpenDNS.

For statistics to work on a home network, you’ll probably need to use an application to update OpenDNS with your dynamic IP address. It is rare for a consumer-level ISP to provide a static IP address to a customer. You may be one of the lucky few! If not, there is some additional assistance on setting up a service or application which frequently updates OpenDNS with IP address changes. This option is only necessary if you are interested in recording statistics. OpenDNS has created a web-based service called DNS-o-matic which makes simple the process of updating several services and networks at one. At work, we have a static IP so we do not need to update OpenDNS. At home, I use the INADYN service. The DynDNS updater might be a simpler solution for novice users and also has an option for Mac users.

Enjoy speed and security! This round is on me!

Technorati Tags: opendns, dns, isp, network, administration, security, speed, tweak

I do still love Firefox. But lately, I’ve been troubled by a single problem: Firefox eats alive my available RAM, occasionally to the point that my machine slows to an unbearable crawl. I’ve researched the problem extensively only to come up with many dead ends on options to repair this. Apparently, many people (and seemingly Mozilla) touts this problem as a “feature” in that it is caused by caching history of the open tabs. If I have 10 tabs open at one, Firefox stands at the ready for any one of those tabs to be selected and will allow faster access if I navigate forward or backward to recently browsed pages.

Of course, the idea is fantastic. But the price to pay for such a feature is costly, especially on my home machine where available RAM is 1 GB.

After trying several modifications to Firefox, none which were successful, I decided to start casually browsing using Opera. The reason I looked to Opera was because of one particularly bad experience with Firefox. Quite by chance one day, I was using Firefox with about eight tabs open. Suddenly, my computer started acting up and I checked the system. Firefox was hogging a tremendous 610MB of my available 1,024. Yikes! I really needed to get to what I was working on faster than it would take to clear the issue by rebooting Firefox, so I pulled up my Program List, opened Opera and within seconds was browsing through the information I needed. Firefox whirred away in the background, trying to figure where to get more RAM to do its deed.

While browsing with Opera, I noticed how responsive the application seemed. In fact, web pages loaded faster. At first, I thought it just seemed that way as I was miffed at Firefox for going 20 mph in the fast lane of I-95. But indeed, even over time, Opera responded well. I opened the same tabs in Opera, navigated around for an hour or two and checked the system status. Opera was using a mere 59MB of RAM while Firefox still hogged over 300MB. I was impressed with Opera.

Today, I dual-wield the browsers. I still use Firefox daily. I cannot live without it for web development. In fact, I recently commented to a friend that if I was left with the option of a single browser and three plugins, I’d choose Firefox and the Web Developer Toolbar, Firebug and the HTML Tidy Validator. Together, they are a brilliant development platform. But for casual browsing, I’ve started turning very often to Opera. It’s fast, light and gets the job done. The UI takes some getting used to, but I’ve found everything I need.

If you battle the Firefox “memory leak”, I’d encourage a visit to opera.com. The browser is free and it’s a great alternative to Firefox. Opera also comes in tiny packages for your mobile device. And Opera Mini is a great product for accessing the web using more traditional mobile phones.

Technorati Tags: opera, mozilla, firefox, browser, slow, speed, switch

I’m busy tidying up projects from 2007 and preparing for the year to come. It seems every year I get into something new. Last year, it was photography. And getting into it changed my perspective on everything. The timing of that was perfect! Andrew arrived in September and his dad had a few months to get good enough with the camera to snap some cool shots of the kid. I’ve learned so much from photography—I’ll be shooting for the rest of my life!

This year, I want to really narrow my focus even more. I had the same goal in 2006 and truly ramped up my skills in web development. I also intended that year to produce a better practice regimen for music, but due to poor prioritizing of my personal time, I failed to really take my musicianship to the next level. In 2007, Missy and I felt God nudge us to serve at Georgetown. That was tremendous for me musically as I now lead worship, organize music and guide the band each week. But it hasn’t really spawned a good practice schedule for me personally. So I want to commit to developing musically in 2008. Of course, I’ll continue to focus on web design and photography.

If there is any gift I would like to establish in my life, it would be a better sense of financial planning. The normal family budget, savings and retirement plans are fine. But I really want to learn about money and investing. We took a Crown course this summer through an NCC small group and that really re-energized me toward focusing on our finances. I want a portion of cash to work harder for us and I’d like to “play” a bit in the stock market. My wife will tell you that the area I’m most private about is our financial life. But I will probably find a mentor or two who can help me grasp some of these concepts and invest wisely. I spent two years as a business major and six years working for a regional bank, including experience in commercial banking. And yet I feel like I am at square one as I look at this stuff! It should be fun to watch those financial channels on TV that I am so used to skipping blindly past. My dad and brother are also into the market, so I should have some good company along the way.

Other goals this year:

• Get a business license
• Buy Invest in a Nikon D300 and Nikon 28-70mm lens
• Redevelop this site
• Teach what I know about web development and music

Blessings to all of you in the new year. I pray for health and peace in your life.

Technorati Tags: new, year, goals, future, photography, music, web design, finance, money, investing

For IT, I prepared something very close to last year’s budget by following the baseline for last year’s actual expenses. Other than a couple of “shifts” that were approved for me to make last year, my estimations on the IT side were fairly accurate. We knew what we needed to do and so I “shopped” and budgeted accordingly. This year, we’ll probably do fewer projects on the IT side because we handled so much last year:

• New Server
• New Server Rack
• VoIP (SIP) Phone System
• Desktop Standardization Project¹
• Improvement in Spam Protection (Postini)
• Storage Implementation
• Plus, many small but consequential tasks

You must read that list slowly to really feel the weight of those tasks. It was a big year for a team that has no real IT department. It’s me and Dave Clark picking up these tasks when we have spare minutes away from digital communications and media. That means many late nights because spare time in digital communications and media does not exist.

So we have a lot finally nailed down on the IT side. And things are rolling well. There is always room for improvement, but it helps to have so much in our favor. 2007 was a year of establishment for the IT department. 2008 will be a year of refinement.

For the digital communications side, I think the exact opposite is about to happen! I’m extremely excited about this. 2006 was very much the year of establishment for the digital communications side. There were several large projects that happened including the massive re-building of theaterchurch.com. In 2007, there were a few major things, some internal application development providing support to the staff, many “routines” based on the establishment of the preceding year and last, much research. Plus, much of my focus went into those massive IT infrastructure changes.

In 2008, I am looking at some very big projects—so large, in fact, that I’ll have to outsource a large portion of the development for the applications and services we are looking to build. That’s exciting to me for many reasons! It will free up a large portion of focus for me. I need that. I won’t spend as much time fiddling around in PHP or trying to bend a small web app into submission to serve a need. (Silos!) I’ll move back into front-end development and project management. I’ll focus on organizing our data into one or two large systems and reducing the silos of information we’ve created over the years by snapping up URLs and building microsites and temporary blogs.

We’ve already experimented with outsourcing this year. That has been very successful. Nathan Herald built a fantastic support ticket system in Ruby on Rails. The projects we are looking at this year are massive. And they’ll likely need several Nathan Heralds. These are thousand-hour development and multi-person team projects; most involve high-end technology as well, including Flash, Ajax, RoR and more. It’s going to take some effort to get where we want to go. The projects we are looking into aren’t exactly secrets, but I’m not going to get into details until I see what I get approved to manage.

Budget proposals are just one piece of the pie. But they are a very important part of the end-of-year process for our departments. Our whole year depends on what happens in these proposals, meetings and approvals. I’m praying for awesome opportunities in 2008.

¹ The Desktop Standardization Project reduced significant “weight” of old, non-standard machines in use by our office staff. We moved old gear out and brought in fresh machines—desktops and laptops, according to the needs of the staff member. There were many reasons we needed to do this, but primarily it was to get everyone on the same technological level and provide consistency of hardware to produce more efficient answers to support requests.

Technorati Tags: 2008, budget, proposal, business, process, communications, digital, web, IT, technology

Andrew watches his first Iron Bowl on Saturday night. The Auburn Tigers won the match 17-10 over Alabama, sealing a sixth-in-a-row victory against the Tide.

War Eagle!

Technorati Tags: auburn, tigers, football, iron bowl, television, sports

If you are into speed or need a solid way to make sure your ISP is giving you what you pay for, hit Speedtest.net.

Here are some results from my latest speed test:

Technorati Tags: speed, test, bandwidth, connection, Internet, Flash, Ajax, speedtest.net