jump to navigation

One Grain of Rice for everyone in North and South America February 5, 2008

Posted by Ryan in : Podcasts, Video, Earth, statistics, Arts, Boing Boing , add a comment


Vlog: Mark Frauenfelder - Rice Demographics - Boing Boing TV

one grain of rice for every person in the Americas there, arranged in categorized piles: the number of people who eat at McDonalds every day; the number of millionaires in the United States; the number of Billionaires; the number of people in South America who live on less than $2 a day, etc..

It was an exhibit by the London-based theatre company Stan’s Cafe, called “Of All the People In The World: The Americas.” They created it to help people understand hard-to-visualize statistics, such as the number of people who live in gated communities in the United States, the number of people who have been killed by tasers, and the number of people with AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.

Watch A Local Folkus, Learn About Central Florida’s Local Food Movement December 20, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Podcasts, Orlando, Links, Video, TV, Trends, Earth, Travel, Restaurants, Web Sites, floridacreatives, OrlandoScene, Storytelling, Friends, Viddler , add a comment

I finally got to watch John Rife’s awesome locavore video, and I now feel very educated and inspired to explore and sample some of the places and foods he intoduces us to in his first installment of A Local Folkus.

It’s also nice seeing this project happen, because John is renting space on our server, and I helped him set up the Wordpress (a bit).

I’d like to post a lot of relevant links to go with this video, but that will take a little while. Check back soon for some more info.

Ryan Price and Julie Norris on Front Porch Radio September 21, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Podcasts, Orlando, Music, Events, Earth, Fringe, Radio, floridacreatives, Likemind.orl , add a comment

Front Porch Radio

Download the podcast

Julie hosts new locals only show on WPRK 91.5 | Dandelion Communitea Cafe

Front Porch is a weekly radio show hosted by Julie Norris, Proprietor of Dandelion Communitea Cafe, and focuses on all things local. Each week features a different guest making a difference locally with eclectic blends of local music and various ramblings about what is happening in OurLando.

Tune your dial to WPRK 91.5 or listen online at wprkdj.org every Wednesday at noon.

Front Porch Radio is now a podcast as well.

What a Week! August 31, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Career, Blogging, Podcasts, Orlando, Cervo, Links, Drupal, Events, Coworking, Wikipedia, Trends, Earth, Liberatr, Web Sites, floridacreatives, Entrepreneurship, Teaching , add a comment

Exciting stuff, and I’m sure there’s more, like new podcasts with awesome interviews and awesome Internet TV too. There must be more getting tangled up in all the excitement. If you’d like to hear more about any of these endeavors, I’d be happy to chat. There are a dozen ways to contact me mentioned on my blog, so just pick one.

Dries Buytaert on Drupal | on the luck of seven August 27, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Blogging, Podcasts, Links, Drupal, Video, Coworking, Trends, Standards, Earth, Travel, Web Sites, Charity , 1 comment so far

Noel Hidalgo is running around the world sleeping on couches, twittering, docu-vlogging and digging up a layer of the new open-source Earth bedrock. By the way, he’s accepting donations (I’ve donated), in the spirit of the movement, just to help him get where he’s going. His most recent video introduces us to the accidental general of a powerful army of Drupal fanboys - and I’m one of them. (link)


Video thumbnail. Click to play
Click To Play

Recoded: 26 July 2007

Locations: Antwerp, Belgium

Tags: drupal, open source, linus torvalds, angela byron, history of drupal, kernel trap, inspiration, empowerment

Music: ana (captain planet remix), vieux farka touré and captainplanet

About: after much wrangling and rescheduling, dries and i finally caught up to talk about the history of drupal, his inspiration, and most importantly the empowerment of community.

important links to note…

- drupal.org

- groups.drupal.org

- buytaert.net

- kernaltrap.org

- slashdot.com

- amnesty.org

- greenpeace.org

on a side note, thank you OpenCraft for giving me a home to edit this video!

also, i’d like to thank dries and karlijn on their new boy and omar for his hospitality in cairo.

Drupal vs. Movable Type August 19, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Blogging, Drupal, Trends, Design, Earth, Web Sites , 1 comment so far

Lighter Footstep is a community site to learn about reducing your impact on the planet, and I recently noticed on their Twitter feed that they’re considering switching to Movable Type from Joomla. This was the email I wrote back to Chris after his query about Drupal:

I don’t know much bout Movable Type, but I’ve watched some screencasts and heard lots of good things. As a blogging platform goes, they have one of the tightest and richest experiences you’re going to find anywhere. Six Apart does a great job on user experience. One downside is finding Perl programmers to do any custom stuff for you if you don’t already know any.

Drupal is fantastic for, but not limited to, publishing a community site with multiple user accounts, forums, rich media, and just about anything you can think of. Drupal is designed to be 100% extensible, so there is nothing on the web today you can’t do with drupal, it’s more a question of whether you have the vision, resources and expertise to pull it off.

Admittedly, I’d want a lot of customizations to make Drupal into a great day-to-day blogging platform - I’m currently using Wordpress almost everywhere I blog or podcast because it is just so streamlined - I imagine Movable Type is a similar experience. Using Drupal is like graduating from middle school to your first full-time job, where you are now responsible for lots of things you didn’t know you needed to manage, because someone was glossing over the grim details before. However, that also means you get more control. Still, once you get set up, the experience is very similar to any CMS platform.

As a personal plug for myself, I’d like to say I’m an extremely competent Drupal developer and theme guru. I’ve been working with drupal 25+ hours a week since January.

I hope this helps you in making your decision.

Addendum: Movable Type is not free for more than one user, or for commercial purposes. I see this as a very big issue, as there is an ongoing cost associated with your otherwise free-to-maintain website. Anyone considering getting into web publishing should consider the cost of “going pro” should the opportunity present itself.

How does iTunes popularity work? March 4, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Podcasts, Music, Links, Video, Reviews, TV, Trends, Earth, Liberatr, Web Sites, itunes, statistics , add a comment

Dear iTunes:
Will you please tell me how many people clicked Subscribe inside of iTunes? I know you know, and since you know I know you know, you appear to tease me with the information. Why?

Is my podcast popular in relation to other Alternative Health shows, or simply compared to the other shows I searched for? Is it popular today, this week, this month, since the beginning of the year, or since Hallowe’en? Is there any way to find out? Please, please, please help me.

Footprint Podcast is Popular on iTunesFootprint Podcast is Popular on iTunes Hosted on Zooomr
iTunes OCDiTunes OCD Hosted on Zooomr

Your podcast catching platform is regrettably the only software that works well for audio and video across 2 major platforms and also manages to keep people inside the program for hours a day, with a little number next to the “Podcasts” source that lets the OCD people know they have unfinished business with their podcast hosts. If someone else captured attention as well as iTunes, I would scream it from the rooftops. If all I do is video, Democracy Player is great! I wish Democracy did audio, or someone would write a hip, open-source podcatching/ music listening platform.

Wait a second… what about Songbird? Is their user experience too general? I can subscribe to a webpage with mp3 links, but not to a feed. Or if I can, they don’t make it obvious. Since they are still on version 0.2.5, does this mean I’m going to have to wait a few years for them to get it right, like I’m doing with Flock? Only you, iTunes, have the power to help me in my quest. How do I compare?

People don’t want to visit Podcast Alley, and they especially don’t want to be NPR’d to death with “Please vote for our podcast, so we can beat the Harry Potter kids!” all the live-long day. They just don’t. Most of them only tune in to about half an hour’s worth of material anyway, so unless we plug it at the beginning, which no self-respecting podcaster would do, there’s almost no way to get a decent comparison.

iTunes Related SubscriptionsiTunes Related Subscriptions Hosted on Zooomr

When I first saw these little gray bars, I was very excited - my podcast is popular! Hell, people even have related subscriptions… I think. Is this like the Amazon store, where they say “People who bought this product also bought…” because if it is, where are the comments from those kids? This large number of related podcasts leads me to believe that you are just pulling the stats from Alternative Health in general, or one very eco-friendly person’s list.

Gosh, iTunes. Even your screenshots look good in a blog post. I wish you weren’t the only major player. I guess all I can do now is start writing XUL plugins for Songbird, create BitTorrent friendly feeds for Democracy TV, and keep doing my shameless self promotions for Liberatr, Liberatr, Liberatr.net!

Thanks for… something, Uncle Steve.

Peace,
Ryan Price
iTunes User
Orlando, FL

Sunday, Not Monday - Bonus Days February 9, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, News, Markteting, Podcasts, Orlando, Music, Links, Events, Video, Beer, Film, Design, Earth, Fringe, MySpace, Web Sites, floridacreatives, grandmaparty , 1 comment so far

I am realizing a bit too late that if you have a monthly event, you need to standardize the date.

Any other dates/times/locations will inevitably be bonus events.

This month’s Florida Creatives is in a different place on a different day - never again.

How does 3rd Monday at Crooked Bayou sound? We can build a relationship with that place, they seemed to like having us on a slow night. This means the next event is March 19th, right after St. Patty’s Day.

There are a couple of Bonus Events coming up I want to discuss with people - one is Grandma Party. This is a one-day craft bazaar that is more than a bit bizarre. Hosted in April in the parking lot of Stardust, dozens of crafters, activists, musicians, videographers, art installationists, farmers, hair stylists, and lots of other -ists gather to hang out, eat soy dogs, drink lemonade, sell their wares and have fun.

I bought a booth for Florida Creatives to try and garner some support from the DIY community. Lots of people there participate in other initiatives like Assembly, and this will be our “coming out” to them. It would be interesting if we could leave some voicemails on the Grandma Party Hotline - 206.666.4.SEW - to show them we are supporting the event.

Later I would like to buy a booth for the Fringe Festival in May, but I don’t have $325 in my back pocket, so I’d like to pass a collection plate.

Temporary Insanity February 7, 2007

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Career, Markteting, Blogging, Podcasts, Orlando, Cervo, SEO, Music, Links, Drupal, Events, Video, Film, Coffee, Reviews, Trends, Standards, Design, Earth, Travel, MySpace, Liberatr, Web Sites, floridacreatives , add a comment

Don’t ask me why, but I just wrote a song. I don’t write songs, but this one just kind of got stuck in my head and I didn’t know who to share it with, so i wrote it down - with chords and everything.

It’s about evil Starbuck’s Coffee and (partly) how it makes me run to the toilet.

I used my little Casio keyboard from like 20 years ago — if that doesn’t date me, what will? It still has all the stickers on the white keys with the little # and b in the corners. I tried to write a song on it last week and I realised it’s hard to write a song when you HAVE to… when that happens you should go to the PodSafe Music Network and grab a Swedish pop-punk band instead.

*******************************************

There are also brand new episodes of Shrink your Ecological Footprint and You can’t spell crapface without PFA from this weekend posted. Those are two podcast talkshows I record with my friends, the first over Skype to Arizona, and the second locally in my living room with a sweet echo. (really)

On Sunday, I am getting jazzed up about having our #3 installment of Florida Creatives Happy Hour at the Copper Rocket starting after 3PM. Immediately before that is the Enzian’s #2 installment of the Indie Film Slam revival.

Tomorrow John Rife and I are getting together at Dandelion to talk about refreshing his videoblog a bit in anticipation of a major road trip (he will be phoning home every few days with a new video). We are planning on doing some Google Maps mashup stuff as well as the standard blogging/feeds thing. I am hoping to be able to get some microformats in there as well. I would like for John to be discoverable by people outside of Orlando who might happen by. I know YouTube has (some imitation of) geo-identification, but I don’t think it gets included in the search results. Tagging and research will help, and reciprocal links (as many as we can get). I hope John meets some bloggers along the way, and makes plenty of MySpace friends.

This will be a fun 3 months of online marketing blitz, especially considering that the location (not virtually, but physically) and focus of the content will be changing almost every day.

*******************************************

Last but not least, the very talented Damien McKenna has been acting as my second set of hands this week, doing some work on a Drupal 5 site for a client. He just got this very spiffy and finally bug-free system going where you add an image (or several images) to your node (this one’s for a single project in a portfolio). Once you save the form, a module called imagecache auto-generates thumbnails for you. Last but not least, these images are munged into links to one of those spiffy AJAX image boxes, like lightbox or in this case thickbox.

The payoff? Instant photo gallery. Pats on the back for Damien.

If you’re still reading, thanks for enduring. I haven’t written many posts like this since my LiveJournal days. The last two I’ve done have been videos.

It’s OurLando, let’s create it together! December 31, 2006

Posted by Ryan in : Tech, News, Site News, Career, Markteting, Orlando, Links, Drupal, Events, Shopping, Trends, Earth , 1 comment so far

I was just reading a post on the Dandelion website about the Homemade for the Holidays craft market they had this month, and I saw a word I noticed on a button at said store:

OurLando

One might say this is a marketing attempt on Dandelion’s behalf, but after looking into it, I noticed that this was a concept originally developed by Frankie Messina of Apartment E, which is a local networking group that currently meets Wednesdays at Austin’s Coffee (I think).

I guess the idea is very similar to that of Florida Creatives. There is a community aspect, a crafting thing, and of course buttons. I’m not sure about it all yet, but I’ll have to get them on a podcast soon and ask them all about it.
I also came across another local networking group, Orlando Dorkbot. This one appears to be show-and-tell driven as opposed to just a networking event.