Thanks again to BBC Click I have discovered a great new service on the Internet. Lefora is a free forum service that lets you create a discussion forum service for your own communities. It’s really easy to set up, customise and get started.
So why do I need a forum? Well I’ve been secretly working on my own little project and now it’s time to start getting users on board. Using Lefora has enabled me to concentrate on my own service and not waste valuable time implementing another forum. You can check out my forum at rondayvoo.lefora.com. Oh yeah, my little project is a Rondayvoo.com. Feel free to check it out and use the forum to tell me what you think!
If you want your own free forum just click on :
free forum hosting by lefora
I stumbled across this new web technology called JSON whilst reading about the performance features being introduced into by AJAX web development tool I use. Essentially they replaced the XML interface between the server and browser based JavaScript client with JSON. JSON is a way of expressing complex data structures which is less verbose than XML and is supported natively by JavaScript which makes it much more performant in those environments. The home of JSON on the web is www.json.org, where there is an article called “The Fat Free Alternative to XML” that does an excellent job of explaining the benefits of JSON. There are also links to JSON libraries for just about every programming language that ever existed. So the question is, will the web community now have to change the name of Ajax ?
I have just discovered a whole area of IP based LAN technology I knew nothing about until this week! It’s known by various names including Zeroconfig, mDNS and Bonjour and I think this has the potential to completely change home networking.
I have been toying with setting up a DNS server at home to resolve all the host names for the machines on my local LAN, but in my research I spotted a suggestion to use Zeroconfig instead. After a bit of digging I realised this stuff looks very good.
Continue reading ‘Zeroconf / mDNS / Bonjour’
Another recomendation from the BBC’s Click tv show is Pandora. Pandora is very clever. You start by telling Pandora the name of an artist or a track you like then Pandora starts playing a stream of music which is similar. The concept is very simple but the technology behind it looks quite sophisticated. Once your “station” is playing you can train Pandora by adding extra artists or by using the thumbs up and down buttons as each track plays.
Continue reading ‘Pandora - Free Personalised Web Radio’
My favourite podcast author, Scott Sigler, just released his third podcast novel called Infection. His previous novels, Earthcore and Ancestor, had me on the edge of my seat so I have high hopes for this story too. I am now on a mission to get as many people as possible to experience Scott’s work as possible - so if you are reading my blog, I insist you go to http://scottsigler.podshow.com/ now and start listening!
Hot on the heals on Earthcore, Scott Sigler is Podcasting his next book, Ancestor. I’ve been batching up a few episodes at a time and listening to them in the car on the way to work. Earthcore was really good, but this story is even more exciting. Great job Scott, can’t wait to see the movie 
Wow, I really like this. I heard this track on Adam Curry’s show on “Podsafe music“. Adam and Patricia obviously have very different tastes to me. I must listen to more of 46bliss and see if they have a CD.
This is just a little bit of fun I saw on this week’s BBC Click Online. Visit Cyborgname.com and try it with your own name. I’m looking forward to a bit of nocturnal troubleshooting…
I have started using the online photo service Flickr to share my photos with friends and family. It has some really nice features, like viewing security, excellent slide show in your browser and these cool Flickr badges (check out the Flickr Daily Zeitgeist in the sidebar) . The service is free if you can live with a 20MB per month upload limit, although you can pay $24.95 per year to increase this limit to 2GB per month (and they remove the adds from your pages). I’m using the free service. I wish the slide show images were a little larger and the UI could be a little less confusing to someone who hasn’t seen it before, but all in all it’s a great service.
I first heard about this new Internet-TV show on the “This Week In Tech (TWiT)” Podcast. Kevin Rose, one of the presenters of Systm is a regular guest on TwiT. Systm just released their 2nd episode. This episode is all about building a Linux based MythTV PVR. They go into quite a lot of detail and explain stuff quite well. The first episode showed how to build a box of tricks that would pick up wireless video cameras. This show is very cool and is very professionally produced despite being free to download. You will need a Bittorrent client to download the show, I’d recommend Azureus. If you like Systm you should also check out From The Shadows.
