Asymptomatic

A while ago I nominated Habari for the SourceForge Community Choice award for Best New Project. Unless you're a first-time visitor, it should be clear that I think Habari is a great tool, and I'm really happy to say that we've managed to make the cut of finalists for the award! So now I need your help...

It's actually one of my goals to get myself nominated for a web award. But technically, this award isn't for me -- It's for the community of folks who have put together a really great blogging package. Allow me to live a bit vicariously and suggest that winning the award for Habari would be just as thrilling for me as to be nominated for my own award (which seems a long way off in coming, if ever).

If Matt Asay would stop by any of the places where our group congregates, he'd learn how deserving of such an award both the software and the community is. We're not fringe, we're up-and-coming!...

Over the weekend, I visited Columbus, not just to hang out with skippy at ComFest and buy too much crap at Origins, but to attend and lead a session at PodCamp Ohio.

The side dishes to this entrée are actually better than the meat, but the meat was the point of the dinner, so that's what I'll talk about here. I'm all about focus here. Focus.

I showed up right on time for the welcome session on Saturday and checked in. I hadn't been able to show up for the Friday night meetup because of the previously mentioned "side dishes". I checked in and was shown to the "Speaker Lounge", marked off by signs with martini glasses (with olive!). After a brief welcome from another couple of session leaders in the lounge, we all shuffled down to Room A for the introduction.

I'm not going to do a play-by-play of the rest of the day, because that's already feeling tedious. Let me cover briefly a couple of sessions I did attend, and my overall impression of the camp. more

The people at the Habari Project have recently released version 0.4 of Habari. If you don't usually read my blog, then you might not know that I help write this software and that the software is what runs this site.

Following up on the 0.4 release, I wrote a kind of "manifesto" for what we need to accomplish for Habari 0.5, and then I read the whole thing into the computer so that you could just listen to it. Lucky you, fun for me. Enjoy.

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Man, this week has been difficult. We've had a few server issues with work clients, and I've been playing around with my own servers, and it's just been a mess that I'm hoping will be in the past come next week. But I've learned some lessons, and I figure I might as well pass them on because people are apparently still buying hosting from really bad places.

What do I need? This is the most basic question you need to start asking yourself before you even hunt for hosts. Having some idea of your demands, both from a technical perspective and a logistical perspective can save you some pain in the future. Here are some really basic considerations:

Shared/VPS/Dedicated -- What level of hosting you choose will depend on the types of service you intend to run and the affordability of storage space. Shared hosting is for small, single, low-traffic installations, like a single blog or a low-traffic forum. VPS hosting allows you to interact with the server configuration directly, to host more complex applications and more of them. Dedicated hosting gives you full control over what runs on your system, plus often includes dedicated storage that is many times what you'd get from the other options. But there are more things to consider....

Today at Woot they're selling a 30GB Zune for $99, so when the clock flipped last night, I bought one. At some point in that process the whole MP3/radio idea mix leaked into my consciousness, and I ended up dreaming about it. When I woke up this morning, I was asking myself, "Is radio dead?"

One of the significant contributors to this thought is the release of Radiohead's new album, In Rainbows. It's not about the album itself - I don't have it, and am wondering if I even want to bother given that my thoughts about Radiohead deserve a full post of their own - but another question I had asked myself about it: Is the album getting radio airtime?

Radiohead is a reasonably big name in music. Will radio stations play the album they've released online outside of the traditional distribution chain? The model for radio is usually to be courted by the music industry to play new music, especially of bands that people may want to hear on the air. The purpose is to generate money in advertising because people will not tune away from the ads between songs if they think a song they will want to hear comes next. So will radio stations play In Rainbows?...