Jeff Hester

Poking around the intersection of KM and Social Media

Archives for March 2008

WordPress 2.5 is ready to roll!

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The good folks at WordPress have officially released WordPress 2.5. It comes with a long list of nice enhancements, including a completely redesigned administration console that looks and feels great. I upgraded this blog in exactly five minutes, including the time required to upload the new files and upgrade the database. It worked like a charm.

One of the things I like best so far is the ability to auto-update plug-ins via FTP. It worked perfectly, and simplifies the process tremendously.

So far, the only plug-in that I’m not able to get running with 2.5 is also unfortunately one of my favorites: Ankur Kathari’s Gregarious social bookmarking plug-in. Everything else has worked like a charm!

Already running an older version of WordPress? Here are the famous three-step upgrade instructions.

Photoshop Now Free

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Photoshop logoAdobe Photoshop has long been recognized as the premier tool for image and graphics editing, but the cost was prohibitive for many people. Adobe first offered a slimmed-down version of Photoshop at a lower cost, but now you can use Photoshop for free! Zero. Zip. Nada. Nothing.

Adobe has introduced Photoshop Express, a free, web-based version of Photoshop. Photoshop Express is available now in beta form, and apart from the required Flash 9 plug-in (also free), you don’t need to install any software on your PC. This means Photoshop Express will run happily on your Mac, your Windows PC or even your Linux computer.

On top of that, Adobe is providing 2 GB of storage for your work, also free. So now you can edit images from pretty much anywhere with a PC and an Internet connection.

Photoshop Express

While graphic designers and image pros will still need the full desktop client, most people will find Photoshop Express more than meets their needs. Even pros will find it useful for those occasions when their own PC is not nearby.

And it’ll probably make law-abiding citizens out of a lot of would-be pirates.

Doing the Animoto Thing

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Animoto is a terrific service that creates video presentations combining photos and music with some great visual effects and very little effort on your part. The beauty of Animoto is that it works with the photos you probably have already uploaded. Animoto can retrieve your photos from Flickr, facebook, smugmug, Picasa or photobucket. You select the photos you want to use, including any special photos you would like to highlight in the video.

For music, you can upload your own or choose from a very nice selection in a variety of genres. For the video above, I chose one of the Indie Rock selections.

That’s about it! Animoto then creates your video automatically. When it’s done, you’ll have a code you can use to embed it on your own blog, or Animoto will automatically embed your video on facebook, myspace, blogger and several other sites. You can even automatically upload the video to YouTube, or download a Quicktime version to your computer.

All of this is free… as long as you’re happy to limit your videos to 30 seconds in length. Longer videos can be created at a cost of $3 each, or you can pay $30 for an annual subscription that let’s you create an unlimited number of “full-length” videos.

The results speak for themself. I was pleased, given the amount of effort that went into it (almost zero).  Check out Animoto.

The Good Life

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It’s been a while since I’ve participated in a Photo Friday challenge. This week’s challenge was “The Good Life.” I was looking through some of my photos to see if I had something that captured the essence of the theme, and I’m happy to report that life is good! And while this might bend the “rules” of the challenge, I submit to you the following collage.The Journey

Here’s to the good life!

Using Google Sites for wiki-style collaboration

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Google has added yet another application to the Google Apps suite. Google Sites gives you the ability to create collaborative workspaces on-the-fly, at no cost. If you’ve got a Google Apps account, you’ll be able to create an unlimited number of these sites. You can restrict access to specific users, open it up to all users from your domain, or make the site entirely public.

Anyone with proper permission can go in and make edits or create new pages, just like your typical wiki. In addition, you can add Google Widgets, Google Docs and a number of other pre-built tools.

Many analysts, including Michael Arrington at Techcrunch, are speculating that Google Sites is intended to compete with Microsoft Sharepoint.

Personally, I don’t see this as a Sharepoint killer, not because it lacks features, but because the large enterprises that typically use Sharepoint are too security-conscious to trust their family jewels to someone outside the firewall. Where Google Sites fits nicely is for small organizations, ad-hoc teams, communities and other groups without either the resources nor the need for an internally hosted solution.

I’m doing some testing with my crew at BigBlueBall and some of the projects we’re working on, and it looks promising. Google Sites is similar to a wiki in that anyone with permission can edit a page or create new pages, and the revision history is saved for reference. Where it’s different is that it uses a much friendlier design environment rather than wiki-tags. It’s not quite WYSIWYG, but it’s fairly easy to grasp for anyone who knows their way around the web.