Some cool updates have been made to DavidMeade.com recently.

You’ll no doubt have noticed the new ‘in-line’ video players. I hope that’s working well for all of you. Please let me know if you have problems seeing the video.

You may have also noticed the availability of comment RSS feeds. This allows guests to receive notifications of replies without having to register or sign up with an email address.

One of the cooler things that I’ve been meaning to do for a long time and finally got around to doing is making all of the DavidMeade.com links much easier to remember.

For example, if you wanted to see all the video blogs, you could go to:

http://www.davidmeade.com/tags/Video+Blog

If you wanted to subscribe to DavidMeade.com, you could use the feed URL:

http://www.davidmeade.com/feed

If you wanted to open DavidMeade.com in iTunes, you could use the URL:

http://www.davidmeade.com/itunes

The cool part here is that none of these files actually exist, so you can pretty much make them up. So if you wanted to … for example … see all posts where I’ve tagged it with “Chicago”, you might try:

http://www.davidmeade.com/tags/Chicago

And if you wanted an RSS feed for only posts tagged “Chicago” you might try:

http://www.davidmeade.com/tags/Chicago/feed

Doug has launched a new site, and Kevin is about to. Once all that is done, I hope to get them to work with me on a collaborative project.

There have been other ‘behind the scenes’ changes, but I wont bore you with them. Just remember … let me know if you find a bug!

- Dave

There have been some site tweaks this weekend to help you out a bit.

Right away, you’ll likely notice the ‘Whats New’ list has been upgraded to show not only the date but also the time of updates. I also fixed a bug where clicking on the whats new item didn’t always take you to the exact potst … it should now.

I’ve also tweaked the audio/video pop-ups such that if you click the comments link it will not close your media window. So you can now watch/listen to DavidMeade.com content while you’re leaving a comment.

The biggest change is that there is now an RSS feed for comments. This is especially good for our guests who want to be notified when a a new comment is left on a blog. Guests don’t get the email notification you members are used to (because they aren’t members) … but this will let them get notification for any topic they choose.

I’ve (of course) got some more ideas, just not enough time to do them all.

The new server is in the MDT zone. I’ve implimented a fix to get the post date/times to show in central time again. Please let me know if you notice it displaying the timezone incorrectly. I also plan (in the near future) to make it so that your prefered time zone is used (you must be a registered user for that to work – otherwise it will show Chicago time).

Thanks,

Dave

The Archive.org seems to be having some issues, and as a result, you may have problems viewing a vlog or listening to an audio blog here at DavidMeade.com. Please do give it a try, and let me know if it works or not. I’m looking into getting a mirror site available.

Sorry,

– Dave

I’ve altered the sidebar to order news articles based on their most recent update rather than their initial posting date. This way some lingering issues can be more easily called out as updates occur.

Let me know if, for some reason, you hate this change.

Thanks,

Dave

FYI, I’m very nearly ready to switch to the new hosting company and then the site should be working like you should/would expect. Thanks for sticking with us during this rough patch!

There was a bug that was preventing my audio blogs from playing correctly in FireFox. I have found and fixed the problem. Sorry for the inconvienence. Please enjoy the DavidMeade.com audio blogs in any browser of your choice now.

Those g*! !@^% mother $*@%#@!ers at my hosting company did it AGAIN!!!!

They overwrote my files AGAIN! Without so much as a warning AGAIN!!! Rather than apply the patch to phpBB they just deleted and reinstalled … destroying all custom built apps and mods. They are seriously the most clueless hosting company in the world.

The format of various pages are now completely broken, directs are completely broken (post something and you will be taken to some crazy page other than what you are used to), some functionality was lost, and I’ve got a good week or two of rebuild ahead of me just so I can get back to square one and they can do it all over again.

I’m changing hosting companies. I’m sorry for the pain this may cause some of you … I’m not fixing this site here – I’m rebuilding it elsewhere. Please forgive the delay … and wish me luck.

Coolness! DavidMeade.com’s TAG system should now be Technorati compliant. Additionaly, the site now provides context appropriate RSS auto-discovery for those of you who use such features (such as Firefox users).