Matt Burley, a friend of mine and coworker at TechVi from the UK (his origin has nothing to do with this post, I just like talking about my “international friends”) has a nice tech blog at mattburley.co.uk. One of his pages is My Tech, where he lists the technology products that he uses.

I thought that was a great idea, so I stole it and have created my own. Check out my My Tech.

Like too many mornings in the past six or eight months, I woke up at 5:00am this morning. No, I didn’t have to, I just did. I’m not sure if my body is changing as I get older or what. I really don’t mind, as long as I don’t drag butt all day because I’m too tired. The extra time waking up too early gives me is quiet time that I often take advantage of to do some web design, research, or class prep. This morning it was Option 3.

When my eyes were about to fall out, I decided to take a break and catch up on some Macworld info. I started watching a video of Chris Breen’s interview of Andy Ihnatko, two of my favorite Mac pundits.

During the conversation, about halfway through the 15 minute video, the two were talking about Andy’s presentation at the show. He had lived without physical media — books, DVDs, comic books, etc. — for all of 2009 as an experiment. Chris asked Andy’s opinion on why Apple’s decision years ago to begin selling digital music at a standard price of 99-cents was praised, while Amazon’s attempt to do the same with book publishers was marred with people complaining that they were ripping off the authors, etc.

Here’s my take. The music industry is viewed, rightly or wrongly, as a handful of big corporations that control everything and rip of the artists. They exist primarily as a delivery vehicle for the music and add very little value to the final product. People hate middlemen. They want to buy direct from the source, as if the music will sound fresher or something.

In addition, people tend to think of the superstars when they discuss music distribution. So what if Bon Jovi loses out on 30 cents per track? Individuals got behind Apple’s “fight” to standardize the pricing because it didn’t affect people that they know.

The book industry, however, is thought to be more open. Lots of people know someone or may even have a cousin that has written a book. Heck, it’s even a cliche dream to write one’s own book toward the end of life so that later generations will learn from one’s mistakes and enjoy the stories of good and bad things that happened. So the book author is thought of as a neighbor, friend, or family member and people can identify with him or her much better than a musician, in general.

As a result, individuals are less forgiving about arrangements that may lower the amount of money an author receives for his or her work. Any “big business” that comes along and wants a piece of the pie, or in Amazon’s case, wants the size of the pie to be standardized, is seen as evil.

Now, I personally don’t believe that, to be honest. That’s just my theory to explain the difference in attitudes. I think that Amazon AND Apple had valid reasons for trying to get these deals done and, as long as the agreements are made, I’m cool with it.

Most of you that know me also know that I’ve been working on a complete redesign of KeokukRadio.com. You know because I’ve done little else with my free time, and a lot of time at work, other than work on this site. I’ve been working on a couple of other sites as well, but this one took quite a bit of time to figure out how to do all of the cool things that make it unique.

First off, I built it using WordPress as a platform. I’ve built a few blogs that way, but have just begun using it as a complete web site solution. I have to say, it works very well! The literally thousands of themes and plugins available make it quicker and more stable than using a traditional web design application like Dreamweaver or Expression Web. I know, I know… some of you long-time pros are yelling at your monitors right now, telling the virtues of using a “real tool” to do the work. I’ve used those, too, and believe me when I say “I’m done with them.”

I’ve learned a lot in the past several weeks. Taking a custom these, editing the PHP, shoe-horning plugins into the mix, and tweaking the output of everything is still challenging. But I really enjoyed digging into the WordPress community and finding an overwhelming amount of support and ideas.

Enough about the coding crap. Let’s get to the good stuff!

Keokuk Radio approached me because they really couldn’t stand the design that an ex-employee has left them with. The pages were dark and unreadable, the site structure was confusing at best, and the whole thing felt incomplete. Instead of attempting to fix it, I suggested that we scrap it altogether and put something fresh in its place.

The result is a brighter, logically-structured, dynamic site with many social media integrations. For example, when a photo is added to the radio group’s Facebook Fan page (also new), the pictures are automatically added to a special Photos page on the site. Comments to that Fan page are also pushed to Twitter along with every News, Sports, or Cancellations post. And one of my favorite little features is the Cancellations and Delays link and post that automatically appear on the home page when that post is set to Published. A very easy-to-use system that’s also pleasing to the eye.

Two other sections to get a massive redo are the Community Calendar and the Sports Calendars. A visitor sees the Community Calendar in a sidebar widget but can also see a larger view on a separate page. This calendar is populated via an API feed from a special Google Calendar. In addition, each of the 12 sports covered by the radio stations has its own embedded calendar. There’s an All Sports Calendar that combined all of these into one comprehensive page, too. And each of these calendars is available via subscription so that users can integrated them into Outlook, iCal, or their own Google Calendars. Pretty slick, if I do say so myself!

If you’re still reading, why not take a couple of minutes and check out the site. Let me know what you like — you can keep what you don’t like to yourself =) — and give me ideas if you see room for improvement.

One more thing: I really want to say thanks to the whole group at Keokuk Radio. They’ve been AWESOME to work with and gave up a lot of control to me so that I could experiment with ideas. Those of you that design web sites, do any creative work, or really just anyone that deals with customers, know how impressive it is to work with clients that appreciate you and actually help with the whole process. I can only hope that my future clients are half as accommodating!

So, today I needed to show some web dev stuff to a client. Figuring this would be great time to try GoToMeeting, the service that is advertised ad nauseam on almost all of the podcasts I listen to, I fired up the browser and headed that way.

After a quick sign up for an account, I was presented with the request for a credit card number that can be charged in case I forget to cancel my account. Umm… no. I set out to find a free alternative.

Enter Yumga. A quick setup and install of the Yumga application yielded no request for credit card numbers nor birth certificates. However, testing showed serious problems… Like the lack of audio and laggy performance of screen refreshing.

I went back to GoToMeeting, entered in a number from an old debit card with maybe $12 in the account, and set about testing. The performance was better, but the audio still gave us fits. The best solution ended up being a combination of screen sharing with audio transmitted via the ancient phone system. It worked but was far from elegant.

So, my question is: Why is it that in 2010, with broadband connections on both ends, screen sharing (let alone video conferencing at the same time) is so difficult to accomplish? Seasoned veterans of technology were involved here, and we still resorted to POTS.

No wonder people hate computers. =)

Hey, I kinda like this new look to my site. What do YOU think?

I’ve been trying out quite a few themes lately, but none of them had the right mix for what I was looking for. But I dragged out an old folder of themes, blew the dust off, and found this gem.

Sure, there are a few things that I’m not too crazy about, but it’s a solid foundation and I’ll be able to clean it up. Got a better suggestion? Please email me or leave a comment.

Thanks again for stopping by!

Well, I’m done with my first class. It went really well, if I do say so myself.

I had seven students and several brought questions that I hadn’t anticipated. I felt well prepared to answer most but I could more experience, I’m sure.

The next class is in two weeks and it’s a different subject, so I have a bit of time to prepare. Then the flood gates open wide and late February and early March get real busy!