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It’s been a long time since I have written a post on here and it’s depressing. I have done some thinking in the last couple of days and here is what I came up with.

I have wanted to do some online video streaming for quite some time and I have spent a lot of time getting my setup working so that it would run correctly. That took away from my posting time so there was a lack of presence on the blog which wasn’t good. Then for some reason I got it in my head that if I was going to spend any time on the website it should be in the video stream. There are 2 issues with that. First is that I absolutely need to be in my home office for that to work. I don’t have any mobile cameras to play with so it’s not a choice at the moment. The other issue is that it takes planning and some dedicated time. I can post from any computer connected to the internet, hell… even my cell phone.

Now that I realize what my mental block was I hope that I can get past it… Christmas is coming and there will be much tech to talk about

I have been searching for a plugin for Wordpress to automatically send an email to my subscribers each time I post a new article. I haven’t been very lucky, until now! I have found a tool called Subscribe2. The name isn’t very telling however it will let you set up how new blog subscribers are registered for emails by default.

Before installing this plugin at www.thesleepygeek.com, subscribers did not receive an email notifying them of a blog post. Since installing the plugin, I can set that any future blog subscriber will automatically be put on the email list (unless they choose not to) so when posting they will be notified.

This is an exciting addition to The Sleepy Geek. I have wanted a medium to notify users of new material if they are not involved with the Web 2.0 scene. It has been easy to setup plugins that update twitter, facebook, pownce, etc. but there are people in the world who don’t subscribe to those services.

Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) twittered a new site just a few minutes ago and I am psyched! It is a site all about grilling and BBQs. If you are a meat lover like me, then this is the site for you.

Prime Cuts is a site created by Justin Levy who not only seems to know a lot about meat and BBQing but also is a chef. So far there are only 3 or 4 posts on the site so it’s hard to see the continuity on the site but the posts that are there are very well written and very informative. I am always looking for new tricks with my BBQ, new things to cook and new ways to cook them.

So all you vegetarians can forgive me for this post, the rest of you go have a look and book his RSS feed

I was looking to add some RSS feeds to my sidebars for popular news sites that I view daily, or close to daily. I looked at using the RSS widget that is included in Wordpress but it is very limited and I wanted something more customizable, which I found on KB Advanced RSS Widget.

Adam R. Brown is the author of this widget and I am pleased with what he has done. He has added features to allow you to list certain portions of the RSS feed coming in. Some of the other features include:

• Decide which RSS fields to display (as opposed to the default RSS widget, which limits you to link and title), and
• Decide how to format the fields (it doesn’t have to be a list if you don’t want it to be).

You are also able to add titles to each feed so that it is clear to your readers what they are looking at. With some work you can limit the title to a certain number of character or parse the first X amount of characters off the beginning. This is handy if your feed has a static lead in that you want to remove.

He also mentions that this is called an advanced product for a reason:

Be aware that it’s called “advanced” for a reason. You need to know some basic HTML, and possibly a little PHP, to use this fully.

I am sure most people who know how to install an widget on their own hosted Wordpress will be able to get this in there and working.

As you can see for now I have added feeds from Leo Laporte and Chris Pirillo because they are a couple of my favorites. I think that I will eventually move towards putting a news service, or a more current events type blog on there. That seems to make more sense to me for my blog.

If you are looking to add RSS feeds to your site go take a look!

I have been looking at http://regator.com for a bit now and I like the site. Something a bit different in style from other blog sites out there. So I recently submitted http://www.thesleepygeek.com to them so they would add my posts to their site. It’s new to the public and I wanted to see if they wanted some new additions, as I am sure a lot of other people tried as well. This is part of the response I got back:

My apologies in the delay in getting back to you about the status of your nomination. When we opened to the public on Thursday, we had a sudden flood of submissions, and it has taken our editorial team a little while to review them all. Thanks for your patience.

It was simply nice to get a response all together but they go one step further by sending a response to me directly. This is much nicer that receiving the standard forum letter for sure!

After all that, I didn’t get added to their site which is fine. They are looking for more up to the minute news type blogs which I am admittedly not. I do like to talk about current issues and products but if you want to know what the latest IT gadget is, someone else will find that first I am sure.

Anyhow, take a look at the site because they deserve it. I will continue to go there for some reads and I suggest you do the same… after you stop here first and click on my ads MWAhahaha!

Of course when you log into the dashboard for your Wordpress installation it will scream at you to update if you are not already at the newest version. After looking at that message for a few weeks, I thought it was time.

The easiest way to upgrade your installation is to follow their installation/upgrade instructions. They are very simple and easy to follow. I however went one step further and read through their comprehensive upgrade instructions. I recommend these for anyone who has installed a plugin or theme that wasn’t part of the original installation. I am pretty sure that means most of us running Wordpress to host our own blog.

One of the most important steps that they talk about is to backup. This is truly a must! I recommend before starting your upgrade that you install a plugin called Backup Wordpress. Most of the Wordpress backup plugins that exist are designed to do database backups and not file backups. The upgrade of Wordpress will touch the database but only at the end of the procedure. This backup plugin will backup both the files and the database so you are safe.

Once you are sure you have a complete backup, then proceed with the upgrade. There is a lot of manual file manipulation so I recommend that you use an FTP client to connect to your server unless you have a very good web host interface.

Watch their steps carefully. The only one that I would recommend against is their suggestion to use a plugin called Maintenance Mode. This is a good plugin for when you are performing some tasks on the site, but in this case you are deleting so many supporting files the site will go down anyhow.

After the upgrade you will find some new features. Although they don’t seem huge, they are nice touches and typical of a sub-version release.

• Version/revision saves a copy of a post every time you edit it, allows you to view (not edit) each of those copies (revisions), Shows forward (in time) diffs between any two revisions.
• Display captions of images alongside them in posts and pages.
• Add paging of Themes in Design panel
• Word Count displayed when writing and editing posts and pages
• Press This bookmarklet
• Add sorting to gallery
• Export/import post excerpts
• Theme Previewer
• Check (assigned) Categories at top Category box in Write/Manage Post
• Show when a term is both a tag and a category
• Wider Profile fields
• TinyMCE 3.1
• Two categories can have sub-categories with the same name

Have fun blogging!

I started to concentrate on my blog in the last 3-4 months with the hopes of building a core readership that would possibly follow me into other online media formats. I hope to one day be a successful internet broadcaster helping people with technology questions and problems. I like the idea of making video and audio broadcasts from my home and I am inspired by two people, Chris Pirillo and Leo Laporte. The problem is that I am not sure if someone in my position can really reach the same amounts of people that Chris and Leo get today.

I honestly think that the internet is the future of media. An amazing amount of people in North America and Europe already get the majority of their news from the internet and I think that old media will eventually be assimilated into what we call the internet today, or will fall by the wayside. It is an exciting time because we are on the cusp of that change. We already see that old media is integrating itself with the internet starting with news papers a few years ago; who post a lot of content online, and now with TV. The main networks in the US are starting to post content online once it has aired on their network. If we look at radio, even in smaller markets we see that most FM and some AM stations in North America are broadcasting online to try and reach a wider audience.

How does that relate to the topic and how does that relate to people who are already into online broadcasting? Looking first at my aforementioned inspirational subjects Chris and Leo. They both have a successful day job running projects online broadcasting themselves helping people (that’s not to say that they don’t have other online projects that help pay the bills). They didn’t start there however. When I first logged onto Chris’ and Leo’s pages, it was not by mistake. I was actually looking to find content about them. The reason for that was my previously having watched them on TechTV when it was on the air. And for that I am curious to know how popular their current endeavors would be if they had not been in the public eye in the old media format. For some reason we see the TV as a type of validation for their knowledge and expertise. This is not to say that Chris nor Leo doesn’t have the knowledge that is required for what they are doing, but that it was the catalyst that helped them to where they are today.

Now if we look at the question “Can you start blogging now and still become techy famous?”, I think that answer is yes. However the changes are certainly very very slim that you will become as popular as Chris Pirillo or Leo Laporte. There are many other blogs that I read on a regular basis and these people do get quite a lot of readers to their sites. They are very popular in their own right however most have been working at it for 10 plus years, since blogging was first seen on the internet.

Now I think my decision needs to be how I will invest the next 10 years to gain readers or viewers. Is the blog the only answer? No. Is a podcast the answer? No. Is a video stream the answer? No. Is a mix of some or all three? I think it is

Total creds to Chris Pirillo for this topic. I was reading through some of my RSS feeds and here is a post about a peanut butter taste test. I must say that this is a really cool topic because if you like peanut butter, then you most likely have a brand that you think is SSOOOOO much better than any other. As do I

I am a huge Peter Pan fan and have been since I was a kid. My brother is also that way and I suppose it’s due to our trips to Maine in the summer time. That’s because we can’t buy it up here in Canada

Part of my comment on Chris’ blog post:

“We vacationed a lot as a family when I was young in Maine. I love it there. Peter Pan is all part of the childhood memory that also includes jumping waves in 59° water, drives by the President’s summer place (Bush Sr. in Kennebunkport), the fair and salt water taffy from Goldenrod Kisses in York Beach and the family being together.”

It’s okay though because we stock up! That’s the nice thing about living close to the boarder I suppose. Take a look at his video. His wife Ponzi puts him through his paces

Chris | Live Tech Support | Video Help | Add to iTunes

I am always looking for good plug-ins for Wordpress. I have been using WP for a long time to blog and have tried to keep it simple because I am of the opinion that “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. I have been talking with some colleagues and fellow bloggers and one of the things that people are looking for is a way to share the content of a site with friends.

I have been looking for something simple yet still very powerful to perform updates to social networks and also allow article emailing. I think I have found it in ShareThis.

An excerpt from their site:
ShareThis makes a WordPress plugin that provides an unobtrusive way for your visitors to post your site content to various social bookmarking sites, or send a link via e-mail & other communication channels (like Facebook and MySpace) to a friend.

You will notice on my website a new link at the bottom of my posts that has a rotating icon and link called “ShareThis”. That will link my article to their service and then allow you to share it by means of a number of avenues.

If you have a personal blog and are able to install your own plug-ins, I would suggest giving this one a try.

So I tried to set up Adsense a while back but didn’t have any luck. I didn’t give it a real chance because I was relying on a WordPress widget to try and install it. It turns out that the new version of WordPress had a “text” widget. This allows the blogger to create a static entry in their widget bar. You can also add in code to implement something in that text area… and you guessed it; Adsense!

It was really quite simple. With Adsense you need to generate code to put in your page if you are the creator, you simply take that code and insert it in the text sidebar widget. It’s that simple!

Now I am going to start looking into other ways of listing; possibly in posts or maybe a banner. I like their ideas but I am still weary of it taking over the site. All too often I see more Google ads on peoples pages than I do actual content.

Another post question for you… What do you use for advertising on your site? Do you prefer another service? If so email me marcus@hamaker.net.