A word of warning: this site is a testing ground for all sorts of things that are not ready for prime time. They come, they go. The things that do work will probably end up hosted elsewhere eventually; the things that don't will get sent to the bit bucket and covered over with random 1's and 0's.

Latest Aberrations

March 2006

I've been working on some XSLT-based mashup sites. An example of how you can leverage RSS feeds and manipulate the data in them to create dynamic pages is my attention stream portal, which pulls in del.icio.us, flickr, and my work blog.

September 2005

'Papercasting.net is humming along at its new home on my WordPress-powered host. I'm going to slowly start to move the image files from the original site over to the new one, and insert redirects to the new pages on this site. It'll be an arduous task, but a work of love, I assure you. :-p.

I'm considering re-introducing paper-based design elements into the site like I did with the old site...only this time, with a higher aesthetic value. In other words, only if it doesn't totally suck.

July 2005

I've moved papercasting off to a server where I can run a dynamic site. The papercasting.net domain now resolves to the plog homepage; I'll be leaving the original papercasting site in place for a while, but thanks to the power of RSS import, I've already moved all the archives over to the new site.

The reason for the move is pretty straightforward--it's a royal pain in the ass to try to post from the road when you've got the software running on a desktop at home. So I've moved to WordPress as a technology base.

In an effort to raise the accessibility bar even higher with papercasting, I'm experimenting with using FlashDocs as the basis for plogging. The latest entries are in Flash format embedded on the page, so hopefully your bandwidth is good and your Flash player works.

The next experiment on my list is a/v blogging. I have to admit that I'm a bit self-concious about talking to a camera or a microphone instead of another person, so hopefully I'll be carrying on more dialogues than monologues.

 

April 2005

So, papercasting is now a revolution of... well, at least three people. Roger and Flo in Switzerland have launched their own Papercast site , They don't support uploading imagemapped links yet, though, so for most of my "padcasting", I'll need to stick to my own platform. I'm currently testing out Pyblosxom and Blosxom.PHP as engines for moving the papercasting platform to a full-blown hosted server (which will be whenever I fill up this .Mac account). But remember, you'll always be able to reach papercasting at http://papercasting.net/plog .

To find out more about what papercasting is, why I started doing it, and how you can get involved, visit my new (non papercast, fully Google-friendly) papercasting FAQ. For purists, there's the original "Why Papercasting?" page

I'm currently exploring doing some audiocast projects using two pieces of now-archaic technology, one analog and one digital: a microcassette recorder and a Sony MiniDisc recorder. I've used the MD recorder for years to digitally "tape" interviews and such for my day job, and it seems to do a much better job of pulling in everything than the cheap-ass audio input on my iMac.

Also, we're exploring video blogging. Those of you who weren't thwarted by the flaky bug in Firefox that makes you download the stupid page (it works fine in IE and Safari, at least) may have noticed that I've been playing around with video blogging as part of the padcast. In case you missed it, here's Z. reporting on a recent fire in our neighborhood: