Luey's Lab

Post Templete is a plugin for Wordpress that allows you to create a layout for your posts and then easily write a new post based on the template you’ve created. Bloggers tend to like consistency in the look of their posts and also tend to use a signature at the end of each article, and a template makes this much easier than copying and pasting the information in each time. Wordpress has become such a deep and powerful platform that it is surprising that this isn’t a built in feature. Luckily there are plugins for every need you can think of. Post Template is a one click activation, and then you create a template exactly like you do a post, save it, and then you can create a new post from that template in one click. Check it out if you need templates for your blog.

Get Post Template

Posted by Justin, Follow me online @                       

Pownce was by far my favorite micro-blogging site, so now my quest for a good replacement has begun. Two things made Pownce great, the community and the ability to easily share files. There is no way to replace the community but if another site can offer the same functionality maybe the community will follow.

At least one site I’ve found is actively trying to replace Pownce. Soup.io was already quite similar to Pownce but they have now decided to try and capitalize on the demise of Pownce by implementing a Pownce migration tool.
The tool imports all your public posts including all the embedded files and your Pownce friends who are also on Soup.io. One problem with the migration tool is that it does not import private messages or messages you sent to “sets”. The other problem is they limit files to 10mb where Pownce allowed up to 100mb and 250mb for pro accounts. Check out the Pownce migration tool HERE

There are some things that I actually like better about Soup.io. They allow for more customization of your profile and its much easier to find friends and view the public feed.

I haven’t spent much time with the site so far, but it certainly has potential as a replacement for Pownce. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Posted by Justin Luey

I just bought an iMac G3 to test out, its going to be the first of many older macs that I test for the site. The goal is to establish the real value of these older Apple computers. Another aspect of this project is to determine the best software to run on each machine.

This iMac is a G3 running at 400mhz and has 384 megs of ram. It came installed with OS 9 but I upgraded it to the lastest version of Tiger 10.4.11. This did involve upgrading to 9.1 and updating the firmware first. So far I have used the latest versions of Safari and Firefox 3, Marsedit, BBedit, and 1password. All of these ran very well, in fact everything but the browsers ran the same as they do on my newer Intel based Mac. The browsers aren’t as fast but still very usable and stable. The performance of the software combination above makes the G3 iMac an excellent blogging solution.

Another test I ran was to edit a video. I recorded the video with my iPhone using Cycorder and edited it with iMovie 3, which is now available for free from Apple. The video editing also went really smooth with no crashes and the old thing that takes some time is exporting the final product. I have included the video below, and check back later for some more tests on this and other older Macs.

The ability to track topics and conversations on Twitter was a very useful feature that Twitter disabled. You can still search Twitter using http://search.twitter.com/ but you have to do it manually each time you want to find something. The search feature does work well for discovering the most popular topics on Twitter.

If you want to track topics or keywords in real time, all you have to do is add “laconica@west.spy.net” as a contact in your jabber supported chat client. I recommend Adium http://www.adiumx.com/ which allows you to use iChat, MSN, Google Talk, AIM, Facebook, and many more all at the same time.

Once you add “laconica@west.spy.net” as a contact, send them a message with the word “help” and you will get a full list of commands.

Here are some of the key commands.

add_service – Add a service you can post to.
help – Get help for commands.
off – Disable updates.
on – Activate updates.
post – Post an update to a service.
services – List all known services.
track – Track a topic
tracks – List your tracks.
untrack Stop tracking a topic

To add your Twitter account just type this message

“add_service twitter username password” of course substitute your username where it says username and your password where it says password.

To track a topic, simply type a message

“track topic” replace the word topic with any word or phrase you want to track.

This also works for identi.ca and army.twit.tv

If you have any questions, post them into the comments.

Uploaded by www.cellspin.net