Josh 2.0

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I’m a sophomore at UW – Madison. I’ll be applying to the Wisconsin School of Business at the end of the semester and looking into what it takes to major in Computer Science in the mean time. If I get into the Business school, I’ll probably double major in CS and Information Systems. Otherwise, it’ll just be Computer Science for now.

I’m a freelance web designer/developer that hasn’t had a ton of work recently. I’m not particularly upset about that right now, as school is starting and I’m getting back into the student life — class, homework, sleep (working web stuffs into the mix in as we get these first weeks rolling). I’ve done a few things that I’m pretty proud of, but my best work always seems to be the personal stuff — when it really means something to me. I’ve actually been thinking about that a lot lately; trying to use that as a way to make everything I do better, but I’ll talk about that another time.

I’ve finally started JoshBetz.TV as a podcast, which only means it’s listed in iTunes. Right now it’s a sad excuse for a podcast and shouldn’t really be called a website at all, but I’ve got some stuff in the works. The only live video is the one about setting up a LAMP server.

Looking Forward

I’ve got some goals for the next year.

  • Establish a real podcast with joshbetz.tv
  • Establish a base of clients to work with
  • Take more photos
  • Better Flickr integration on here
  • Grow this list

FancyFlickr Dev Help

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So, as many people know, I started development on a plugin called FancyFlickr a little over a year ago. Development went well at first at first, but it started to get slow and my lack of programming skills started to show. I originally got the idea for the plugin from a video Chris Coyier did on his CSS-Tricks blog. The main idea of the original is powered by a bunch of cool CSS3 and a bit of jQuery. This all works quite well, but when I started trying to add features it turned into a bit of a mess. The plugin currently functions and works in pretty much every environment that I’ve tried. There are some server requirements, like cURL, but if these are met it works fine.

I’ve known for a while that the plugin needs help. At first a few people wrote me asking for help sorting out problems that had to do with loading the images from Flickr. Recently, it really hit me when I noticed that Fred, from Fredstuff.com stopped using the plugin in favor of something that loads quicker.

The first thing that I want to do is make it more efficient, as it currently slows page loads significantly. I’ve also got some big dreams for the future of the plugin involving “WordPress gallery” style photo pages for individual photos and galleries. Basically, the WordPress gallery, but powered by Flickr.

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Why Free is Good

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I was orginally going to call this GPL: My 2 Cents.

As a web designer, I can create free themes and put them out in the wordpress theme directory for anyone to download. If I’m a good designer it will become popular and lots of people will download my theme. If I’m a bad designer, well, you know what happens.

I think that right there speaks for itself — it’s this idea that the cream rises to the top. We’ve been hearing this a lot lately. (more…)

Skype-o-Something…

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So it’s been a while since I’ve written here and let’s just say that I’ve been busy. We started a show, Sudo Make Me A Sandwich, a couple months back and I’ve been trying to figure a way to get the quality up without breaking the bank. There are some small things you can do, like invest in a quality microphone or headset. It doesn’t have to be anything too fancy, I just bought a decent looking Logitech headset from BestBuy and it already sounds much better.

We were also having the problem of incorporating guests into the show. I bring my cohost in via Skype and we wanted a way to  be able to also bring in a couple more panelists if needed. Right away I thought of Leo Laporte’s Skypesaurus — maybe I even got the idea to do the show this way from him. He’s got a quite expensive setup though. Not only did he build four custom machines that are dedicated to Skype, but he’s also got the TriCaster, the IP audio mixer, and lots of bandwidth.

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