Wordle

Wordle is a cool tool that allows you to instantly create "word clouds" of a bunch of text or a web page. Here are a few I just created:

This blog:
Small Dead Animals:
NDP.ca:
The website of a business colleague of mine:
From the comments on this YouTube video:

Improvement to Canadian Radio Stations Web Page

Lately I've found myself copying lots of radio program links from the Radio Stations web app I built a while back. Before, the only link you could directly get was the actual "http://" one. But more often than not, I was using the link to embed in a comment on a blog. This required me to construct the HTML code each & every time.

I've improved things such that there are now 2 textboxes one can copy from. The first provides the same link as before. But the second includes HTML code which presents the link like this: click here
You can still customize these two words if you like.

Enhancements to the Canadian Radio Stations Player

Thanks for all your feedback so far! I've just implemented 2 minor enhancements:

1. I've added station CJAD from Montreal. It was my primary station when I lived there and has some great hosts & shows.
2. If Cookies are enabled on your browser, you'll now be able to set any station as your default. Just click the button underneath the station's logo and the next time you return, it'll be preset for you.
   

Listening to Radio Stations Across Canada

If you're like a growing number of Canadians then you're catching more & more of your news via the Internet. A terrific way to learn about what's going on across the country is to listen to talk radio stations from coast to coast. To assist with this endeavour I've created a single web page that provides links to the audio feeds from assorted stations across Canada. You can access it directly here or you can reach it via a hidden link on the Pelalusa.com site.

When you get to the Pelalusa home page you'll be presented with a daytime or nighttime map of the world (depending on your local time). In either case, in the lower right corner you'll find a hidden link to the radio station page. It's easy to spot because your mouse cursor will change.

Clicking on this link will take you to this page:
I've tested it with Firefox 3.0 and it works perfectly. In both IE7 and Chrome there appear to be problems with the [necessary] popup window being blocked. I don't believe there's anything inherently wrong with my code so you may need to adjust your security settings.

I'm very much open to suggestions of future enhancements. Please just leave comments here or write me directly.

Michael Campbell Has His Own Website

Michael Campbell, one of CKNW's financial pundits, now has his own website: www.moneytalks.net Interesting stuff throughout!

Waikiki Travel Site

Earlier this year I was fortunate enough to find a privately owned suite to stay in during my stay in Waikiki. The owners, Irene & Wes, are incredibly nice people and I promised to build them a website to better advertise their suite. It's now done and live.

I must confess that I went well beyond what I had originally intended to do but I'm very pleased with the end result. Inadvertently it gave me a perfect opportunity to showcase my photos & videos. And it also inspired me to rework it and build a more general purpose travel site that'll be advertising supported.

Chhhhanges Are Afoot!

Some major changes are happening in my professional life, all of which I can't talk about publicly yet, but suffice to say it's all good! I'm adding this posting almost more to document the precise moment of change, so that I can look back historically and smile. This video I recently posted is a pivotal part of it. So is this new blog entry by legendary tech journalist, Robert Scoble. And so is this book. I was up until 4am last night thinking, checking available domain names, and thinking even more. Sometimes crystal clear clarity only comes in the silent hours of the night! I registered a pair of domain names this morning. They'll likely be 2 of 4.

My consulting business will continue unimpeded. PocketPollster.com will be finished later this year and commence selling the product I worked on for nearly 2 years (on & off). BC Digital Divide will continue, and actually grow. All I know is that a massive change has happened. It's like I've been sleep walking, going through the same old routine every day, and suddenly I've seen a bright light up ahead.

I believe a golden opportunity has presented itself and is ripe for the picking by the website entrepreneur who seizes it AND executes correctly. What a fabulous period in history we live in!!

Technology Changes in My Life

Most people are familiar with the term "Spring Cleaning". It offers one an opportunity to throw out the old clutter and be open to something new. I've spent the past few days doing the same thing with assorted technology in my life. This includes:

1. Reformatting my laptop's hard drive and reinstalling Windows XP from scratch. I've actually had to do this twice because of some problems the first time. Things had gotten so bad with the state of my Windows that my software development tool, Visual Studio 2005, was no longer working properly. Rebuilding everything from scratch is a looooooong process so this time, once I have a base system that I like, I'm going to back it up with Acronis.
2. Moving my PocketPollster.com website to a new Windows server hosted by GoDaddy. The previous temporary site for PP was just pure HTML. The new one in the future will work with Microsoft's .Net technology. It's not done yet but I'm working on it! To test out the new functionality I built a simple .Net webpage to more quickly bring up the CKNW Audio Archive, something I access a lot. You can reach it here. It doesn't look fancy but there's actually a lot of coding under the hood to determine the correct hourly segment that needs to be accessed. In order for this page to work, you need to enable pop-ups. This is what you'll see - very simple, but also very effective:
   

The final thing I'm doing is forwarding all of my PocketPollster e-mail to my Gmail account. It's a new way [for me] of having all of my e-mail online but a transition I want to make.

ASP.net Videos

I spent much of the day watching videos about ASP.net, Microsoft's technology for developing sophisticated websites. I'm relatively new to website development and have pretty much picked up my knowledge on-the-fly. But I learned today that there were some definite holes in my knowledge - some small, some large - regarding this very sophisticated technology.

Some might consider these videos (aka "screencasts") to be quite dry but I found them quite exciting and my mind starting racing ahead to what I could with new concepts and techniques!