Hosting highly-customized photo albums used to be quite a daunting task. I've been the webmaster of vanapus.org (new layout work in progess) and they like to put up photos from their conferences and events. Back in the old days, it was all manual batch resizing and renaming of files, then you had to create the table the photos would go in and all this other extra work. Sometimes I would run into problems and it would take hours. Anyway, nowadays I use Flickr's API with the help of a tool called phpFlickr.

Now creating a photo album is as simple as uploading photos to Flickr and putting them in a set. Behind the scenes, the photos page calls Flickr for a list of the user's sets, displays them in a list, then you can click one and the album page generates the necessary tables and display settings to your liking. To me, it's the easiest way to create a fully customized photo album with little evidence of using Flickr, making it simple to manage and professional-looking. Currently, I'm working on some pagination code (well it's already written, having some CSS issues now) and I'm trying to work on cutting down the time it takes to make a call to the API, then it'll be perfect.

We also use this same technique with another site I run called Planet Blacksburg:

With some help from Brian Sewell, we were able to implement Flash galleries to the site and integrate them with Flickr. Flickr also completely manages the photostream on PB's homepage, which is a unique feature to news sites.

The new medium that is Twitter just keeps getting more and more interesting. You can send a message about anything to the world, and recently, businesses have caught on to that idea. Some very smart PR people in various companies have started a Twitter account for their business to address problems or comments people make about their product on Twitter. For example, this has happened to me these past few days:

I don't necessarily agree, I can flip back and forth between over-the-air HD channels and the ones Comcast provides and see a noticable difference. But anyway, Frank from Comcast was the first company I saw doing this on Twitter and I really liked what he was doing. Comcast seems to give people a lot of trouble, so they've made it really easy for customers to get their problems heard so they have a good chance of being solved. From what I've seen, there's no problem Frank doesn't give up on. It's also a great chance for Comcast to see what people's real experiences with Comcast are instead of relying on customer complaints. For example, I wouldn't call Comcast if I had a bad experience (unless it was very bad) cause I just don't like getting involved in disputes, but I will certainly Twitter about it.

When I got this one, I simply laughed. I wasn't even complaining about VMware, I think VMware is great. But as someone who tries not to use Windows because ideally, one only needs one computer and one operating system, I didn't want to have to install another OS on my brand new iMac, even if it's virtual. But anyway, VMware was quick to assure me that Windows would be a great addition to my iMac (again, not really agreeing).

These may not be the best examples of how companies are using Twitter since they are more trying to assure me their product is worthy, which is arguable. But I have seen people get actual problems fixed very quickly just by posting to Twitter. I'm looking forward to seeing more companies signing on to this, as it's very effective for them and and their users.

Ordered a refurbished 24" iMac last week, just got in today. My old main desktop, the Mac Mini, has now been shafted to the media center to provide content to my AppleTV and iPod.

Another part of my job at the athletics video office at Virginia Tech is to produce and direct broadcasts for ACCSelect.com. We were doing a baseball game tonight and a foul ball was hit up into the radio booth where I was filming and our commentator was...commentating. Here's the action from tonight's broadcast:

Why couldn't you see him catch it? I spent a lot of time indoors growing up, so when a ball is flying at me at high speeds, I move out of the way. In all his years calling baseball, he'd never actually caught a foul ball in the press box before, and I'm sure it's a rarity on ACCSelect.com.

A few days ago, I noticed the first one, now the second one has popped up. Anyone who has had this problem with anything knows how annoying it is. Every time my iPod's LCD shows a certain color in that area, my eyes will be drawn to it and I will be reminded of my damaged hardware. How devastating. Hopefully it'll be replaced in the coming months by a new iPhone.

Part of my job at the athletics video office at Virginia Tech is to make the end-of-the-year highlight video. It's just supposed to be something relatively short that is to be shown at the annual all-sports banquet. After hours of stressful work, I finally finished it and it seemed to be well-received. Here it is: I'm somewhat happy with it; there's some things I'd do differently to prepare had I known exactly what the video would entail, but I guess it's good enough. The whole video and effects were created by me on an Avid Adrenaline Media Composer and video was shot by me and various other students in the video office.

Taylor lost her camera a while back and really needed one before she goes storm-chasing in about a week. So I ordered one for her until she can pay me back, and she was super excited just to have a camera again. Awwwww:

In other news, I hope to get the blog back up and going now that school and work are slowing down for the summer. I hope to keep it rich with fresh, new media content and well-formed rants.