Category: Mostly Everything

Famous French blogger Loic Le Meur makes history by interviewing presidential French Minister of Interior Nicolas Sarkozy.

Not only is it the first-ever podcast by a French political leader, it also marks a startling break with customary etiquette, as Sarkozy and Le Meur address each other with the familiar “tu” rather than “vous” during their 30-minute meeting. “Bravo!” read many of the hundreds of viewer commentaries posted on Le Meur’s blog over the past few days. Many are heralding the interview as a watershed event, showing that French politicians can no longer afford to ignore the growing importance of nontraditional media

Read Loic Le Meur

Aaron Brazell, who does a great job over at Technosailor did a fantastic post for Problogger defining the 10 Things You Should Know About WordPress 2.0.

We’re currently running at version 1.5, supporting better spam guards and the ability to recognize podcasts. WP 2.0 looks even more promising.

Yep, WordPress is getting a mighty upgrade and I’m so dying to see what it will resemble in the next few days.

WordPress? WTF if that?

If you’ve been seriously blogging for any bit of time at all, you’ve heard of the juggernaut that is WordPress. WordPress, of course, is the most popular self-hosted blogging platform utilized by independent writers. The official launch of WordPress 2.0 is upon us and, no doubt, the blogosphere will be buzzing about its launch. As a tester of the product since the early days of the WordPress 2.0 alpha builds, I’ve watched, participated and even assisted in the development of this software.

From what Aaron writes, it seems that WordPress 2.0 is turning into a drag-and dropping, community-building, anti-spam shooting, CMS generating monster that will truly benefit bloggers of every stock.

Oh crap, this is such a technical post. I doubt you got this far into the post with a smile still on your face.

Oops. I did it again.

Read

I noticed a lot of people have problems resizing images for their personal blogs. Not only do they eat up a lot of bandwidth, but huge images are a toil for those in dial-up. Here are some ways to make your pictures smaller while retaining the overall quality of the shots:

Note: Though you can always use Photoshop to resize images, these are two ways to make resizing faster

For Windows XP users

Windows XP Power Toys: Image Resizer

This is a small application that installs directly to the Windows XP UI. Now, everytime you right+click a picture, there will be a new option to “Resize Image.” All you do is choose the desired size. Usually for standard column blogs, the accepted width is 300. It’s free

For Mac users:

You can actually use the default screen capture app from the Mac but I prefer YellowMug’s SnapNDrag because of several other screencap options. Then, I just upload the picture to iPhoto and Export (click on the Share Tab and you’ll find it at the bottom). Resize the image and save! Again for blogs, using 300 for width is great.

If you have other tips on how to resize images, you could post them in the comments below and I’d be happy to add them.