I’m heading out to Park City in a couple hours for the Sundance Film Festival. I’ll be video blogging, focusing mainly on the panels. But I’ll also be keeping an eye out for intelligent discussions and talks in non-Sundance venues. The plan is to post one video per day with a commentary and whatever additional resources are appropriate. The videos will be posted here and on Filmmaker Magazine’s site.
If you’re going to be at Sundance and would like to meet up, drop me a line or find me by following me on Twitter. Have fun and remember: carry your phone charger at all times, and be careful opening the toothpaste that first time.
Tags: blog, film festival, filmmaker magazine, scott macaulay, sundance
Until now, I’ve been posting links automatically using del.icio.us. del.icio.us is a very useful social bookmarking tool. The site has an “experimental” feature that will automatically post to your blog a daily digest of any links you’ve bookmarked.
It’s a cool feature, but it’s extremely limited. You can’t import del.icio.us keyword tags as wordpress tags, and you can’t change that boring post title (e.g. links for 2007-11-27). Most importantly, it doesn’t let you filter which links get posted. So I’ve had to stop bookmarking things that wouldn’t be appropriate for the blog (even though they’d still be public).
So I’ve stopped it, until they fix it or until I come up with something better. From now on, if I have something to share, I’ll just write a post about it.
Tags: blog, del.icio.us, social bookmarking, web 2.0, websites
On the technical side of things, I want to discuss one very important feature of web hosting for filmmakers or anyone else. Frequently, a program running on a server will access other web sites behind the scenes (often using cURL). A major innovation of the vaguely defined Web 2.0 is that web applications can share data via XML (as in RSS) and other machine-readable formats. Previously, everything on the web was mostly stored in HTML, which ties the information to the layout, making it readable only by humans, making data-sharing tedious.
I’m working on some custom software that will use cross-site data sharing. But even Wordpress, the blogging software that powers this site needs it to fully function. Wordpress will certainly run without it, but here are some key features that require it:
- Comment spam filtering. Wordpress uses the Akismet plugin. To check incoming blog comments against a database of known spammers. It doesn’t work if your site can’t access the Akismet server.
- Trackbacks and pingbacks allow your blog to automatically post a comment on other blogs that your posts reference. This is a great way to encourage cross-site discussion and make other bloggers aware that you’re writing about them. It’s also great for driving traffic to your site by creating a link on another site.
- Update services such as Pingomatic notify blog directories every time you update your site. Certain plug-ins can also directly ping Google and other search engines so your search listings are as up-to-date as possible. Great for driving search traffic to your site
- Feed Syndication. You may want to have on your site a list of links or posts from other services such as Flickr, Twitter or del.icio.us. There are Wordpress plugins that will use RSS or Atom feeds to automatically update these lists.
Even if you’re hosting service does support cross-server connections, it’s not a bad idea to make sure the above features are enabled and working correctly.
Unbelievably, my current hosting service, aplus.net, does not allow this kind of intra-server data sharing. They claim that it’s a security problem, which I understand. But it’s so important that I have to switch to a different service and question the viability of their business. So I will be switching to Site5, which was recommended to me by Lance Weiler, who uses it to host the Workbook Project. So we’ll see how it turns out. (The fact that this site has been intermittently unavailable today has me more confident that this is the right decision.)
It can take two or three days to fully move a web site to a different hosting service, so don’t be surprised if you encounter some problems with this site. For starters, I’m going to disable comments on the old server to avoid synchronization issues. If there’s anything else that’s surprising or persists more than a few days, please do let me know.
Tags: blog, hosting, web 2.0, websites
