Im not sure why I happen to jump over to look at Site Explorer at 2AM on a Sunday, but I did. I found quite a bit more than I had expected.

It seems that sometime in the past few days Yahoo went and updated the look of the results for Site Explorer. As you can see from the image below and from the actual results, I learned that Yahoo really doesnt like to index my site. Oops.

I dont know if I like them better or worse but the results do appear more compact then the previous design.

Read more...Yahoo’s Site Explorer gets a new look

It was another weekend of football around my house. With the Chicago Cubs going down in 3, my hope was for a good showing by my college teams and the Bears to win over the Lions.  All went well for my teams - and Dave was happy.

As I wrote up my experience with Live Streaming MLB Playoffs, I started to be upset at myself for not commenting on the better NFL experience.  So tonight, I am doing just that.

Sunday Night Football with John Madden and Al Michaels is a great way to wind down from the weekend for me.  The problem in my house has become the number of shows on Sunday nights that everyone wants to watch. It has made it difficult for me to just sit and watch, until I found out they were streaming the Sunday Night Football games online. How awesome is that, the NFL live and online?

Unlike the attempt by TBS and MLB for having MLB Playoffs Live Online , it seems that the NFL and NBC have done everything right.

Initial Sunday Night Football View

As you can see, they give you a few views and the picture is very clear.  You can follow players around, watch the broadcast,  watch the cable cam, or pick the sideline cam. All give you great angles and if you dont zoom in on any one you can watch them all at the same time (not fully but you get an idea of what is going on everywhere).  When in this view (or even when zoomed in) and you mouse over either the right or left sides you are given the option to switch to a different view. This again, just makes it such a smooth UI to use.

Read more...Sunday Night Football Live Online

Recently I was able to watch a Sunday Night Football game live and online and it was great. Everything about it was great. The video quality was good, the sound, the option to switch back and forth from different camera angles - all I can say is that it was well done.

Tonight I had some work to do and thought I would see if I could watch the Cubs online. What do you know, but I can. Great I thought to myself, this is awesome.

Not so much.

I added in the white lines (where the video was playing) to show you how they have it set up. It simply uses Windows Media player to stream the video.  The page loads with 4 screens which I figured out later can be set to the full video area by clicking the Mosaic, Backstop, Pitcher, Dugout or Batter icons. How was I suppose to know those were buttons?

Once I figured that out - it was nice to have a bigger picture.  The quality wasnt bad but it wasnt great. The sound - what sound? They piped in the sound that the camera picked up. There werent any anouncers or anything, just the sound of the crowd. This isnt exactly watching baseball online if you ask me. Luckily for me I live in Chicago and get WGN - so I listened to them. The problem with this is that the video was lagging some minute or so behind the radio broadcast. Another strike against MLB Gamecast or MLB Live and Online.

The final straw came when the video just stopped.  So there I am, watching a blank screen. I kept trying to refresh the page but couldnt find a nonflash area on the page. Finally I got it, but had to wait for it to buffer, load, buffer, and finally play. Talk about another stike against them.

So lets recap:

Sound Quality: Strike

Usability: Strike

Video Quality - Foul Ball

Streaming: Strike 3!!!

And that is when I turned it off.

Read more...MLB Playoffs Live Online

For a long time I have heard good things about twitterfeed but much like graywolf I hate to use 3rd party applications that ask for my username and password. So what else could I do but go on a hunt for a Twitter Wordpress plugin?

I did a seach on Wordpress for “twitter” and found some possible options but only 2 really stood out as probables:

• Twitpress by Tom Purnell
• Twitter updater w/ TinyURL by Victoria Chan & Jonathan Dingman

Twitpress

Twitpress is a simple and straight forward plugin. It gives you few options but does the job. You can customize the tweet but that is about it.

One problem I have with Twitpress is that the permalink option does not work. Im sure that I could go in and figure it out, but thats not the point :). The permalink is suppose to look like “domain.com/index.php?/twitpress” and not like this:

Overall, Twitpress will get the job done but its not my favorite Twitter Wordpress plugin.

Twitter updater w/ TinyURL

Twitter updater has some nice bells and whistles that Twitpress does not have. You can define when you post to Twitter and get a few more options. The link is also clean and short due to the use of TinyURL, but I am greedy and would like to see some alternatives to TinyURL available.

The options though do favor Twitter updater. You can update Twitter when you create a new post (status is saved but not published), edit a post (re-save but not publish), publish a new post or edit a post. Like I said, quite a few options.

The TinyURL integration is handy due to the fact that some blog links can get very long. Take a look at what it looked like for me:

As you can see, it is clean and simple. The ability to change the wording for each action is also quite handy. I think going forward I am going to stick with Twitter updater as my Wordpress 2 Twitter application.

Read more...Twitter Wordpress Plugin

Not that I follow anyone actively or use my account much but it is somewhat interesting to see Google actually do something with one of its purchases.

Like many of the small companies they buy, very little seems to come of the great promise. Do you recall Dodgeball? GrandCentral? Postini? The list goes on and on and only a few have gone on to be integrated or enhanced. I understand that many are bought simply for their technology/people and integrated into bigger projects, but wouldnt it be nice if some were actually nurtured and built out?

Perhaps Jaiku has a chance, we will have to wait and see. Having Jaiku moved over to Google’s servers is a start. Jaiku is in the middle of a remake so that it can be fully hosted as a Google App - which should be interesting as well.

Also, per the email from Jaiku, there are now unlimited invitations available.

We've been working on the Jaiku service over the weekend after
finding an issue with one of our servers on Friday. As part of the
solution, we're moving Jaiku to a Google data center.

This is something that we'd planned to do anyway, as part of our
future transition to Google App Engine. Now that we've moved, we'll
need to ask you to review and accept a new terms of service and
privacy policy.

As a special thank you for your patience, we'd like to throw a
little nest-warming party and open unlimited invitations for Jaiku.

Please sign in at http://jaiku.com to review and accept the new terms.

Special notice to users of Jaiku Mobile: to reconnect Jaiku Mobile
after agreeing to the new terms, select ‘Go Online’ from the Options
menu on your phone.

Anyways, it is good to see some time and energy put into a purchase, perhaps Feedburner and some of the other purchases will recieve some Google Love soon as well.

Read more...Jaiku Gets an Upgrade, Somewhat