My Set-up

It’s always fun to see how other people use new tools to get their work done. Inspired by usethis.com’s series of interviews, Takaaki has written up a really neat piece about exactly what hardware and software he uses in his daily life. I would LOVE to read more of these because it gives you so [...]

On Aggregating in Drupal

It’s no secret that I like aggregating. But I’m not a fan of aggregating like a jackass.
With that thought in mind, I wrote up this post on aggregating local content responsibly with Drupal over on Journalism 2.0. This is my second guest post over there (thanks Mark!) and there are likely more in the works. [...]

My guest post on Journalism 2.0

Just a quick note to point out a recent project I’ve been experimenting with. Some of you might have seen me tweeting some nonsense about programming a feed generator tool recently. Mark Briggs must have lost a bet or something, because he let me write about it over on his site, Journalism20.com.
Essentially this tool takes [...]

Brainstorming TokyoSocial on Google Wave

The discussion below is from Google Wave, and it’s mostly just me and some friends discussing a new Tokyo related project I’m thinking about (ok, it’s mostly just me and Alex). It follows along the lines of the kind of brainstorming that me, Alex and Chris have always done over email. Again, I like the idea of [...]

Making a Chess Screencast

This is an overview of the presentation that I gave at Yokohama Barcamp. Me and my brother Steve went through making a chess video screencast — going through moves on a board, and commenting on them as we go along.  Before go any further, here is a list of the software I used:

Screenflow
Skype
Skype Call Recorder
Snapz [...]

Christine Usyak on this Saturday’s Yokohama Barcamp

I don’t do audio much, but leading up to this Saturday’s Yokohama Barcamp, I thought I’d help out by trying to spread the word a little about the event. So armed with only a walking bass track and my silky smooth NPR voice, I spoke with Christine Usyak about the Barcamp. If you are in [...]

Tracking Twitter reponses to Obama’s Town Hall in China

Earilier today Barack Obama had one of his famous ‘Town Hall Meetings’ in Shanghai, where he took questions from Chinese youth in attendance and from questions posed on the internet. Naturally, there were some interesting responses to all this on Twitter. As a sort of exercise in ‘Twitter coverage,’ I tried experimenting with Chris’ TwitBlog [...]

7 Tips for Building Local

Since working on a city-specific website with Chris and Alex, I’ve been occasionally wondering about the best way to create websites that showcase local content. Now that I’m here in Japan, it’s kind of natural to ponder what could be made here (in English).
Here are a few points that I think any good local (Tokyo? [...]

How Short Links Can Solve Ginormous Problems

My brother Mike is living in Vancouver, and besides being a pretty awesome graphic designer (he worked on Megedeth’s site!) he has also been helping to promote his friends’ band, Magnus Rising. He’s perpetually working on their webpage, and is always considering new and interesting ways to promote their stuff. The other day we were [...]

Many Hands Make Light (Web) Work

I think my grandmother said that once (but the parentheses are mine of course). And if she had ever been into web design, I like to think that she might have made some cool sites by following this principle. I’ve made a bunch of websites over the past few years, but very few of them [...]

Getting Started with Drupal: The Non-Retarded Version

The worst thing about all the documentation over on Drupal.org is that it’s just not very accessible to non-developers. But first I want to address the question,
Why even bother with Drupal?
Despite the headaches I’ve experienced with installation and administration, Drupal is super powerful. It’s really good at presenting content in interesting ways, and in a [...]

Making the Shift to Online Journalism

I don’t do stuff like this very often, but last night I had a chance to spill my guts to about 30 or 40 people on a topic that I’ve kinda been obsessing over for quite a while. I’ve met a lot of people who write for a living over the past few months, and [...]

September 28 Seminar: Making the Shift to Online Journalism

Ok, so here’s the deal. I’m giving this seminar thingy in cooperation with Media Tectonics. The purpose of the talk is to explain to people who write for a living how they might use a blogger’s web-tool arsenal to be more competitive in online publishing. (Update: Just to clarify, the talk will be in [...]

My Running Playlist

I was searching around for some good tunes for running a few weeks back, and I couldn’t really find too much that I liked. Since then I’ve whipped up a pretty fun playlist on my iPod and I thought I’d share it here. It’s a pretty diverse mix, and the only rule I had when [...]