Voxeo Talks

Want to leave a comment on our blog but don’t want to take the time to type it in? If you look at the bottom of this or any Voxeo blog post, you will now see below the comment area this image:

Just click on that image and start talking into your webcam!

As explained in more detail in our “Behind The Blog” post, we’ve installed a new WordPress plugin from a startup named Seesmic that lets us easily create videos to embed in our blog posts and also allows us to accept video comments.

You do NOT need to have a Seesmic account to leave us a video comment!

Just click on the link and start recording. Don’t worry, you have the option to re-record your video and also to cancel the video comment (by clicking the “back to text comment” link) if you don’t like how it came out. If you do have a Seesmic account, the video comment you leave here will be posted to your Seesmic account for others to see, but again, you do NOT need an account to leave a comment here.

So what are you waiting for? If you have a webcam handy, click the link below and tell us what you think of this service!

P.S. If you’d like a spiffy new MacBook Pro with an embedded webcam, consider applying for one of our job openings - the MBP is our corporate standard!

Technorati Tags:
video, seesmic, wordpress, wpmu, wordpress mu, voxeo, wordpress plugins, plugins

Want to get an email message every time we publish a new blog entry? We are now offering the option to subscribe via email. All you need to do is:

1. Click on the “Subscribe via Email” link in the first side bar.

2. Enter your email address in the next form and the anti-spam string of letters.
3. Once you receive a confirmation email, simply click on the link in the email message.

That’s it. Now you will receive a message once a day whenever we have published new blog entries.

NOTE: For the moment, we are only able to make this email subscription feature available for our “All Voxeo Blogs” feed. We are not currently able to make it easily available for the individual blogs. (For more details about why, see this post.)

We will continue to look at ways to make our information more readily accessible. If you have ideas, please feel free to send them along to us or leave them as a comment here. In the meantime, please do feel free to sign up and get an email notification when we post new items. Thanks.

I am pleased to note on this final day of 2007 that we’ve recently added a new blog to the site. With “Behind The Blog“, our goal is to tell the story of what we had to do make this blog site work using WordPress MU - and to continue to write about what we do as we improve and enhance it in the time ahead. We’ll write about the plugins we add, the modifications we make and the challenges we deal with - and answer any questions raised by readers. More details - and information about why we are publishing this blog - can be found in the introductory post to the blog. If you are interested in creating a blog portal like blogs.voxeo.com, or are just interested in the technical details behind a site like this, feel free to join us as we explore the world of running a corporate blog portal using WordPress MU.

If you use a feed reader, you can subscribe to the direct feed for the blog or simply get new posts as part of the “all Voxeo blogs” feed. (Behind The Blog posts also appear in our new Twitter feed.)

Come along and join in our little adventure… we know there are bound to be challenges ahead!

Technorati Tags:
voxeo, wordpress mu, wpmu

Do you use Twitter? If you do, you now can follow “twitter.com/voxeo” and keep up-to-date with articles we post to these blogs. Why do this when you can also simply subscribe to our RSS feed for all blogs? Well, as I wrote about recently, some people who use Twitter a lot find they don’t use RSS subscriptions as much, instead relying more on what the read in their stream of Twitter updates. So, we’d like to help those folks out and provide a way they can stay up-to-date on all the articles we post here.

If you are interested, the gory details of what I did to connect our WordPress MU site to Twitter are available in our “Behind the Blog” weblog.

P.S. If you don’t like all these automatic notification thingamajigs and just want to keep returning to blogs.voxeo.com and hitting the refresh/reload button on your browser, you are perfectly welcome to continue doing so!

Technorati Tags:
twitter

Two minor updates to our overall blog site that I thought I’d mention. First, you will notice that we’ve changed the main portal page at blogs.voxeo.com to show the latest posts across all blogs. Before today, we displayed the latest post in each blog. So for each of our blogs, you saw the latest post. While this is one way to display our latest posts, it doesn’t really show the fact that we may be posting more frequently in some blogs than others. For instance, with RJ and I both out in Vancouver at IETF 70, we have been posting quite often in Speaking of Standards. However, the previous way of displaying posts only showed the last post. Today Rick had some cycles to work on the PHP and MySQL code and successfully changed the portal page to show the last five posts across all blogs. We think this gives a better reflection of the content we are creating on the overall site.

What do you think? Do you like this format better? Is five the right number of posts to display? Should we have more? (10?)

Second, while we previously posted about making a site-wide RSS feed available on the main blogs.voxeo.com page, the site-wide feed was only for posts. You will now notice that we also have a RSS feed available for all comments across all blogs. If you would like to see comments left to any of our blogs, you can now subscribe to that feed. We will be adding easy subscription to comments feeds to all of the individual blogs as well.

Comments and feedback about these items - or anything else about the site - are definitely welcome. Thank you for visiting.

Part of what we’ll do in this blog is also occasionally provide an update on new features we are adding to this blogs.voxeo.com website.  For instance, today we added:

• Site-wide search - If you go to the blogs.voxeo.com “portal” page, you’ll see that the search box in the first sidebar now says “Search All Blogs”.   This will search through the contents of pages in all of our weblogs.  (Should we put this as a feature of the sidebar in all our blogs?  Or just the main portal?)
• Site-wide RSS feed -  Also on the main portal page, we now have an “All Voxeo Blogs” RSS feed. Please do subscribe to that feed if you want to keep up with any and all posting we post here on the site.

Beyond that, we continue to make minor style improvements.  Astute observers will also note that the icon in your browser address bar is now a Voxeo logo. (We moved a new favicon into place.)  More improvements are on the way in the days and weeks ahead.  Please feel free to leave us our suggestions (or just tell us how much you like Rick’s theme that gives us this nice design!)