Voxeo Talks

I was pleased to recently receive word that one of the proposals we had submitted to O’Reilly’s 2009 Open Source Convention (OSCON) was accepted. To my surprise, it was not one of the proposals we had submitted about the new simplicity of bringing voice into applications, such as through using open source programs and languages like python, PHP, etc. with voice via Tropo.com.

Instead it was a completely different proposal I’d put in called “Building a Corporate Blog Portal Using WordPress MU“. In the presentation, I plan to share some of what we’ve learned through building blogs.voxeo.com on top of the open source WordPress MU. I’ve documented many of our challenges and learnings in our Behind The Blog weblog and I’ll continue to do so as we continue to evolve the platform. Overall it’s been a positive experience because we have had the control to be able to truly shape the blog portal in the way that we want it to be. It has, of course, involved a good bit of work.

Anyway, if any of you will be out at OSCON 2009, July 20-24 in San Jose, CA, here’s what you can expect to hear me talk about:

Do you want to create a blog portal for your company or organization that includes multiple blogs and/or podcasts? Do you want to do so in a way that gives you the maximum amount of control over how the portal looks? And doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to implement?

While many people may be familiar with the open source WordPress blogging software, this presentation will focus on WordPress Multi-User (WordPress MU or WPMU), the open source multi-blogging software platform used for such high-traffic sites as WordPress.com. Presenter Dan York will draw on his own experience implementing WPMU for a corporate blogging platform and discuss topics such as:

• Checklist for getting started with WordPress MU
• Things to think about up front before starting
• Policy decisions around blog creation: who can create them, etc.
• Developing a common, branded look-and-feel
• Security issues associated with using WPMU
• Plugins that add value
• Integrating with other social media sites and services
• Educating users and helping authors get going

Attendees will leave with an understanding of how to return and get started with exploring a WordPress MU installation, along with tips to make it work smoothly and pitfalls to avoid. Come with your questions and prepare to return and start blogging!

Me being who I am, you can be sure that I’ll make whatever content I can (such as slides, etc.) available through this site.

You can also be sure that I’ll also see about having a BOF or other perhaps informal session out there about developing voice apps on Tropo.com. If you’ve never been to an OSCON, due check out OSCON 2009… I’ve been to several and they’ve been great shows.

And stay tuned for more info in the months ahead…

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Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpressmu, wpmu, danyork, voxeo, oscon, oscon2009, oreilly, blogging, blogportals, socialmedia

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FYI, this afternoon I upgraded blogs.voxeo.com to the latest 2.7 version of WordPress MU. While everything looks fine in my testing, if you do notice anything on the site that doesn’t work like you think it should, please do leave a comment here on this blog post – or email me.

Now I am just looking forward to getting back to writing…

P.S. For those interested in WordPress, I wrote a post diving into the details of the upgrade from WordPress MU 2.6.2 to 2.7.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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!)

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