Graves On SOHO VoIP

Funny how things just sort of happen. In looking back through some emails I just discovered that it was one year ago today that I started writing this blog. At least that’s when I setup my account at Wordpress.com. The first real post came perhaps a few days later.

This blog was back then an effort to set down in one place the answers to questions that I was fielding in a variety of public forums online. It was in essence born out of frustration that the same set of questions kept returning, each time meeting with answers from a different group of respondents, and with some variability in the nature of the answers. So I wanted to simply document what I have done. My own experience working from a home office full time over the past 10+ years.

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For about a week I had a Skype status display in the sidebar on this blog. The site runs Wordpress and I never have felt that the use of sidebar Widgets caused a problem…until this Skype thingy. Adding that widget caused the site to reference some data at download.skype.com. It made loading pages excruciatingly slow. So, bye bye Skype status!

Some links on this site are going to be broken for a short while. Earlier this week, after the Hurricane Ike cleanup, I managed to get the site moved from Wordpress.com free hosting to a BlueHost. This will eventually let me do some things that I’ve wanted to accomplish but were not allowed on Wordpress hosts. Like use Flash for example.

However, in the mean time I need to got back through a lot of old posts and edit internal links that made reference to the old blog URLs. I’ve tried to be more structured about how I setup my domain, subdomains, etc. But that broke all the old links. Only internal links are impacted. Links to external sites are remain sounds.

I’ll get it all sorted out eventually. In the mean time if you have any suggestions about managing a Wordpress installation I’m completely open hear them.

From DEMO 2008 this week we have the launch of SproutBuilder, an online web 2.0 construction tool for Flash widgets. This looks so incredibly cool!!! So much promise. There has been so much buzz about Adobe entering into voip action via their new AIR platform. Something like Sprout could leverage this to great effect.

I once undertook to learn Flash v4, but found it wanting. I was frustrated by the fact that in designing flash Macromedia seemed to ignore all the precidents for manner of operation establish by animation software over the years. It was as if they truly ignored everything that came before. This was a drag for those of use who had used animation software for some time already. It meant getting to know things the “Macromedia” way, which was not always productive or intuitive.

I quickly moved over to Swish as a solution to creating my own Flash content. Swish is great. Vast amounts of the common banner ads that you see everywhere online are created in Swish. You can tell by the looking at the effects used on text.

I also hope that Wordpress will let us embed Sprout objects into our pages. At present we can’t do that unless we host on a paid service so that we can have our own private instance of Worpdress running.