Thank you, double feature

This week's Philly PHPMeet-up was all about Drupal. The night was jam-packed with many wonderous things, including some of the latest and greatest drupal modules, philly-based sites powered by drupal, and even the drupal song (DANGER:ITS UBER-CATCHY and has remained firmly embedded in my brain since I first listened to it over-and-over again)

Two of the most interesting non-drupal things I first heard about last Tuesday night were Habari and Snag-it. Habari is an open source blogging platform that is being developed right here in Philadelphia, and Snag-it is a wonderful little program that allows you to quickly and easily take screen-shots and pimp them up all nice-like in one simple step.

I am so jazzed about both of these, that I decided to install Habari and produce a step-by-step tutorial using Snag-it. (The tutorial's target audience is a total n00b with a hosting account with Site5, who wants to get in on the early stages of this home-grown 'next-gen' blogging platform)

Here goes:
First, download the package here. Then extract all the files.


Next, create a new directory on your site, and transfer the files using FTP. If you need a good FTP program, download FileZilla - its super-easy to use and totally free.



Now its time for database stuff. Lucky for me, my Site5 account makes it nice and candy for anyone one who can point-and-click to manage databases. Simply log-in to site admin, and select 'mySQL Databases' --> Manage Databases. Scroll down to the section labeled 'Create mySQL database', and give it a name.



Once you have created the database, go back to 'mySQL databases' --> 'Manage Users'. First, create a user, and assign a password. Then, go to the section labeled 'Grant Permissions' and select the database and user you just created.



Now for the fun part! Your first look at Habari's simple-chic interface. To complete the installation, all you need to do is view the directory that you uploaded your Habari files to in a browser.



Fill in the information about the database name, user, and password that you just created. Give your new Habari Blog a name, and click 'Install'.



Voilà! - you have a shiny new home-grown blog!

So there you go - one night, two awesome new-to-me tools, one colorful tutorial. Now I'm off to get my hands dirty hacking into Habari to see what I can find.

woohoo!

Burn baby, burn

FeedBurner lets you 'burn' your RSS feed, providing you with stats on subscribers, hits, pageviews, and more. In typical Google fashion, set-up was a breeze and there were tutorials to lead me every step of the way. This Modern Life is now burned, and I can see all sorts of stats on who is subscribed to my feed...namely ME.
Using FeedBurner will allow me to manage all of my blog feeds in one place, which is becoming more important as the number of blogs I am managing continues to grow. The interface is clean and neat, and offers weird little witty things all around.
Today's welcome message:

My Feeds are a bridge over troubled water

Thanks FeedBurner, hopefully with your help I can start to change that.

Happy Birthday Allyson

While preparing a presentation about the perks of using Blogger for the PANMA Web 2.0 Tools Shootout this Thursday, I came across a photo that reminded me of my bestfriend Allyson from middle school - it was this tacky animated GIF:


It looks so much like the 'Cracker eating contest' in the Three Stooges NES game that I couldn't resist looking it up. Needless to say the game is well documented on this fine website: Moby Games.
Inspired by these photos I decided to put together a slideshow using Picassa Web Albums and embed it in a Blogger Post to see just how it easy it can be...