I’ve known for a while that the plugin needs help. At first a few people wrote me asking for help sorting out problems that had to do with loading the images from Flickr. Recently, it really hit me when I noticed that Fred, from Fredstuff.com stopped using the plugin in favor of something that loads quicker.

The first thing that I want to do is make it more efficient, as it currently slows page loads significantly. I’ve also got some big dreams for the future of the plugin involving “WordPress gallery” style photo pages for individual photos and galleries. Basically, the WordPress gallery, but powered by Flickr.

The Problem

I need help. I can’t do all this on my own. Nor do I trust my knowledge of PHP to write truly efficient code. I’m looking for someone to help me in this. I’ve already contacted Joe Tan — he’s got the closest thing to what I’m trying to bring to FancyFlickr. I haven’t heard back from him though, so if there are any other PHP developers that would like to help I’d be thrilled.

If you know anyone, point them my way or let me know and I’ll ask them for help.

As a web designer, I can create free themes and put them out in the wordpress theme directory for anyone to download. If I’m a good designer it will become popular and lots of people will download my theme. If I’m a bad designer, well, you know what happens.

I think that right there speaks for itself — it’s this idea that the cream rises to the top. We’ve been hearing this a lot lately.

Obviously I’m not going to make it as a web designer if I can’t find a way to monetize my business.  I’m not worried about the “hobby bloggers” that are using themes from the theme directory. I’m just putting that stuff out there to get noticed, to get attention, to get my name out there, to give back to the community. Don’t get me wrong, there are some great themes in the directory — I used a few of them when I was starting out. My targets as a designer though, are the businesses, politicians, or even individuals that want custom themes. They like Mystique, or P2, or Pixel, but they don’t want their site to look like anything else out there.

The serious bloggers that are those business and such need custom designs. There’s so much power in WordPress, it’s amazingly customizable and I believe it really can be the right CMS for any occasion if the theme developer is good. But it’s going to take a good theme developer to get the full potential out of it.

The people that are serious about their blogs don’t need a “cookie cutter” design. And at the end of the day, that’s all thesis really is, isn’t it?

Matt or Mark, someone correct me if this is totally crazy or just plain wrong.

We were also having the problem of incorporating guests into the show. I bring my cohost in via Skype and we wanted a way to  be able to also bring in a couple more panelists if needed. Right away I thought of Leo Laporte’s Skypesaurus — maybe I even got the idea to do the show this way from him. He’s got a quite expensive setup though. Not only did he build four custom machines that are dedicated to Skype, but he’s also got the TriCaster, the IP audio mixer, and lots of bandwidth.

We had to figure out how to do pretty much the same thing for a fraction of the price. Instead of a TriCaster we’re using some desktop software. There are a few different options depending on what platform you’re on. Instead of building four custom Skype machines we’re using scrap parts that were being thrown out at the local high school — I’ll admin, we lucked out on this part. We got three older Dell gx270′s, 2.8GHz Pentium 4 Hyper-Threaded CPUs, and generic AGP graphics cards. To capture the screens, we’re using an application that captures the desktop and sends it over the network. I also invested in a gigabit ethernet switch as well as some low-profile capture cards. I’ve been planning to buy the switch for awhile anyway and the capture cards aren’t vital to the operation, but will let us send video back to the others hosts and/or guests.

Instead of the IP audio mixer I decided to go with — no, not even an analog mixer — a PC application, Virtual Audio Cable. It’s tedious, and probably doesn’t give us the best audio quality — definitely not any live control — but it saved loads of money. I should also mention, the only way it was possible to use Virtual Audio Cable with all these interfaces was a sound card donation from a friend’s freshman-year PC.

My goal was to get something as close to Leo’s setup as possible with quality that would make the show watchable without spending too much money for now. I figure, if the show grows we will be able to buy equipment with the procedes and not have to dig into our own bank accounts.

Make sure to check out the show for the quality. Just a note: Episode 13 will be the first one shot with the new CPUs. Before that the Skype frame-rate was quite poor. Before the Pentium 4 CPUs we were using the stock 2.4GHz Celeron chips.

I already had a pretty good idea that I wanted to go with Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper!. I had already had some experience with CCC from my job last summer, but I had read an article on Daring Fireball about backup and he used Super Duper!. I decided to checkout Super Duper! first since I hadn’t really looked into it much before.

It turns out that you can download Super Duper! for free, but there is also a paid version that unlocks some more features. For the most basic backups either program works great.

Normally I would recommend doing an exact copy of the drive you want to an external drive, but the only external drive I currently own actually came out of my MacBook and is only 160GB so I decided to only backup the home folder. Getting a little more specific, I also wanted to exclude my music folder if at all possible. I’ve got a fairly recent copy of my music library on another machine and since I knew there would be something that I would have to leave out, this was my number one choice.

Since the title here is “Super Duper!”, you’ve probably already figured out what I decided to go with. If I had just needed to do an exact copy like I said before, I probably would have chosen Carbon Copy Cloner, but since my backup had to be a little more precise, I decided to look at Super Duper! and loved it. I’m not sure, CCC may be able to do all the things that I needed it to do, but I never actually got to the point where I wanted to look at it. Super Duper! did all the things I needed and more.

I had dreamed that I would be able to plug in my external drive and my computer would automatically backup and shutdown when it was done, but I knew I wasn’t going to find one app that would do all that for me. I was wrong. Super Duper! will allow you to schedule backups any way you want, including when a certain drive is plugged in. You can tell it to automatically repair permissions before the backup starts. You can run scripts before and after backups. You can automatically have the computer shut down when it’s done. You can tell it exactly what folders to backup and folders to ignore (ie: ~/Music/).

Super Duper! makes backing up easy. And it runs every night before I go to bed, no matter when that happens to be.