Radio Active #39: Nuke(m)Con, Doom, Geeky Media

The gaming world has GenCon. My gaming group has Nuke(m)Con. Radio Active #39 starts with a look at our home grown convention and then takes a look at a couple of new geeky media outlets in the form of the Geek Gazette newsletter and Geek Label podcast as well as an exceedingly useful anti-repetitive stress injury software tool for the Mac. Finally, in the category of "movies we watch so that you don't have to", there's a review of the video-game inspired horror flick Doom. The film stars the Rock and once again proves the axiom that you can't make a good movie from a video game. Listen to the episode and read the show notes

Radio Active #38: Painting Ghosts, Portable Apps, A Feast for Crows

Radio Active starts glowing again as the Great Fall Painting Project of '06 winds down. This time around I've got updates on said project as well as the far geekier AirTunes setup I finally got working. Sites of Note looks at Jonathan Coulton music videos shot using World of Warcraft, the world-building third season of the Harping Monkey's Round Table and the very cool (and very geeky) Portable Apps web site, which provides geeks with self-contained versions of Firefox, Open Office and other programs they can stick on a thumb drive. Finally there's the much delayed review of A Feast For Crows, the fourth book in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice series. Get the show, read the show notes.

Radio Active #37: GenCon (Almost) Live, Geek Acres, Nintendo DS

Home improvement once again takes center stage as my wife and I prepare to re-paint our living room. But it's not all painting and scraping: I've also got two new sites to talk about -- GenCon (Almost) Live and Geek Acres -- and a run down of my favorite games for the Nintendo DS. And that review of George R.R. Martin's A Feast for Crows? Yeah, that gets delayed again -- look for it in Radio Active #28. Get the episode and read the show notes.

Radio Active #36: Stargate, Geek Design, Tech Podcasts

Technology vlogs -- also known as video podcasts -- take center stage in Radio Active #36 as I run down the big list of shows I watch every morning while eating my Cheerios and feeding the baby, including commandN, diggnation, dl.tv, Geek Brief and Geek Entertainment TV. I've also got news about the Stargate SG-1 Viewers Choice Poll, ramblings about resisting the urge to pull an all-nighter, and thoughts on geek interior design. Get the show.

Radio Active #35: Eberron Music, Vintage Gamer, Geek Activism

This show features a Radio Active first as I do a game and music review of the same product: Wizards of the Coast's Sharn: City of Towers for the Eberron campaign setting. The show has a ton of listener feedback from Radio Active #34, as well as a review of the Vintage Gamer podcast, a discussion of the 95 Theses of Geek Activism and a link to a conversation between two famous geeks: Zack Braff of Scrubs and Garden State fame and Kevin Smith, known for his films Clerks, Chasing Amy and Dogma. Get the episode and read the show notes.

MySpace

The Atomic Age has certainly fallen on hard times since the new Nuketown went live, which is ok, since suspect RSS aggregators and search engines were the only ones really reading it. Still, I should post here more often, as it is a sort of back-up outpost for the ol'thermonuclear burg.

While we're on the topic of little-used outposts, I do have a MySpace profile that I setup back in the spring for a workshop I gave on Web 2.0, and I decided I'd beef it up a bit just in case anyone's looking for me over there (hey, it could happen). You can check out the profile at this url:

http://www.myspace.com/knewquist

If nothing else, I've found MySpace a useful way to show support for some of my favorite independent bands and performers, like Jonathan Coulton and the Atomic Swindlers, both of whom have profiles on the site.

Radio Active #33: Battlestar Galactica Season 2 Soundtrack, Uncle Bear Podcast

Radio Active #33 is online after I successfully hid away on the third floor and forced myself to get the damn thing done. It features a review of the Battlestar Galactica Season 2 soundtrack, and various ramblings about the new Nuketown

NT Redesign: It's Alive!

The new Nuketown is up (and thus, the number of posts around here is down). So far response has been positive, but there hasn't been much in the way of comments, so I'm working on penning some content specifically aimed at getting a response.

NT Redesign: All Over Except for the DNS...

The redesign is finished -- yesterday I setup the email addresses through the new house and worked out the page forwarding scheme that will make sure people can get from the old pages to the new ones. I also told Network Solutions to point to the new Web hosting service, an arcane process known as changing the DNS. Now those changes neeed to spread through the internet, and once they do, the new site will be accessible.

NT Redesign: RSS Tweaks, Statistics, File Uploads

The list of things left to be done before the new site launches is growing ever shorter. During lunch today I created the "RSS" page that points to the two major feeds on the site (the main site feed, and the podcast feed), I got the new "Hall of Fame" statistics page working completely, and added the last four podcasts to the web site.

Only two tasks remain: setting up the redirect to send folks to the new web pages, and the mod_rewrite redirect for the old podcast files, so that all the old podcast file links don't break.

After those two things are done, it'll be time to officially through the switch; I'm hoping that will happen tomorrow, and that the new site will be officially "live" by Saturday.

NT Redesign: More CSS Hacking, Image Moving

And now we enter the dog days of the redesign, as I hack away at the lingering issues, back up all the files off of the new site, make sure that all the Radio Active MP3s and Nuketown images are re-loaded on to the new site, and generally try to avoid being too bored while doing the grunt work.

The most complicated task before me is manually updating the new site's database with the location of all the Radio Actives to date. It requires updating several tables manually (though I'm getting an idea on how to automate the process) and will probably take a good chunk of today to finish.

Xbox Live Gamer Card

NT Redesign: CSS Fixed, Geek Tree Moved

I got a few minutes tonight to work on the new site, something I haven't done for a few days. I was able to fix the float issues with the CSS (basically there are a couple of elements in the drupal.css file that had "clear: both" properties set, which caused elements in my design to float oddly).

I moved the "Geek Tree" feature over to the new site. I tested the user registration process, but for some reason it didn't work. I'm not sure if that's because the beta isn't in its final location, because I've got some toggle switched in correctly, because Google is blocking the e-mail, or something else entirely.

Once I've got that working, the last major project will be to setup the various redirects, either through PHP or Apache's mod_rewrite, so that a minimum number of links are broken. It just wouldn't do to have a spiffy new site, and then have no one be able to get to it because I lost all my search engine and cross-linking traffic.

It's a Boy!

His name is Lucas Kenneth Newquist. Full details on Nuketown.

NT Redesign: File Uploads, Links

I hit an unexpected roadblock with the new site today as I discovered the new host doesn't let me modify the php.ini values, which in turn means that Drupal won't be able to upload any files over 7 mb in size, which is about 90% of the podcasts. Never fear though -- I think I can work around that by uploading the files manually and then hand-updating the Drupal file table. That's not pretty (enough so that I'll want to work on a short program to automate the database updating part of the process) but it should work.

Why bother? Because Drupal automates the creation of RSS feeds, and it will automatically include the file in the podcast feed, so net-net I'm probably saving 20 minutes by doing it this way rather than hand coding the RSS. That's the theory at least.

In other news, I've successfully moved the links index over to Drupal, but now I'm considering whether I want to use it or not. I'm going to experiment with having each link as a node in Drupal, which would allow the entire Linkport index to be referenced by the rest of the site, would allow users to comment on any sites, and possibly allow me to setup voting for links (though I'm not sure if I want to go that far, mostly for technical reasons). New links would be added on a freeform tagging basis, meaning I'd use tags, rather than categories, to organize them.

Keeping the Links section in Drupal makes them easier to edit, which could also help should any volunteers step foward and want to help with expanding the site.