Change of Feed Address (Feedburner)

As this is a WordPress hosted blog, and I can’t fiddle with the head meta-tags…

I’ve switched to a feedburner RSS feed – if you are subscribed to the default WordPress feed you might like to change to the feedburner feed instead (for my sake, feedburner have good stats). Thanks.

New feed address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/alttablib

(PS. I’ll be adding a feedburner feed for comments shortly).

Pandora Hacks

I just did a Google search on “Pandora Hack” – it pulled up this sweet utility that will write the Pandora tracks to Mp3 files as they are played. Booyah. I’m still loving Pandora.

• Noobs Guide to Pandora’s Rip Hack
• Pandora: How to Rip and Save Pandoras Music to MP3 Files for Free
• Pandora Downloader : Installation Instructions

(I’m hoping these are still working – I can’t try them out until the broadband at home gets up and running again, which is a couple of weeks away!).

See also Technophilia: 15 ways to get more out of Pandora, which gives some useful tips on extending Pandora. I’d especially agree with point #2 (something I’ve noticed):

Shut it down: Turn Pandora completely off about once every two hours. The player tends to get, for lack of a better term, stuck, and doesn’t do as good a job finding your stuff the longer it plays. Turning it off and on every once in a while seems to resolve this issue.

There’s also the Pandora Roundup which also looks to have some more useful extensions and hacks.

Using WordPress as a CMS: Investigation

I’ve recently thought about redesigning a fansite of someone elses. Their design is running on geocities and looking very old, but it has some fantastic unique content.

By utilising WordPress as a CMS I get the advantage of WordPress’ easy to use admin interface for this other person to use themselve, and if necessary I also get the option of utilising WordPress.com to host the website.

At the moment I’m researching exactly how WordPress can be utilised as a CMS – the following readings look to be a good place to start:

• From Weblog to CMS with WordPress
• WordPress CMS
• WordPress (as CMS) Hacking Tips

Other things to think about are:

• User Management
• Hacking “the Loop“
• An integrated Forum (which I’ll be looking into separately later)
• Using posts vs. pages