Pirate Fembots can be quite demanding.   I set up a WordPress blog for her A YEAR AGO, and now she’s finally getting around to using it.

And also apparently now she’s not satisfied with WordPress’s  built-in image tools.

And who can blame her?  They kinda suck.

So here’s my first attempt.  Picasa (by Google) integration. I’ve been using Picasa for years to import and store my photos.  For fancy stuff, I use Photoshop.  For simple cropping etc, Picasa does just fine.  And you can store your pics online (like Flickr).

So here’s try number 1:  Insert 1 photo (this is a flyer from 2 years ago).

that seems to work just fine.  I press the plugin button, it pops up a list of my Public Picasa galleries, and I just go into a gallery, choose my photo and BANG…there it is!

Now, to show a whole GALLERY?  This is a gallery I just uploaded of old Los Diggaz flyers and tags we put on cute girls:

Seems to work pretty good.

I didn’t realize that my RSS feed had gone a little awry.   This can lead to all kinds of trouble.  But the feed is now working again an feeding all of those hungry RSS feed readers out there.

Here’s the proper RSS link for ALL of my Content:

http://www.diggz.org/index.php/feed/

If you’re looking just for the Podcasts, they are here:

http://www.diggz.org/?feed=podcast

Subscribe in a reader

A couple of months ago a friend sent me an email asking if I could help her with a website problem (this is a relatively common occurrence in my life).    It seems the daughter of one of her friends had been diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma, a relatively rare and aggressive form of cancer.

Since December 2008, 6-year-old Zoe has been going through chemotherapy, but also needed radiation therapy. Her health insurance company had denied coverage for a special type of radiation therapy called Proton Beam Therapy.

My friend contacted me because the family was trying to raise money to cover the cost of the Proton Beam Therapy and raise awareness of this alternative treatment.  So on a Saturday afternoon instead of watching Seinfeld reruns I threw up a Wordpress blog and configured it for them.   And subsequently they began spreading the word about Zoe’s situation.

Well, I got some good news today that the folks at Aetna agreed that Proton Beam Therapy would be the least harmful solution for Zoe and agreed to cover the cost of the treatment.

Furthermore, their fight for this treatment for Zoe may positively change the coverage policies for this type of treatment for pediatric care!

Needless to say, this makes me very happy.  Because it was a really good Seinfeld rerun I missed!

READ more about Zoe.

I’m sure everyone is happy to know that I finally got my WordPress installation working properly again.  For a while I couldn’t really add posts.  But if I’m correct this post will work just fine.

In the meatime, check out the work Ryan’s been doing on The Channel Project.

So Pixelpipe is an iPhone application that makes it easier to get your pictures out of your phone an onto the web. You can configure it to upload to your Facebook, Picasa, Smugmug, Flickr, or any of several dozen other sites, (including Wordpress blogs like this one).

It definitely has some limitations, however. For example, it didn’t actually upload the photos to my Wordpress blog, it just created a post with links to the photos hosted on THEIR site. But, usually that’s sufficient. I also configured it to send the same 4 photos to my Google Picasa account and my Facebook account, which it did.

It didn’t actually do very well with the layout in Wordpress, nor did it create a subject for the post, but I can always come in later (as I did with this post) and clean it up. I don’t think I’ll be using this tool to update Wordpress directly very much. If they’re just going to link to the files, I’d rather use one of the Wordpress Picasa Gallery tools and upload images there.  Anyway, if you’re interested check em out in the App Store, or at www.pixelpipe.com

Can this be? Or am I dreaming? Wordbook claims to be able to do it, and this is me testing it. I’ll let you know how it goes. I suppose that if you’re seeing this on Facebook, then it works!!!! And if not, I just wasted about 30 minutes.

Update:  It Works!

Well, sort of.  What it does is post a message on your Mini-Feed that you have a new blog posting, including the subject of the blog, and a link to your blog.  It only works with the downloaded version of Wordpress (if you use the Wordpress blogging service, you’re out of luck.

I realized that despite the fact that I loved my old Cold-Fusion-based Blog software, it’s just not as slick as this WordPress thingy.  So, I’ve made the jump.

I’m going to me migrating all of my old posts over to this, but in the meantime, you can still access my old Blog here:

http://www.diggz.org/index.cfm