Camstudio is the open source screen recording software for your computer. There are many other software companies that offer to sell a screen recording/capturing software. But if you know how to use Camstudio correctly and understand some of the basics of configuring it, you’ll never need any paid software in this field. Camstudio will do the job completely for you. The following YouTube video is by far the best instructional video on how to setup and use Camstudio. It will tell you everything you need to know.

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Here’s a new and interesting plugin. It’s called the FriendFeed Comments Wordpress Plugin and it displays your FriendFeed comments from your posts on your Wordpress blog. It’s kind of a difficult thing to describe easily, so i’ll let the creator explain it to you.

“This plugin will allow you to display on your own site the comments that people make on FriendFeed about your post. I keep trying to think of a more succinct way of writing that but I can’t. It always sounds more confusing than it is.” There we go that’s much better.

How it’s Used in your Template

The plugin ads a template tag called <?php wp_ffcomments(); ?>, which you can drop onto your template somewhere inside “the loop” so it can access the post’s details to match it up with the FriendFeed data.

How I plan to Use it

I personally have not been to motivated by the FriendFeed tool, despite all the attention that it has been getting. But now if I can integrate the comments between FriendFeed and my blog, then I don’t see any reason why I won’t promote my blog posts on FriendFeed and start building a network of friends. In my blogging efforts, I hope to be able to use this method to build more comments and conversation on my blog(s).

Why FriendFeed?

The interesting aspect of FriendFeed is its quick evolution from a lifestreaming service to lifestreaming plus discussion forum plus latest news plus search engine. It seems to be a way to add all of these different information sources into one. The way I see it, if you can tap into all of my informational resources, than you can know everything I know about the Internet. And that becomes mutual. I can learn everything you know about the Internet. Knowledge sharing increases at incremental rates if people use FriendFeed to it’s capacity.

You can download this plugin from the creator’s website. Don’t forget to inform him of any bugs that you may come across. And don’t forget to thank him for his contributions.

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Have you been to Barack Obama’s website and seen the cool slideshow that he has on his home page? There is actually a splash page that you have to go through first, before you get to the home page. But then you will see it. It looks like this:

Have a Slideshow on your site just like Barack’s!

Well guess what. Thanks to our friend Guillermo Rauch over at devthought.com, you can now have the same slideshow for free! Guillermo has put together a script in Mootools using a bunch of CSS to give you the same type of look and feel and cool slideshow effects that Barack has on his website. The script is fantastic looking and very lightweight so it doesn’t slow loading time up too much. See the Demo Here.

The Creation

Here is a little bit more of an explanation of the slideshow. “I took my previous class (SlideList), and made a few changes here and there. It works with MooTools 1.2, and supports all kinds of shape transformations (top and left coordinates, and height and width properties), which means it can now be used with vertical, horizontal, or even irregular lists. I extended it and came up with a new class that receives the images and loading spinner as parameters (note: it’s arguable whether this is the best decision OOP-wise, but due to the simplicity of this script, this was the right call)

The Code

To ensure all images are loaded before the user makes any interaction, the MooTools Assets component is used. The CSS plays a major role (as in every other animation-focused script). I suggest you analyze it carefully before implementing it in your applications or websites. You’ll probably need to adjust the ids, or use classes instead to keep your stylesheets clean.

The markup is meaningful and simple. Two lists are used (one for the images and the other for the links). The loading element is included in the HTML, but it’s probably better to inject it from the script directly. You can download the files for this slideshow at Guillermo’s Blog at devthought.com

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Laconica is an open source Microblogging tool that you can use to build a microblogging website of your own. Websites such as identi.ca use Laconica as it’s platform. The dependencies for running Laconica are Pear, XMPPHP, php-openid, and OAuth.php. You can learn more about the dependencies and how to install and configure Laconica by going here.

What is Microblogging?

Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually 140 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. The most popular of this type of service is Twitter, which i’m sure you have heard of lately. People are still trying to figure out exactly how it is they can benefit from such a service, but I think right now the possibilities still stand as “endless”.

What would I do with a Microblogging Open Source Tool?

Now this one is up to you. But the ideas that microblogging brings to the table are literally endless. And chances are you will probably be introduced to a project of your own, or of someone elses that will require such technology. One thing that I have thought of is to have all developers on an open source project microblogging together to collaborate on that open source project. This would increase productivity and communication at a faster and more effective rate to help get projects done quicker.

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You gotta check this cool free tool out! It’s called the Web Forum Reader - A unique internet forums reading software. The basic idea is for you to be able to read web forums in a similar way to how you read your RSS Feeds for blogs. Being that there are still so many helpful forums out there, this tool could be very beneficial for you and save you tons of time. Here is the explanation of the software:

“Web Forum Reader is uniquely designed for reading Internet forums and conferences. You can easily add your favorite forums to Web Forum Reader to stay informed about updates and changes on these forums without loading them in your browser. Web Forum Reader saves you time by showing new and updated topics while hiding topics you have already read. Web Forum Reader will also reduce the amount of data you download compared to regular reading using a browser. Use Web Forum Reader’s handy Resource Addition Wizard to add Internet forums and conferences.”

Here are the main features of the tool:

• Convenience: Mark new topics, recently updated topics, and topics that you have already read.
• Flexibility: Add various types of forums and Internet conferences.
• Precision: The built-in browser automatically scrolls the page to the position where new posts were added to the topic.
• Scheduling:
  The Scheduler feature will always keep you informed about changes in
  the forums you are interested in. Web Forum Reader will notify you
  about new and updated topics in forums as soon as they appear.
• Favorites: Mark your most interesting forum topics as your favorites. Be alerted to new posts in these topics first.
• Organization: See new and updated topics on all forums at once in one list.
• Efficiency: Reduce data downloads and save on bandwidth costs.
• Time savings: Show only new and updated topics while monitoring multiple forums.
• Ease of use: Join several similar forums into groups. Synchronize grouped forums with a single click.
• Multitasking: Use tabs to work with several forums simultaneously.

This can be a very helpful tool that will enhance your web learning. I personally subscribe to over 200 blogs because of the ease of use for getting only new information via RSS. But if this tool works the way it says it does, I can now benefit from some of the highly informational web forums out there like webmasterworld.com. Go download Web Forum Reader and try it out. It’s totally free.

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Over this past weekend I played with the open source social networking platform Elgg. I set it up on elgg.chasesagum.com for testing to see how well the installation worked and to test out it’s features. I must say that it works great and the installation went smoothly. If you are looking at building a social networking platform for some reason, maybe for your business or maybe as a business venture in and of itself, I recommend Elgg open source. It has a slick interface that looks better than MySpace ever will and it’s of course open source which makes it even better. Here are some of the features mentioned on their site;

1. Blogging
2. Social Networking
3. File repositories for individuals and communities
4. Podcast support
5. Full access controls
6. Supports tagging
7. User profiles
8. Full RSS support
9. Rss aggregator
10. Create Communities
11. Collaborative community blogs
12. Create ‘friends’ networks
13. Import content
14. Publish to blog
15. Multilingual
16. Branding/customization
17. OpenID support

Some of you may be asking yourself, “why run my own social network?”. Especially when you already have Linkedin or MySpace. Here is what Elgg had to say in response to this question;

“For organisations concerned about their data but still wanting to harness the power of social network, you can. The ability to customize and brand your network exactly how you want. Connect together networks to create a truly distributed, global network of sites - the way the Internet should be! You can develop specific functionality to suit your needs. Even thought MySpace is too big to be useful? Create specialised, targeted networks instead!”

This could potentially be a huge benefit to several business models. The first i’m thinking of for example is Real Estate agents and brokers. An entire social network of real estate agents and brokers that can communicate with each other and collaborate and teach each other. Not to mention share leads internationally. Just a thoughts. Be sure to go to www.elgg.org to download this terrific open source social networking tool.

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