8BitKid: Living Bit by Bit

First off, I have two new sites to present:

Awecelot.com
I was in a Rock Band tournament at a party one night, and we entered our band as “The Ocelots”. The person running the show misspelled our moniker, and so we were down as “The Awecelots”. I thought it sounded/looked pretty cool, and so I snagged the domain. I am not exactly sure what I will do with it, but at least I have it.

BigSixSocialClub.com
For those of you who know me well, you know I am in a dominos club bearing the name of the URL mentioned above. The Big Six Social Club convenes every week to throw bones, and we now have chapters in Silver Lake, Washington D.C., and New Haven.

Yahoo! Media Player
Finally, I have launched the new version of my Yahoo! Media Player Wordpress Plugin. This new version allows you to input your Amazon Affiliate ID to monetize referrals from your site.

- click here to get Yahoo! Media Player Wordpress Plugin v1.1

If you just upgraded to Safari 3.1, you may have noticed that the Yahoo! Media Player is crashing the browser. This is due to a change in the latest version of Safari, and is being addressed and should be fixed ASAP (EDIT: this problem was fixed and pushed to the stable build as Wednesday afternoon, 3/19).

In the meantime, if you try to deactivate the current plugin (v0.3), you may encounter a problem. This is a non-fatal error, and your admin panel should return to normal through just hitting the “back” button on your browser. However, I have found and corrected the bug, so please download and install the new version.

- Download the Yahoo! Media Player Wordpress Plugin v0.4 with bug fix

If you haven’t noticed, there is a music player integrated into this site. It creates those small play buttons next to each mp3 links (such as for this incredibly amazing song), and also creates the player in the bottom-left corner of the screen. If you want to see a richer demo, play with my music posts category. This player is a free piece of software available courtesy of Yahoo!. While they have already done an excellent job of making the player easy to integrate into a site, I decided to test my coding chops and make a plugin for the Wordpress blogging platform (the one that this site uses) to make it even easier to install and manage.

I recently had some free time to work on the plugin, and it now is up to version 0.3. I have completely rewritten the plugin, and added some functionality. There is now an “options” pane that will allow you to turn on the “beta” build of the player, so to speak, so you can test the new features coming down the pipe.

Also, I must disclose that while I am a Yahoo! employee, I work on this in my free time since I love the utility, am a big music fan, and needed a cool coding project. Please play around with this latest version and pass along any feedback.

Download: Yahoo! Media Player Wordpress plugin v0.3

A quick note: I have been informed that commenting has not been working.  I identified that the problem was coming from my anti-spam protection.  While fixing that I realized that my “contact” form also had issues.   Luckily, I have fixed both of these problems, so comment and contact away.  Please let me know if you run into any more site problems.

Well, my brother informed me that the old RSS links from the last build of my site are broken now that I have updated my blog engine. Please grab the new RSS feed.

Also, this picture, while meant to convey how the old link is “broken”, is what the ceiling of my brother’s bathroom actually looks like today due to a leak from the apartment above.

Greetings readers! On a personal note, I am going to be in NYC for the next week. I will be in Williamsburg for the next several days, and then staying midtown. If anyone is going to be around, definitely drop me a line. I am planning at least one visit to one of my favorite watering holes, “Barcade”, which combines my love of vintage arcades with my fondness of microbrews. I am coming in from Vermont, and about to board the train in Albany, so I’ve gotta dash in a sec…

Also, you may have noticed that the site has gone through a major overhaul in recent days. I have been spending my vacation migrating everything over to Wordpress so I can update it more frequently since I am no longer tied to software on my home Mac. I promise to update more regularly now :-) Please keep checking back, as I am still working out some new features, such as my photo galleries, better mobile integration, and more.

Happy Holidays!