Things on my mind. George Drapeau's Weblog

A buddy of mine used to work for Yahoo! on some pretty high-traffic properties that they run.  But last year he left the company to pursue an idea he had.  His company, G-Snap!, is the result, and tomorrow afternoon at 12:30PM Pacific time, I will be using his company's technology to "snapcast" the USC vs. Arizona State college football game.

So first things first: if you wanna keep up with the game and won't be around a TV but you will have a mobile phone with a web browser, go here:

http://gsnap.com/236.

I've tried it on my Treo's browser, and it's been tested on tons of other mobile browsers as well as the major desktop browsers like Firefox, IE, and Safari.

It's hard for me to describe how fun it is to follow a snapcast; it helps if you're interested in the event itself.  You can simple go and watch the commentary, or you can login (for free) and make your own comments.  Often, I find the comments are more entertaining and engaging than the snapcaster's commentary, but you be the judge.

When you join a snapcast, you are in a live community of fans who are interested in not just the game scores but also some of the play-by-play and live commentary of what's going on.

Also, you can create your own snapcasts of anything you want.  Recently, a new user decided to snapcast the NASCAR Talledega 500 (it went really well, according to my friend).  Another recent snapcast was two people snapcasting the recent U.S. Vice Presidential Debate, with lots of viewers commenting.

You can get a better description of what G-Snap! does by reading about them here.  Or, take your browser (mobile or desktop) to the URL above and watch my 'cast and enjoy the game.

Fight On!  Beat the Sun Devils!

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(this blog entry is a note-to-self kind of a thing.)

I've been using a cool Firefox browser extension called ScribeFire to write my blog entries; I like it because it's easy to write the blog entry without having to worry about writing HTML markup, and it makes it easy for you to post the blog entry to just about any kind of blogging software you want.  I usually write to my blogs.sun.com blog, which runs the Roller blogging software.

That's all good, but recently I couldn't post new blog entries with ScribeFire and I couldn't figure out why.  I'd go back into the Account Wizard, where you tell ScribeFire about your blog, including username and password.  But it kept failing on my username and password, and I was absolutely sure I had those correct.

Well, I finally figured out what I was doing wrong.  This will certainly apply to Sun employees but it may apply to others out there using Roller blogging servers.  Here's what I needed to do:

• Log into blogs.sun.com (my blogging site); recently, we switched our authentication mechanism to something all Sun employees know.
• under the "Actions" section there is a choice labeled "Edit user profile"; click on that.
• Choose a "Weblog Client API Password", which is different from the password you used to log into blogs.sun.com.  This password is what ScribeFire will use when it tries to post a blog entry for you, so you need to tell blogs.sun.com what to expect for a password.  Confirm the password and save.

There you go.  Now you can go into ScribeFire and update your settings.  Here's how I set mine:

• Open ScribeFire and click on the "Add" button under the Blogs tab; this launches the ScribeFire Account Wizard;
  
• my blog's url is "http://blogs.sun.com/drapeau"; enter yours and Continue;
• Click the Configure Manually button that appears next;
• Select "MetaWeblog API" as the blog system type (I don't know why not "Roller"; just trust me here);
• for the API URL, type "http://blogs.sun.com/roller-services/xmlrpc";
• for the Username and Password, use your username and the password you entered as the Weblog Client API Password above;

That should do it.  Now you can blog with Scribefire, which should make blogging easier and more fun overall.

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