Mike Chambers

Just a quick note, but I have changed hosting providers for my weblog. The transition should be pretty seamless, and if you are reading this, then you are all set. It might take a day or two for the DNS to update.

The weblog is now being hosted by MediaTemple. They were one of the partners of the on air tour, and hosted the website. They gave us excellent support, and thus when I started to look for a new host, they were the first people I contacted.

The transition should be pretty smooth, but if you run into any issues, just leave a comment on this post.

Well, Ted Patrick and I launched video.onflex.org a little over 3 weeks ago, and we are already nearing our twentieth video on the site. If you haven’t checked it out yet, make sure to glance through some of the videos.

Anyways, we are nearing the end of our backlog of videos, and it looks like I have some time this Thursday and Friday to create some more videos, so:

What Flex and / or Apollo videos you want to see on video.onflex.org? What do you want us to show? Who do you want us to interview?

Let us know by posting your thoughts in the comments.

One of the new plugins we installed on the new weblog server is the Quickcode plugin for Moveabletype This is a simple plugin that uses bracketed tags to make it easy to mark up posts.
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As you have probably noticed, my weblog has moved from markme.com to weblogs.macromedia.com.

The new url is:

http://www.mikechambers.com/mesh/

Make sure to update your urls for the site and the rss feeds.

Christian Cantrell’s weblog has also moved, and eventually all of the weblogs on markme.com will be transitioned over.

The biggest changes are that the site has a new look (although not necessarily good). I tweaked the default templates, so they don’t look so hot, but I am going to try to spiff it up some over the coming weeks.

The other big change is that we are using a new spam controll system, which should hopefully reduce or eliminate weblog spam.

Finally, we have tried to redirect everything from markme.com, but there are probably quite a few links and posts still broken. So, if you find any errors, you can just post them in the comments here.

Updated : April 23, 2007 to point to new domain.

As I mentioned yesterday, we have released an small update to MXNA (our Macromedia Community News Aggregator).

In addition to a bunch of tweaks and bugs fixes, there are some cool new features, including:
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We just uploaded a mini release of the Macromedia XML News Aggregator. There are some cool new things in there, but instead of telling you what they are, Christian and I thought it would be fun to have a quick little contest.

So, the first 3 people to post in the comments describing one of the new features / changes to MXNA will win a Flash Timbuktu Messenger bag (these are sweet). Make sure to include a URL pointing to the new feature / change, as well as your email address (so I can contact the winners). Once a feature / change has been posted in the comments it cannot be reused.

Btw, If you were one of the people that Christian and I pinged last night showing off some of the new features, then you are not eligible (sorry).

You can view the Macromedia XML News Aggregator (MXNA) here.

As Christian just posted, we have added a new section to the MXNA 2 beta. The new section is titled Reports, and lists all of the reports and analytics available at MXNA.
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One of the biggest problems we have had with MXNA (or any aggregator) over the past year or so is that they are primarily category based, and not content / conversation based. So, if a weblog is in the Flash category, and someone posts about what they had for breakfast, then that will appear in the Flash category.

While, this is not always a bad thing, as it allows you to get a feel for the people in in a particular community, it can lead to problems. One, it can make it harder to find the latest information being posted about Flash (or whatever category), as the category may contain a lot of off topic posts. Two, and as we saw during the past year, when the posts are about controversial or incendiary topics, then it can just annoy people trying to find info about the category. Finally, it omits relevant posts that are made by feeds in other categories (i.e. someone in the ColdFusion category makes a post about Flash).
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As Christian Cantrell posted earlier, we have just released a public beta of the next version of the Macromedia XML News Aggregator (MXNA 2).

This version was re-written from the group up with performance and extensibility in mind. While there are already a ton of cool new features, the thing I am most excited about is that we now have a solid platform that we can quickly build on top of and add new features.
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We have made a ton of new Macromedia XML feeds available in order to make it easier for everyone to keep up with the latest news, technotes, articles and other information from Macromedia.

Here is a list of some of the products covered:

• Breeze
• Central
• ColdFusion
• Contribute
• Director
• Dreamweaver
• Flash Communication Server
• Fireworks
• Flash
• Flash Player
• Flash Remoting
• Flex
• FreeHand
• JRun

You can find out more information, as well as view all of the feed URLs from:
http://www.macromedia.com/go/rss_info

Christian also has some additional information on the feeds here.

You can also keep up with all of the feeds in the Macromedia category at MXNA.

Btw, big thanks to Christian Cantrell who basically put the entire project together.