ShowMeDo Blog

In the first of a two-part series, Rachel Cunliffe has made a grand 30 minute introduction to blogging with the rapidly growing open-source WordPress system.

Rachel covers everything you need to know from installing the software at a host through to publishing posts and pages. Also covered: customising WordPress with a new blogroll and a plug-in and making an ‘About Me’ page.

If you like the video, please leave Rachel some feedback on her blog and on our video page.

Here’s a first - we have uploaded 5 videos using the 3gp protocol that plays on many modern mobile/cell phones. The videos are David Rawlinson’s car maintenance set - you could watch them from your car, or show them to friends…

Here’s an example, for David’s Good Battery video - it should play on most desktop video players as well as mobiles.

We haven’t uploaded 3gp versions of our regular screencasts - the 3gp protocol is designed for ‘real world’ videos - it makes a mess of screencasts so you can’t read the text (therefore losing the point somewhat). There are some notes over at our wiki, including notes on how to get the videos onto a phone. I’d love feedback on this - is it useful? Where can you see this going?

David Rawlinson adds another two ShowMeDos to his set - Checking the Oil and investigating the condition of the car’s Battery.

The Oil video is a good visual guide to checking a car’s oil, whilst the Battery video lets you hear the noise a car may make when the battery is fine but another problem stops the car’s engine from starting.

Both are excellent examples of learning about a car where the more traditional Haynes manuals (Amazon: MGB Workshop Manual example) fall down.

Kyran and I apologise for the recent site outages.  The site went down for a part of Friday and Sunday due to my misconfiguration of our lighttpd server (fixed), and twice since for shorter periods apparently with problems at our provider.

I’ll be discussing this with our provider with the obvious aim of having a stable ShowMeDo for the future.  Sorry again for the outage.  Now…on with making some more ShowMeDos!

David Rawlinson introduces basic car maintenance in this start to a larger series. Here David introduces Toolkit Contents, Selecting Tools and Coolant Inspection.

Thanks go to Kevin Dangoor and Peter Cooper for recent blog mentions (and good luck on iterating the jobs-board extension for Code Snippets).

We passed 40,806 downloads last week (we were at 36k just over a week back!), and now we’re up to 53 videos with David Rawlinson’s latest Car Maintenance videos. Let’s keep sharing that knowledge!

Here are some stats for last week: 2,669 video downloads for the week and 36,806 downloads since January 1st. Not to be sniffed at! We also had several new video comments from users showing their appreciation and asking questions [1, 2, 3].

Our top five downloads this week (by number-of-downloads) are:

1. 260 - PyDev
2. 142 - RUR-PLE 1
3. 121 - PyDev Extensions
4. 120 - Development And Navigation With SPE
5. 120 - wx Hello World

And here’s a list of our videos that need some more love!

1. 21 - Using Nosey For Python Testing
2. 14 - The Perfect Cup Of Coffee
3. 12 - CatWalk’s sqlmonitor
4. 5 - ScummVM with FOTAQ
5. 4 - Java Psion Link