It has been revealed.

I was in a music festival, playing with a select wind ensemble this past weekend (it’s the reason I missed an interview with IMified which we apparently may re-record anyway!).

It was a pretty cool weekend, usually is, and I received some recordings today from the event. They are now mirrored and in a nice MP3 player on this server.

Check them out here, and give me feedback!

I’m in a “don’t do anything mood” so I decided to pull up and post my iTunes Top 25 Most Played songs.

Check out the file here: http://chris.comitar.com/blog/downloads/itunes/top25-250307.xml

And feel free to steal my XSL if you want it. It’s all in the code.

chris

A few months back, i posted about a new project that was in the works.

Today, I am excited to announce that this project, a Luppino-Van Patten Media project (credits) is finally ready to be showcased to the public.

Amalia is a dead-simple web page management system. It is not designed for blogs, or forums, or communities. Amalia was created with pages in mind - the management of simple sites. Think old school - About, Contact, Info, that sort of thing. A CMS in form and function.

Why would Luppino-Van Patten Media want that sort of thing? Well it is simple really, our target market is not interested in blogs. They do not need forums. A Twitter feed streaming their latest business updates is overkill. That is okay, but the problem is there is no established tool for easy page management.

Amalia is here to fill this void. Amalia makes it easy for users to create files and folders, edit these files, delete files and folders, and upload images. The file editing interface allows users to edit page titles, keywords, and descriptions. Editing content is easy too, we use the powerful TinyMCE, with a special modification that allows users to edit raw HTML as well (similar to features in the latest incarnation of WordPress).

Because of the way Amalia works, it’s ideal for designers. Integration with existing themes is simple, at the most you only have to add four lines of code to your design. To add users to Amalia, simply edit a user file. Dead simple and quick. You can also centrally host your installation of Amalia, we host ours at http://amalia.lvpmedia.com/, and then our clients can visit that page to log in and change their sites. It simplifies maintenance, saves space, and consolidates resources.

I’m excited to be rolling Amalia out to clients, and more exited to look into the process of distributing Amalia to other developers and designers. Portions of Amalia are available already - we use MagpieRSS for our notifications, Tango for icons… there is a list of credits available. The majority though is hidden, and I’d love to change that. If you’re interested in licensing Amalia, contact me and we will talk!

For now though, a demo should suffice, yes?

Website: http://amalia.lvpmedia.com/
Username: test
Password: test
Output: http://clients.lvpmedia.com/test/

Enjoy!

Chris

Conceived in late 2006 and officially founded in early 2007, Luppino-Van Patten Media is a comprehensive media firm, owned and operated by central New Yorkers Chris Van Patten and Steve Luppino.

I’ve spent the past half hour or so running through the iTunes podcast library. I’m trying to diversify my audio collection - so I’ve decided to start subscribing to podcasts. Before now, the only podcast that I’ve listened to was Accident Hash by the awesome CC Chapman. Here’s my current selection:

• Accident Hash
• All Songs Considered
• Fresh Air
• Intelligence Squared
• This American Life
• WGBH Classical Performance
• KEXP - Song of the Day
• KEXP - Music That Matters
• IndieFeed: Alternative / Modern Rock
• IndieFeed: Indie Pop Music
• Radio 1’s Best of Unsigned

I’ll keep updating this with my new subscriptions. I’m having a lot of fun experimenting and finding new sources of media to keep me busy throughout the day. It’ll be interesting how the Signal vs. Noise ratio is. As I type this I’m listening to “This American Life”, so I wonder if I’ll get info-overload.

Time will tell!

Chris

Sorry for the lack of blogging lately, I’ve been swamped with client work and all sorts of miscellaneous things. You’re welcome to follow my twitter feed though, it’s faster for me to post there, so I tend to update there frequently.

http://twitter.com/cvp

well, sort of.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6411017.stm