NorthCast: Blogs - The Web Podcast By Northern Folk!

We've Been Packing For A Month (And A Day)

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 11:24:09 GMT

On the 13th of January, we launched NorthPack into the wide world of the internet, with the aim to have 50 feeds added and sync'ed within the first month...

Well we did it... almost, today (about 2 hours ago) our 50th feed was added,

Ross Dargan, the proud owner and his blog http://blog.the-dargans.co.uk, published the blog .net 2/.net 3 asp.net sql and all sorts of other goodies!..

We are proud have reached the goal of 50 feeds and you can be sure that a few ales will be drunk at our next meeting on monday, but this milestone marks the beginning of the next update to NorthPack, we have received an increadible amount of feedback, comments and feature suggestions and we are working hard to make sure your ideas and suggestions for NorthPack go into the site...

Tell your friends about Northpack and keep blogging, we've indexed around 800 posts (and soon they will be searchable and archived!), we are aiming for an additional 1000 in month 2 (there could be a prize for the 1000th blog post... who knows!!)

Thanks a lot for reading and have a happy valentines day.

Dom, Ryan & Paul

(On Another Note :: Happy Birthday Heather)

Avatars, Favicons and your experiences

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 10:04:42 GMT

So NorthPack has been running for 2 weeks now, and the quality of your content passing through the site is amazing! But enough about what we think.... what do *you* think?

If you have added your blog to NorthPack, has it affected your stats in any way? more visits? more comments? we've had a couple of people say that because of the increased exposure through NP, it's encouraged them to blog more, which is fantastic, the main goal of the site is to unite and encourage the Northern community.

One thing i'd personally like to see, is for everyone to have avatars! it's a shame to see the default "?" picture next to a featured blog, don't be shy, get your face up there!

We'd rather that avatars were all faces, as we're a largely social community, we meet at GeekUp's, OpenCoffee's and BarCamps, but can't always put a face to the name... this is where your avatar comes in! The option to add your avatar is in your user profile :)

A quick note about resizing

I've had a couple of people come back to me regarding your photo's being cropped, or looking pixellated, i just thought i'd take a minute to explain why, and how to avoid this.

When uploaded, your avatars will be resized to be a 90 x 90px image, and greyscaled. to get the best results, the image you choose to be uploaded should have the same width-to-height ratio (1:1), or to put it simply, "it's hip to be square, innit".

You can, of course, send images that are't square, the upload script will simply resize your image to 90px (on the shortest edge), then crop off the rest. This will either result in a nice arty shot of you, or chop off your head.

If you're too shy, then you don't *have* to upload a picture of yourself, but please try find a picture which suits you, and can be associated with your profile.

Favicons, favicons everywhere...

As you've no doubt spotted, we make use of Favicons to personalise your blog on NorthPack, there's quite a lot coming through with no favicons, which is a shame.

If you don't know how to create a favicon, there's plenty of sites that will help you make one just a google away, my favourite is http://www.favicon.co.uk/ and lets you upload any picture to be resized and sent back to you in the .ico format, simply upload this to your site root, and we'll find it :)

At the moment, we're kinda cheating at how we retrieve them, by simply attempting to load them from http://yourdomain.com/favicon.ico, now we know that not everyone puts them in the site root, or even uses the default filename, so at some point we'll be getting smarter and retrieving the real location from your server, but for now, they'll have to sit in your site root to be picked up by us. We'll also support PNG favicons down the line too ;)

Comments?

So we'd like to hear your views, make use of the handy comment form below :) We've got plenty of new features in the pipeline too, so stay tuned!

NorthPack Beta 2.0 with RSS!

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 16:31:50 GMT

NorthPack is a fantastic resource which aims to shine a spotlight on what's happening across the Northern Web Community, our RSS feed makes it even easier to access this information.

Head on over to NorthPack.co.uk and click on the new shiny "subscribe" button in the navigation, and you can add our feed to your favourite reader :)

We're still working on even more great new features, but rather than sit on them and release them all at once, we'll be rolling them out as soon as they're ready!

Please feel free to leave any feedback, comments or suggestions below.

NorthCrew officially launches NorthCast!

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:48:31 GMT

Welcome to the all new, officially launched, NorthCast website. For those of you who have heard our pre-shows you'll have a rough idea of what we're all about, however for those of you new to the site let me give you a run down.

What is NorthCast?

NorthCast is a northern focused podcast covering local news about web related professionals, people probably like yourself if you're reading this blog. In addition we conduct interviews, and provide event coverage "up north" and our basic aim is too provide a much needed voice to the North of England.

Who runs NorthCast?

NorthCast is brought to you by the NorthCrew. At time of launch the NorthCrew consists of Ryan Taylor, Deb Bassett, Paul Stanton and Dom "The Hodge" Hodgson. You can find more information about us on the link below:

http://www.northcrew.co.uk

May I draw your attention for a moment?

NorthCast is a community podcast powered by community content. Without the community we have nothing. We're just three blokes sat around, tinkering with our laptops and admiring Dom's latest Nintendo T-Shirt... playing on the Wii... and occasionally surfing the web. Basically what I'm trying to say is we need you. That's right you!

You'll find on the navigation menu a link to submissions, this is where you, a community member, have the opportunity to submit content or suggest podcast topics. Are you launching a product? Have you started a new business? Anything you can think of that might be interesting to the community get in touch. We may even want to interview you for the show.

Also don't forget to subscribe to the podcast, we have a selection of RSS feeds providing you with the content you're most interested in.

Where are we going with all this?

Well that's up to the community. We hope we'll be well received, so far our feedback has been excellent, and there are many features and directions we would like to go in, the main feature being video, but no-one wants to flog a dead horse so let us know what you want to see and hear about. This is just the beginning!