It was August 2005 and I bunch of us had gathered on someone’s Relto in Until Uru. The topic of the night was how we should go about starting a podcast for the Myst/Uru Community. Back then, the idea of a podcast was a little more foreign than today, and plenty of time was spent arguing about what the hand-crafted RSS feed should contain.

Fast forward almost 5 years and The Cavern Today, spurred on by the return of Myst:Online Uru Live (again), has decided to “reboot” and start at Episode #1 again after months of non-production. Have a listen to our latest episode entitled, Something Old, Something New.

My role since the beginning has been to looking after the servers, forum software, and website. this February, I began a major redesign of the website using WordPress.

Initially, I was sceptical of WordPress’ applicability to podcasting, but I was soon proven wrong. With the addition of a couple of simple plugins and a good theme, WordPress can be a podcasting powerhouse!

A couple of tips for using WordPress to podcast:

• Create and use categories from the beginning. In this way you’ll be able to publish multiple feeds, and therefore, multiple shows.
• Choose/Build a simple theme which shows off your content, gives the visitor easy access to an MP3 download, and offers an iTunes Subscribe button.
• Get a plugin to take away the audio-file management headaches. We use Blubrry PowerPress.
• Choose one of the many Twitter plugins for WordPress to auto-tweet when you publish a new episode.
• Allow comments! The whole point of podcasting is to build and serve a community. Allowing comments means instant two-way communication with your community.

Happy podcasting!

So here’s something worth admitting: I’ve been running WordPress 2.0 since 2006 and have never once bothered to upgrade to the latest version – unlike Jonathan who seems to update to the current stable almost daily! So without further ado, let me welcome you to the new WordPress2.5′d timokeller.net 2.0. I designed this rather simple theme to run on the effortlessly awesome K2 theme for wordpress, and I think its come out okay. Suggestions?

Congrats to the WordPress guys on a stunning new WP-ADMIN panel and the already huge number of downloads they have received. Its funny how even though its just a blogging script, it gets much more attention than Drupal releasing 6.1!

I’ve spent most of the past four months working on ChirpFX, a simple MVC Framework for developing human-centric web applications in PHP 5. The first application to use the framework is ChirpSchool – a highly extensible webapp for school and student management, assessment, promotion and monitoring. Its been picked up by the likes of Sun Valley Primary School and other local schools, and we’re looking forward to expanding at a rather exciting pace. We’ll have a promo website up soon with more information. More on that in the coming weeks.

If you want to keep an eye on me, follow me on Twitter. If you’re not on Twitter yet I’d highly suggest you join – its a really interesting way to interact with friends and followers!

Schedule for the next few weeks:

• Cognitive Behaviour Analysis Tutorial Assignment and Project
• Computer Science Network Architecture Tutorial 2 and Test
• Professional Communication Unit Paper due
• Deliver SMS and Assessment Modules of ChirpSchool
• See lots of Amy!

Thanks for catching up! See you on Twitter.

Tim