Great way to access Twitter and Facebook from China

Both Twitter and Facebook are blocked in China but so far, Brizzly hasn't been blocked and it works.

in reference to: * Brizzly / philou (view on Google Sidewiki)

On Yunnan TV with June 朱婧

Hey, maybe that deserves a blog post?!

I was on TV with June 朱婧! She's a chinese pop singer from Yunnan but living in Beijing. My friend asked me if I wanted to do this TV 2 minutes yunnan tv's special spring festival performance on drums and so it happened. On a friday evening, I went to June's friend house in Kunming, met her and her friends for the 1st time and recorded my instrument over the song. Of course, we were going to do play-back. I

From Playing music in Kunming

took my djembe but finally a friend there had this drum from Nepal and the sound was pretty good so that's what I used. It was also easier to walk with it. So we did several take to record my instrument, they had done so in the afternoon already for the other instruments: accordeon, violon, mandoline... turns out you can't hear much the difference from the original song. That's because the TV wanted a good quality sound track i guess, and we did the recording very quickly.

Anyway, on sunday afternoon, we did a fake recording with strange cloth. The director didn't like it so we did it with simpler cloth on Monday for the real recording.

Then, the show was on TV sunday night, February 14th:

And June had this video on her blog where she presents her "special band":

Well, it was a cool experience. I was certainly delighted to meet June who was very nice. I have been listening to her CD for 1 year as you can see from my 1st tweet about June.

More pictures here.

From Playing music in Kunming

1st Drupal website: Ecotourism in Yunnan, China

For a while now, I've been working on making a new website for Xintuo Ecotourism, an ecotourism company based in Lijiang, Yunnan, China.

The old website was not well compatible with Firefox and was difficult to update. I considered WordPress but I have finally chosen the famous Open-source CMS Drupal as a platform for the website. Mostly because I wanted to learn by doing and this opportunity allowed it, I was sure I could do a decent website with Drupal.

I'm pretty happy with the result. I haven't been disappointed with the possiblities. The only thing is : Drupal is much more hard to keep up to date (Modules, Themes...), but maybe it's not that important once your website is up and running.
I find the theme update most troublesome, because I did some change in the theme, but when you update it (when the author released a new version for bug fix for example), you have to do these changes again...

The most difficult task was maybe to get Clean Urls to work. At first I had difficulty to understand the "help" section about this. But I finally succeeded.
My biggest disappointement was about some modules which are not available in Drupal 6 (but in Drupal 5, which makes it frustrating). For example, a module to deal with Picasa Web Album, or to have a Google Sitemap.

I had fun to play with the Weather and Maps modules, and I had difficulty to find a WYSIWYG editor but in the end, i think it's a good website for that company.

List of the main modules I added:
Views, CCK, GMap, Location, Weather, Google Analytics, Tagadelic, Wysiwyg, Fivestar...
Theme:
Marinelli

Next time, i'll write a bit about 2 other websites I did, this time with WordPress.

banging away