Will's Miro dev blog

One thing I’ve been meaning to write a post about was to list the things I use Miro for. There are probably other ways to do them, but that’s outside the scope of this post.

1. Keeping track of government
   President Obama’s weekly address and key speeches – http://www.whitehouse.gov/rss/speeches.xml
   Metavid – http://metavid.org/wiki/

   The metavid one is really interesting. From their site:

   “Metavid is a community driven archive of legislative video from both houses of the U.S. Congress, spanning from early 2006 to the present. This archive is searchable by speaker name, spoken text, date, metadata we’ve scraped from outside sources and user contributions. Metavid is video wiki where users improve its accuracy by fixing transcripts and annotating speeches.”

   I can subscribe to an RSS feed of anything that has to do with “Kerry” or “Kennedy”. It’s ultra-convenient, fascinating and a really awesome use of the all these technologies.

2. Continuing education
   Open Courseware Consortium – http://www.ocwconsortium.org/use/use-dynamic.html
   MIT OCW – http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

   Video and audio lectures and other course materials to learn subjects you didn’t have time to take in college. The MIT OCW is a great site, but any of the other groups that participate in the Open Courseware Consortium are also really useful.

3. Learning a new application
   InkScape – http://feeds.feedburner.com/Screencastersheathenxorg
   The Gimp – http://feeds2.feedburner.com/meetthegimp
   Blender – http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TheBlenderShow
   Microsoft Office on the Mac – http://mac.microsoft.com/macoffice/videos/en-us/xml/videopodcast.xml
   …

   There are lots of podcasts out there that walk you through using specific applications to do the things you need to do. Watching how someone does something tends to be a lot easier to understand than reading about someone doing something.

4. Learning new libraries, APIs, toolkits, whatever, …
   Git – http://feeds.feedburner.com/Gitcasts
   CSS – http://feeds.feedburner.com/CSS-Tricks-Screencasts
   …

   Any time I need to come up to speed on something programming related (toolkits, utilities, APIs, libraries, …), I almost always do a Video Search on YouTube and Google Video. I go through the results and download the videos that seem relevant to what I’m doing. Often I tweak the search terms and search again. Doing this brings up tutorials, demos, presentations, tech talks, and a variety of other interesting bits. This greatly adds to what I can gather by looking through the project web-site and forums because it’s distilled in a different way.

5. Keeping up with projects, communities, conventions, meetups …
   Ubuntu Developer Videos – http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/ubuntudevelopers/uploads?orderby=updated
   Fedora TV – https://fedorahosted.org/releases/f/e/fedoratv/fedora-tv.xml
   BSD Conferences – http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?vq=bsdconferences&alt=rss
   …

   These are useful to watch because you can see where these projects are going, who’s involved, and what they’re working on.

I’d love to know what other things people use Miro for. Add your uses in the comments.