Birmingham Web Designer Jeremy Flint blogs here. He works for Kinetic Communications. He organizes events and programs for IPSA. He takes pictures and posts them on Flickr. He also blogs about Hiking and Mississippi State Sports when he has the time. He recommends Dreamhost for all your hosting needs. Make sure you grab the RSS Feed. You can also follow him on Twitter.

I really love my Flip MinoHD. It is small, easy to use, and perfect for grabbing those quick life moments that you would miss if you had to bother with a larger camera.

One of the few complaints I have had is the range of the lense. It is a pretty tight shot, so you can’t get in too close to something or someone without cutting out a lot of the image. After a few days with my Flip, I immediately started looking for ways to improve the experience. One of the methods I came across was just what I was looking for. Some people had purchased wide angle lens kits and hacked their Flip Mino or Ultra to be able to use a wide angle lens.

For Father’s Day, my wife and son bought me one of these lens kits and within 5 minutes, I was shooting video through the wide-angle lens and it was great. Here is a sample video. You can see the standard view from the Flip lens around the :28 second mark. The noise you hear is me unscrewing the lens.

Here is what you need to perform this hack:

• Flip Mino/MinoHD/Ultra camera
• Super Glue (I used a pen applicator)
• Wide Angle Lens Kit

I have seen several different types of wide angle converter kits. I used the SunPak 0.5x Wide Angle Converter kit. It includes step-down rings and runs about $40 at BestBuy. You can get it for slightly less than that online. SunPak also makes a 2x telephoto lens and a macro lens kit.

There are 4 step-down rings included in the lens kit. I used the 30.5mm ring. Add a small bead of superglue to the bottom of the ring and place it over the Flip lens. I used a superglue pen applicator so it was easier to control the amount of glue. Press and hold the ring firmly for about 30 seconds while the glue sets in.

That is pretty much it. Attach the lens and start shooting wide-angle video. Here is a shot of the Flip with the lens attached.

If you want to see what is possible with the Flip Mino, check out Zack Arias’ video Transform, which was shot with a Flip Mino HD. His blog post about the video is where I first learned about hacking the Mino with these lens kits.

So last night I was pondering Twitter and analytics and asked “how do links in twitter apps show up in analytics reports?”. This was really prompted by something that Sean Kelley mentioned at his SMCBham talk on Tuesday.

Sean was showing off referrer sources in Omniture for Health.com, where he is the senior editor. Twitter was ranked very low, despite the fact that they have over 250,000 followers. He mentioned that he thought that number was rather low, and that Omniture wasn’t updated to handle third-party twitter apps.

So I set up my own test last night. I created a post, shortened the URL, and posted it on Twitter. I also asked whoever followed the link to add a comment with a note about where they saw/clicked on the link. The following screenshot shows the referring sources table for that post in Google Analytics:

Of those who left comments, only two or three said they came from twitter.com. The rest came from a variety of twitter apps, like Tweetie, Twitterific, and TweetDeck.

Most of the third-party app clicks seem to show up as direct referrals – the equivalent of typing the URL into the browser’s address bar manually. There is one referral that showed up as iconfactory.com, so it would be interesting to see how Twitterific is handling links and passing referrals.

So, could this mean that when people look at Twitter stats and think they are low, they are really only seeing half the picture? Are there any tool out there that can track the actual clients that people are using?

I noticed that bit.ly, the service I used to shorten my URL, will show the difference between twitter.com and other apps, but won’t show specific apps – so those clicks could also come from Email or IM clients.

I was recently pondering analytics and twitter. Twitter streams can be viewed from the actual twitter website as well as third-party applications (Tweetie, TweetDeck, Twhirl, Seesmic Desktop, etc).

So how are these apps counted when someone clicks on a link on Twitter, that definitely shows up as the referring link. But what about when someone clicks on a link in a twitter client? Is it still tracked as a referral from Twitter, or is it tracked as a direct link?

So here is a little test. I am going to put a link to this post out on Twitter. If you came here from Twitter or a Twitter client, leave a comment with where you saw this link. I will try to match up the referrals with the sources and maybe get some answers.

Since the release of Leopard, I have loved using the Spaces feature. For those who are unfamiliar with Spaces, it basically creates virtual “desktops” on your Mac, which allows you to organize your application windows for a more clutter-free experience. You can have up to 16, but I just stick with 4.

One thing that is really helpful if you are using Spaces is the option to set applications to load in certain spaces or to have an application available in every space. For instance, I want to be able to see my task manager and chat app, no matter what space I am currently using. I also load my Windows VM to space 2 so that I don’t have to worry about it taking over my current desktop while it loads full screen.

To access these settings, go to System Preferences, then click the Exposé & Spaces icon. Once you are there, You will see the Application Assignments area below the spaces preview. Just click the “+” icon to add an application, the select where you want it to load from the Space column. Here is a screenshot to illustrate.

Once I set up my application prefs for things like Adium, Skitch, and The Hit List, I found myself doing a lot less unnecessary space switching.

We wrapped up our third BarCamp event here in Birmingham recently and I wanted to put down some thoughts on organizing the event. Hopefully it will help out anyone that is planning a similar event in their area.

Last year, BarCampBirmingham came together very quickly. I think we had our initial planning meeting about a month before the event. We were able to secure sponsorship from Google and Microsoft, as well as free space from Innovation Depot and a little bit of money from IPSA. We had about 70 people turn out for the event and it went off great.

This year, we had about a 2 month lead on planning time, having our first meeting at the beginning of March. When we weren’t able to secure sponsorships from Google and Microsoft, we decided to target local technology companies. With the economy in the shape it is in, we knew that we would have better luck getting lots of sponsors at a lower buy-in than trying to lure that 1 big sponsor that would cover everything.

Sponsorships

Sponsors make BarCamp happen. Since BarCampBirmingham is a free event, we rely on the generosity of sponsors to provide stuff like food, meeting space, t-shirts and door prizes to the attendees.

We set our sponsorship buy-in at $200 and started working our connections. TechBirmingham was instrumental in helping us spread the word. We were able to get 15 local companies to buy-in which helped us cover lunch for 100 attendees, t-shirts for everyone, and equipment rental.

In addition to cash sponsorships, we had just as many companies offer in-kind sponsorships. These in-kind sponsorships included meeting facilities, A/V equipment, design and printing services, and advertising.

Registering Attendees

In the past, if you wanted to register for BarCampBirmingham, you had to edit a page on the wiki, adding your name to the end of the list. Some people weren’t comfortable editing a wiki page. We decided to use EventBrite for registration. This worked out great. Since the tickets were free, there was no cost for using the service. We could also easily send email to attendees, print registration lists, and more. We also sold sponsorship tickets, which made it easy for the sponsors to pay us. I think we only had 2 or 3 sponsors that had to pay by check.

Spreading The Word

This year, instead of using the traditional wiki page, we setup a website to spread information. I think this was a good decision. The website was easier to use for people who were not used to interacting with a Wiki, and we were able to do more on the site. For suggesting sessions, we setup a page and opened up comments. People could subscribe to an RSS feed of the site and we could also push updates out to social networks like Facebook and Twitter. This seemed to really help us spread the word.

Pulling It Off

At the end of the day, BarCampBirmingham was a great success. we had almost 150 signed up to attend, and over 100 actually made it out for the event. In addition to a great turnout from the Birmingham area, we had attendees from Montgomery, Huntsville, Atlanta, Nashville, Memphis and Chattanooga make the trip.

If you missed BarCampBirmingham, you can visit the website to see session slides and videos, and signup for future BarCampBirmingham announcements. You can also check out the BarCampBirmingham Vimeo Channel.