Since the Zune 4 software was released, I have been using it fairly exclusively as my media player when using Windows. I really enjoy using the software, and I like the way it tracks and shares my recent plays. In the spirit of Xbox “achievements,” the Zune social system even issues “badges” once you’ve listened to a specific artist enough times.

Unfortunately, however, the Zune software is only available for Windows, and I use Linux about 99% of the time on my home computer. I do, however, have Windows XP installed as a VirtualBox guest so I can use Windows programs like Photoshop, Internet Explorer 6 (for Web development testing), etc. I thought it would be simple to use the Zune software inside of that VirtualBox. I was wrong.

Apparently, the Zune software will not recognize media files stored in a VirtualBox shared folder. When you attempt to play the files, you will most likely receive an error stating that the file couldn’t be played, and that it might have been moved.

Among the Twitter clients I occasionally use, Seesmic Desktop is the first to add support for Twitter lists. At this time, the lists feature is only available to those that are subscribed the Seesmic mailing list, but the are available and appear to be working. I suspect it won’t be long before we see the public release of this version of Seesmic.

Hopefully we’ll start seeing some of the other popular Twitter clients for desktops and mobile phones begin to release versions that support Twitter lists. On the other hand, I have to admit that I don’t yet understand all of the hype over Twitter lists.

For those of you that may not have noticed, yet, WordPress MU has updated to version 2.8.5. Recently, WordPress MU has been making great progress in following closely behind WordPress in its release schedule. If you are running WordPress MU on your site, please make sure to upgrade to the new version.

With WordPress MU, you can easily login to your administrative control panel and update all of your blogs with a few simple clicks of the mouse. Once you login, you’ll see a notification at the top of the screen informing you that WordPress MU 2.8.5.2 is available, along with a link to update your installation.

Once you have backed up your WPMU database and all of your WPMU files, you can simply click “Upgrade Automatically” button to quickly and easily update your WPMU installation.

Everytime blog software provider WordPress launches a new version, there’s always talk that people are afraid to upgrade because of compatibility issues with the plugins they use. Most worry that their WordPress installation will break after the upgrade.

WordPress security guru Mark Jaquith has posted on the WordPress blog about a new “plugin compatibility tester”. Mark notes, “As part of our continuing efforts to make WordPress core, plugin, and theme upgrades as painless as possible, Michael Adams developed and launched a beta of a new “Compatibility” feature in the plugin directory, powered by your votes. When viewing a plugin in the directory, select a WordPress version and a plugin version from the drop-downs. If there has been feedback about this WordPress / plugin version combination, we’ll show you what percentage of responses marked that combination as compatible vs how many marked it as incompatible.”

The information from the voting is also included in the WordPress API. Now the key is getting enough people to vote to make the responses accurate. Perhaps if they add the voting mechanism into the plugin page inside of the WordPress install, that might help get more people to vote.

Brizzly, a really nice Web-based Twitter client, integrated Facebook into its interface today. Now, in addition to being able to manage multiple Twitter accounts (I currently have three), you can add your Facebook account to the application.

Within Brizzly, you can watch your news feed and your wall. What’s really nice, though, is that Brizzly also allows you to keep track of your recent activity on Facebook. I don’t know about you, but a lot of times, when I comment on someone’s wall post or status update on Facebook, by the time they see it and reply, it’s disappeared from my news feed so I have trouble finding it again. With Brizzly’s new interface, finding that conversation is just a click away.

If you haven’t tried Brizzly yet, I do have a handful of invitations available for those that are interested. Just leave a comment here and I’ll send the invitation to the e-mail address you use with your comment.

Amid much conversation about whether or not Friendfeed has a future and how it’s supposedly being abandoned in droves, I’ve experienced the first major failure of the service since I started using it (thanks to @holdenpage) a few months ago. The service has been down for at least 30 minutes at the time of writing this post. Despite Paul Buchheit (one of the creators of Friendfeed) posting about server upgrades and potential updates over the last few weeks, attempting to load Friendfeed results in a standard timeout error.

I can’t help but wonder if this outage has anything to do with the fact that some Friendfeed features were unveiled on Facebook earlier this week (the new “Live Feed”). I’m hoping it’s just a random outage, but am not holding my breath. I have come to love and appreciate the community over at Friendfeed, and would hate to see the service die such an unceremonious death.

Here’s to Friendfeed, and hoping it comes back soon. Until then, I guess I’ll have to find something in real life to keep me occupied.

Today marked the end of an era, as Yahoo! finally put the classic free host Geocities out of its misery. Although Geocities has become the butt of many an Internet-related joke over the years, I guarantee that the world would be a very different place today had Geocities never existed. First of all, many Web developers and designers got their start with one of the free sites offered by Geocities. In addition, I’m almost certain that sites like MySpace (and, as a result, Facebook) would have never been conceived had the idea not begun with Geocities.

I hopped on the Geocities bandwagon shortly after it began back in 1994 (I might have joined in 95, but I know it was still the early days of the service). They offered a great jumping off point for anyone interested in learning HTML. For the time, they offered fantastic free hosting (complete with the ability to run certain CGI scripts) and had some amazing tutorials and tools available to help put together your own Web site.

A new way to connect to your databased launched late last year. Named SQL Buddy, the software was downloaded over 20,000 times when the developer reported on the stats back in January. While PhpMyAdmin works well, it does feel a lot like 1985. SQL Buddy appears to be a more Web 2.0, Ajax-friendly version.

I use Navicat which is super powerful but runs as a local client only. SQL Buddy runs on your server which means it can be accessed from anywhere. SQL Buddy is free and is distributed under an open source MIT-style license.

I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight a Web site I’ve been enjoying for the last few months. Nick DeNardis recently celebrated the one year anniversary of his video blog series “eduCheckup.” A few times a week, Nick visits a site that’s either been suggested by his users or that he’s found on eduStyle, and then reviews that site with a unique outside perspective. He evaluates the visual appeal, the quality and accessibility of information and the quality of the source code. He then averages the scores he’s given in each category and provides a letter grade (like you’d get in school) for the overall presentation.

A few days ago, I saw a post on Smashing Magazine outlining ten tips to give your WordPress blog a little more personality. While most of the tips don’t really apply to the blogs on which I’m currently working, tip number two piqued my interest.

Tip number two explains how to display a list of “related posts” at the bottom of each post, and tells you how to add icons to each of those related posts. Unfortunately, when I attempted to implement the tip on one of my WordPress MU blogs, I found that it didn’t work for a few reasons.

1. The tip uses a meta element called “post-img” which, as I’ve found since attempting to implement the tip, isn’t a standard WordPress element.
2. TimThumb doesn’t work with WordPress MU out-of-the-box.

So, I set out trying to figure out how I should implement the tip. Following are the results of my tinkering.