Hey check it out, this is my 100th post. I am pretty excited about this milestone. In light of my 100th post I wanted to put together a quick post to say Thank You to everyone. If you have ever posted a comment, subscribe to my RSS feed, or clicked one of my advertisements, thank you. This is purely a hobby for me, so when I receive a comment from one of my readers, it really means a lot to me. In the coming weeks, I am going to really work to increase my posts per month average, so if you don’t subscribe to my RSS feed already, now is a great time to do so. Thanks again everyone for supporting ATLChris.com up to this point and I hope you will stay around and get more involved as ATLChris.com evolves.

What’s New at ATLChris.com

As many of you know, for the past year, I have been a huge fan and supporter of the Disqus commenting system. The main reason I started using Disqus because I technically didn’t know how to code a kick-ass commenting setup via Wordpress. Well, now that I am professionally developing Wordpress premium themes, I have grown my knowledge of the Wordpress code base, and decided to take it on myself to develop my own custom Wordpress powered comment setup. Well, I am proud to premier my 100% custom Wordpress comment setup TODAY! I hope you all like it. The new comment setup offers threaded replying and jQuery & cookie supported UI interactivity. You can now hide the comment form, the comments themselves, and the trackbacks and pingbacks individually. ATLChris.com will remember what components are show and which are hidden when you return to the site in the future.

One hiccup I have with the new comment setup, is that threading will not display on comments made prior to today. This issue is the result of importing the Disqus comments from the past year in to the Wordpress database. I wish Disqus would offer better exporting tools, but they don’t because they don’t want to make it easy for you to leave. Moving forward though, threading is fully supported!

I just received an email from Andrew Kippen, a representative for Boxee who wanted to publicly respond to NBC CEO Jeff Zucker and his comments to the US Congress concerning the rocky Hulu & Boxee past. Jeff Zucker was recently on C-SPAN discussing the Comcast & NBC merger, when Virginia Rep. Congressman, Rick Boucher, asked “Did Hulu Block Access for the Boxee users to the Hulu programs?” Mr. Zucker explained that Boxee had illegally taken the Hulu content without any business deal. He went on to explain that Hulu had always been open to making a content deal with Boxee. You can view the full C-SPAN footage here: C-SPANArchives.org.

Andrew Kippen, a representative of Boxee sent out a press release with some statements to clarify the remarks Mr. Zucker made on C-SPAN. Andrew’s remarks are below.

I’d like to set the record straight regarding Boxee’s access to Hulu. Boxee uses a web browser to access Hulu’s content – just like Firefox or Internet Explorer. Boxee users click on a link to Hulu’s website and the video within that page plays. We don’t “take” the video. We don’t copy it. We don’t put ads on top of it. The video and the ads play like they do on other browsers or on Hulu Desktop. And it certainly is legal to do so.

Above, Mr. Zucker says the original decision was made by Hulu’s management. That is correct, but as Jason Kilar (Hulu’s CEO) wrote in his post, the request came from NBC. “Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes.”

…

Mr. Zucker says they always said they are open to negotiations. That has not been our experience, but at this point, we will take Mr. Zucker’s offer at face value and will contact him. We are eager to work with both Comcast and NBCU to bring more content on more devices to our users. We believe the Internet represents a great opportunity for content owners and we hope that current artificial barriers put on distribution over the Internet will be taken down.

I can personally vouch for what Andrew said above, Boxee did nothing more than link directly to the Hulu content, including the ads. While it was originally removed, the new Boxee beta has brought back Hulu content. The new method of displaying Hulu content is nothing more than the ingenious use of an internal browser and automatic full screening.

Just a quick note, to let you all know that my second premium Wordpress theme, Simply Business, is now on sale at ThemeForest.net. This theme was designed for small to medium size businesses that would like to have full control over their website, and a professional design, with out the need for an expensive web developer.

First off, I have received a couple of request from some people to keep my reviews short, so this one will be my test short review. I will provide links to more detailed reviews below if you would like to explore it further. Also, please leave comments to let me know if you like the new short style or prefer the old long reviews.

I recently had a chance to review the Kodak Zi8 ($179.00 on Amazon) high definition pocket video camera. This camera falls in the same category as the Flip Ultra and Mino HD cameras, which is what I currently own. I was particularly excited to review this camera as it is something I have been in the wall about buying for some time. I currently own a SD Flip Mino, and am ready to upgrade to HD!

Features

The Zi8 boast a wide range of features, some of them are very common in other pocket cameras, and some of them aren’t! The Zi8 offers 5 different capture modes, 1080p, 720p at 60 f/s, 720p at 30 f/s, WVGA, Still Image. All video is shot in a 16:9 widescreen HD format and still images are taken in a 5 MP format. The Zi8 features a 2.5 color LCD, swivel out USB arm, SD/SDHC slot, and external microphone jack, HDMI output, built-in image stabilization and a micro/macro view switch.