SXSW wrap up

Still trying to process my thoughts on this year’s conference. It was great, in a totally different way than last year’s conference. I met so many more folks this year, which was a good thing for me, but was also a lot of work. Last year I focused more on the panels and less on the networking, but still managed to get a ton of inspiration and a few great friends out of it. This year I had many more conversations with many more folks, but most of them were only a few minutes long. We’ll see how many of these turn in to great friendships, but there are a few that I hope will.

The Requisite Namedropping

SXSW 2006

On Friday I am off to SXSW. I am really looking forward to catching up with the folks I met last year, and meeting some new friends. There’s nothing like a place full of hundreds of web geeks to give me a shot of inspiration. I will be at Buffalo Billiards at 6:30 on Saturday for the University Web Developers meetup. You are all invited— come say hi and meet your colleagues in meatspace! Chip Diffendaffer from Denver U. deserves much credit for organizing this get-together. We will then all be moving over to the opening party at 8. I am still figuring out which panels and parties I will be attending, so I won’t bore you by posting them here. Plus, I tend to decide these things on the spur of the moment, and will just end up changing my mind if I try to plan too far in advance. Just make sure you say Hi if you see me. Looking forward to finally meeting some of you all!

Switching Hosts

If you’re reading this, you are seeing the site at the new host. I think everything sould be working fine here. Let me know if you see a problem. This is a test to make sure my feeds are working. Sorry for the interruption. One last test. Sorry.
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Introducing Jangly Ganglia

I have been a bit quiet lately. This is largely because I got a spark of inspiration (sadly a bit rare these days…) and launched a new project over at Jangly Ganglia. Some of you may remember when I spoke about buying the domain on a whim after reading a passage in Cryptonomicon. I sat on the name for several months, and then had a brainstorm last week. I realized I needed a way to stay positive— that no matter what happened in my life, I was focusing only on the negative. This is a function of my biology; I have had depression for about as long as I can remember and have been actively dealing with it for about 5 years. Although I can keep things pretty much under control, I needed something else to remind me that life is not all gloom and doom. Jangly Ganglia stepped in to fill that purpose. Jangly is a blog, where every day I post something positive, funny, wacky, or inspiring that happened to me. It is a way of forcing myself to realize that these kinds of things really do occur for me, and they really do occur every day. The public nature of the blog format keeps me honest— I can’t cheat if I know others are watching. And hopefully it also provides some laughs or inspiration for others that are in the same boat as me. I set up Jangly using ExpressionEngine rather than my beloved Textpattern for a couple of reasons. First EE has more sophisticated membership permissions that TXP. My vision is to make Jangly into a community where anyone that wants to make the committment to themselves to post something positive from their life every day will be able to join the project have the place to do so. Ideally this will turn into a community that is using blogging for something innovative and helpful to their lives. Second EE is having a contest that I have entered in hopes of winning a forum, license, or hosting that will allow me to do the above. Entries will be announced on March 1 and winners March 15, so stay tuned and wish me luck. In the meantime, if you’d like to give the project a try, I am taking submissions over at JG. I will post snippets for you until I get a license that will allow me to add members to post for themselves. So how will this all affect Interllectual? Hopefully it won’t. I will still be posting here— this is the place where I post rants, professional articles, and longer snippets about my life. What I am doing here is completely different from what I’m doing over there. If anything, I’m hoping to write more here as I’m able to deal better with my biology. So, enjoy Jangly Ganglia, and contribute if you’re so inspired. If not, I’ll see you here before long…

Gregarius: The answer to my feed reading issues?

I think I may have finally found a feedreader. I have been maniacally switching readers every couple of days for several months, trying to find one that meets all my needs. Apparently I have a lot of needs. High maintenance, moi? Anyway, sometime during my obsessive googling for feed readers I came across Gregarius, which is

a web-based RSS/RDF/ATOM feed aggregator, designed to run on your web server, allowing you to access your news sources from wherever you want.

• Completely web-based (runs on your web server)
• Simple, password-protected, administration and configuration
• AJAX powered item tagging
• Full-text search
• Committed to web standards: renders XHTML/CSS, supports OPML
• Gregarius is FREE software and is released under the GPL

Portfolio Update: Sustainable Goodness

My latest project has launched: a family of sites for Ag Innovations Network, an organization that works toward real solutions to sustainable agriculture. I can’t express how fun it was to work on this project— I got to learn about an interesting and worthy non-profit, design with luscious photos of food, and push my Textpattern-foo even further. The Ag Innovations Network site highlights the mission and services of the organization, and will contain articles about sustainable ag issues. The Ag Futures Alliance site features a separate section for each county the organization works with, and is built to expand to accommodate up to 15 counties in the future. Each county section has a unique graphic header that features a major agricultural product of the county. Both sites use Textpattern as CMS to allow clients to easily update and maintain the content. Check the sites out if you’re interested in seeing what I’ve been doing in my spare time. A major upgrade of my Portfolio section is in the works— I have launched to many HSU sites in the last year that I have gotten behind in adding them here.