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Calagator documentation sprint this Saturday

Rick Turoczy on September 19, 2008

Portland’s favorite calendar aggregator, Calagator, continues to improve, code sprint after code sprint.

And it’s drawing ever nearer to its 1.0 milestone.

But before Calagator gets there, it’s time for a different kind of sprint, as Audrey Eschright shares:

We’ll be meeting tomorrow starting at 10am at CubeSpace, to kick off the Calagator documentation sprint. I really encourage anyone who has been involved in the development of this project, on any level (including lurking on the mailing list) to stop by, even if you only have an hour or two free. We’ll be working on the Calagator User Guide, and talking about what’s next for the project after we reach our 1.0 milestone.

More details, time, and location for the Calagator documentation sprint can be found, well, on Calagator, of course.

Calagator is an all-volunteer effort to provide a unified calendar for technical communities and user groups in Portland, Oregon. Anyone can contribute information by importing, creating, and editing entries.

For more information, join the mailing list or visit Calagator.

Category: Calagator, Calendar, Documentation, Events, Oregon, Portland, Sprint
Tag: Calagator, Documentation, Oregon, Portland, Sprint

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for September 18

Rick Turoczy on September 18, 2008

Automattic to Preview WordPress 2.7 at WordCamp Portland

Aaron Hockley writes “I’m excited to announce we have a great addition to our lineup of speakers for WordCamp Portland. Jane Wells from Automattic will be offering a look at some of the new features and changes that will be coming in WordPress 2.7.”

SplashCast has Politics

Tom Turnbull writes “The channel is a massive clearing house for some really great political content. Yesterday afternoon, I listened to a series of recent political speeches while working. Without divulging my political leanings (not that I hide them) some of the content fires me up, while some raises my hackles a bit – which is part of the fun of politics, after all.”

An Interview About WordCamp Portland

Aaron Hockley writes “Portland area freelance writer Kerri Buckley interviewed me about the upcoming WordCamp. Since it’s a blogging conference, I suggested the interview be posted on a blog.”

A case study in poor authentication: Palin’s Yahoo! email account

Greg Hughes writes “Vidoop uses a system like this for resetting information on their OpenID accounts. It’s simple and it works. It requires me to have the correct device (my phone), uses a different communication channel (the phone network, hence “out-of-band”) to contact me and then verifies I am a legitimate user. It requires me to interact as part of any change.”

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

Category: Links

Cooking up a Story takes us from Farm to School

Rick Turoczy on September 18, 2008

It’s “using technology for the greater good” day here at Silicon Florist.

First we had the Collective Software Initiative’s TriSano story, and now we’ve got news that Portland’s favorite online show about people, food, and sustainability—Cooking up a Story—is going to be live streaming an interview with Debra Eschmeyer from Farm to School.

What’s Farm to School?

Farm to School brings healthy food from local farms to school children nationwide. These programs connect schools with local farms with the objectives of serving healthy meals in school cafeterias, improving student nutrition, providing health and nutrition education opportunities that will last a lifetime, and supporting local small farmers.

Cool hunh? Sounds a lot better than that freeze-dried salisbury steak and reconstituted mashed potatoes they had when I was a kid.

Tricia over at my OurPDX has joined in the fun with this challenge:

Before the broadcast, I’d like to get a discussion going about the Food to School concept. Personally, I think many of the worlds ills could be solved if people knew where their food came from and how it actually gets to the table. If we as a society could become more connected to the farms and farmers that grow our food, maybe we would make very different choices regarding our eating habits. And, if we REALLY knew how our food was produced, would we still eat it? Ok, don’t answer that.

So take a few minutes out of your lunch hour tomorrow to sit in front of your machine and listen to the interview. It will be held at 12:15 (or so) via UStream.

And if you like, you can join in the conversation, either on OurPDX or at Cooking up a Story.

Category: CookingUpAStory, Farm, Oregon, Portland, School
Tag: cooking up a story, debra eschmeyer, national farm to school network, ourpdx

Collaborative Software Initiative launches TriSano, an open-source means of tracking disease

Rick Turoczy on September 18, 2008

In the world of technology, we complain about having to deal with “viruses” and “infected systems” all of the time. And, as such, we have any number of tools at our disposal for tracking, managing, and eliminating these viruses.

But what about using technology to deal with the impact of disease in the real world?

Portland-based Collaborative Software Initiative may have the answer with its newest effort, TriSano.

TriSano is designed to help communities collect and share disease information within and among communities:

To provide Public Health organizations freedom and choice when tasked with making an applications decision to support their communities. We offer the opportunity to scrap the monolithic development process and custom built solutions traditionally provided through system integrators and traditional software companies. Our suggestion: engage in the power of community building and open source technology to solve complex health technology challenges for the good of public health.

It’s like your own private Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And, Utah already has plans to go live on TriSano.

But Dana Blankenhorn sees TriSano reaching much farther than that:

TriSano is written in Ruby. Rather than building 75 forms, TriSano built a form-builder. The system can be maintained by doctors, regulators, or through TriSano in the form of Software as a Service.

What it means is a faster, flexible, less-expensive system for creating and maintaining infectious disease reports. Utah will train its people first, CSI will seek to roll it out nationwide, and everyone (including you) will reap the benefits.

For all the appreciation I have for cool Web 2.0 tools, they remain—quite often—a frivolous applications of technologies that hold unlimited potential. And that’s why it’s especially exciting to see a local company tapping into that potential for the greater good of humanity.

Collaborative Software Initiative was founded in 2007 by Stuart Cohen, a veteran IT executive and former chief executive officer at the Open Source Development Labs. Cohen has partnered with Evan Bauer, financial services technology veteran and former chief technology officer at Credit Suisse, to bring together like-minded companies to build software applications at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods. The company introduces a market-changing process that applies open source methodologies to building software collaboratively. For more information, visit Collaborative Software Initiative.

Category: CSI, Disease, Health, Healthcare, OpenSource, Oregon, Portland, TriSano
Tag: CDC, Center for Disease Control, collaborative software initiative, infectious disease, open source, public health, TriSano

A Cozy Lunch 2.0 at SplashCast

Rick Turoczy on September 18, 2008

Yesterday’s Lunch 2.0 at SplashCast was nice and cozy. Maybe it was my warning that space was small, the closed guestlist, the slightly incorrect address on the Upcoming event (sorry).

Or maybe people just had other things to do, like work.

Whatever it was, in contrast to the last few Lunches 2.0, only about 70 people filtered in and out of SplashCast’s semi-new offices in the old Merchant Hotel in Old Town. This worked really well for networking, since you could navigate the entire room, bouncing between conversations, and not worry about missing anyone.

As has been typical with Portland Lunch 2.0, Kim Ramage, our host, made a brief introduction to SplashCast and welcomed everyone. Then the networking and nomming began. Unfortunately, Mike Berkley, SplashCast’s CEO and the Lunch 2.0 instigator wasn’t able to attend.

Again, there’s that pesky work thing getting in the way.

Aaron hasn’t posted his photos yet, but I’m sure they will rock, as usual. Check his Lunch 2.0 collection on Flickr if you’re interested.

Mark Colman tweeted several pictures he took, including this one of AJ and Doug in the midst of what looks like an interesting conversation about the finer points of the iPhone’s keypad.

Thanks to Kim, Mike and the whole SplashCast team for opening their digs to us.

Yearning for more? No worries about space in the next few venues, the Art Institute of Portland (October 15) and the Eclipse Foundation (November 5). In fact, they’re both large, so bring your friends and colleagues.

Better yet, if you can find uninitiated Lunch 2.0 people, bring them along to spread the goodness.

Category: Events, Lunch2.0, Portland, SplashCast
Tag: Events, lunch, Lunch2.0, Oregon, Portland, SplashCast

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for September 17

Rick Turoczy on September 17, 2008

WordCamp Portland: How About a Session On (insert topic here)?

Via the WordCamp Portland blog “Do you have a WordPress topic on your mind? Have you looked at our list of speakers and sessions and thought ‘that’s great, but what about ________?’ You’re the perfect person to suggest a topic for an unconference session!”

Tracking software’s growth – Silicon Forest – The Oregonian – OregonLive.com

Mike Rogoway writes “With old-line chip companies on a seemingly intractable decline, and software on the upswing, software now represents a greater share of Oregon’s high-tech economy than at any time in the state’s history: Roughly 1 in 6 Oregon tech jobs are now in software, up from 1 in 25 in 1990.”

Maintaining a Successful Corporate Community

Dawn Foster writes “Apparently, this is corporate community week on the Fast Wonder Blog. I decided to follow up my post on Monday about Custom Corporate Communities: Planning and Getting Started with this post containing tips about what to do and what to avoid doing if you want to have a successful corporate community. While some of these tips are specific to corporate communities, most of them also apply to other types of communities as well.”

Strands Get Win At DollarDays

Via Northwest Innovation “Corvallis, Oregon-based Strands, which provides social recommendation software, said Tuesday that the firm has been selected by DollarDays International to power personalized product recommendation on its website.”

Techcraver.com | Craving tech, craving life! » Blog Archive » Nokia Legends Campaign Now Live

Jason Harris writes “Nokia Legends, the ad campaign I was involved in last month will go live today. The campaign centers around 8 stories told by actor Ron McLarty (of Sex In The City and Law and Oder fame). The urban legends, as they are called, highlight innovations that are coming out in the near future, a few years from now, or are just perhaps a very lucrative research project.”

Legion of Tech Happy Hour Meetup at Green Dragon Bistro & Brewpub (Thursday September 25, 2008) – Upcoming

These are super informal meetups where we hang out, talk about geeky stuff (wikis, open source, new technologies, openid, …), and wind down with like-minded people over beverages.

Neighborhood Notes Providing News and Events in Portland

Via the TeachStreet blog “Are you in the Portland area and don’t know whats going on in your neighborhoods? Check out your one stop shop for all of your news and events needs at Neighborhood Notes. They’ve created an amazing space where communities can communicate and connect with one another about Portland events and local neighborhood news.”

Show Your Best on ORBlogs | Oregon Blogs

Via the Oregon Blogs blog “All your images are belong to us! Oregon Blogs is looking for images to feature on its front page and banner slots. We’re generating a collection of random images to show on the front page, and three banner images to show on the front, article and archive pages of the Oregon Blogs Blog (that long, narrow image at the top of the page).”

A Character Length Comparison Of Various URL Shortening Services « Link En Fuego

Bram Pitoyo writes “When you want to utilize every bit of that 140-character Tweet limit to communicate your latest find or endeavor, every character matters. So I thought I’d compile a character count of most URL shortening services out there and give you a round, hard number of just how short did the developer mean when he said ‘short’?”

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

Category: Links

80+ WordPress designs from Portland and the Silicon Forest

Rick Turoczy on September 17, 2008

[HTML1]With WordCamp Portland fast approaching, I’ve had any number of folks approaching me with questions like “What’s WordPress?”, “Why should I use WordPress?”, “What can I do with WordPress?”, and “When will you shut up with the questions already? I mean, really?”

So rather than try to recount all my WordPress love in one egotistical post, I thought it might better for a little more “show” than “tell.”

So here—in a rough semblance of alphabetical order—are what some other folks in Portland and the Silicon Forest are doing with that magical open-source blogging platform, WordPress:

Whew! That’s a lot of WordPress going on.

If I missed your site (or screwed up your URL), I apologize. Please link it up below so that everyone else see the cool things you’re doing with WordPress.

Category: Design, Oregon, Portland, SiliconForest, WordCamp, Wordpress
Tag: Design, Portland, silicon forest, WordCamp, wordcamp portland, Wordpress

Portland startups—and other Silicon Forest startups—defy the Oregon tech slump

Rick Turoczy on September 16, 2008

I was just going to link to this. And then I thought better of it.

“A link?” I thought. “This is traditional media taking notice and giving credit where credit is due. This needs more than a link.”

So, I give you this piece from my former college classmate, Mike Rogoway over at The Oregonian entitled “Oregon losing high-tech jobs—with more bad news to come.”

A steady drumbeat of cutbacks in Oregon’s high-tech sector has reduced the number of technology jobs in the state to its lowest point in nearly three years.

Wait a second. Where’s the positivity? Where’s the “credit where credit is due”?

Well, that comes at the end of the article. From which I’ll judiciously quote (passage emphasis is mine, not Mike’s):

Oregon’s tech industry has one distinct bright spot: software.

Long the weakest link in Oregon’s technology economy, software has emerged strongly over the past few years—spurred by a vibrant community of open source software developers and Web services companies that require little investment capital to get started.

Software jobs are up 12 percent during the past two years, and now number 9,500. Although still a relatively tiny part of the overall state economy—which numbers more than 1.7 million jobs altogether—software is the fastest growing part of the high-tech sector and one of a small number of industries that is defying the broader economic slowdown.

Much of the activity is concentrated in Portland’s Old Town, home to a cluster of companies that develop software for the Internet. Examples include password-protection technology from Oklahoma transplant Vidoop, and collaboration tools from Jive Software.

“We’re just this wonderful hotbed of open source, brew-your-own-softwareville,” said Harvey Mathews of the Software Association of Oregon. “It’s a tight community, so we all help each other out. Which isn’t the case in lots of other industries.”

Can I get a “w00t!!!1!”? This is exactly the kind of thing we want to see. The kind of recognition you deserve. And the reason I continue to relentlessly document all the cool things you’re doing.

You’re making it happen. And you’re blowing the curve.

And for that, you need to congratulate yourselves, Portland and Silicon Forest startups. You deserve it.

Keep up the good work. Stay focused. And keep working to on that code.

I’ll be sure to let everyone else know: they ain’t seen nothing yet.

Category: Oregon, Oregonian, Portland, SiliconForest, springstage, Startups
Tag: Oregon, Oregonian, Portland, silicon forest, slump, springstage, Startups, tech

Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for September 16

Rick Turoczy on September 16, 2008

ORBlogs 2.0: The State of the State

John Metta writes “Seems like half the state is clamoring for an update on the ORBlogs progress (well, four or five people were asking about it, anyway). Here it is, a line-item review of our progress so far- living proof that the lazy bastids at ORBlogs would rather sleep away their nights than give you satisfaction!”

Central Oregon Web Professionals Usergroup: October Meeting

Via the COWPU blog “Everything boils down to three things when you are building a successful web site. We’ll review the meat behind the brand, search and content balance to help position your site for ultimate visibility and conversions. Once you have these tools in hand, you’ll have some helpful tips to determining which company and which system to work with. From choosing a CMS to working with a design firm/agency, the balance is the key.”

Mamapreneur Conference in Portland next week

Via the TeachStreet blog “I was just poking around on Portland-based site, MomHub. Even though I don’t have kids, it’s a great site. (Oh, they’re also building a DadHub, too.) It’s similar in mission and functionality to what our friends at ParentMap (Seattle-based) are doing. They’ve got all sorts of great local listings for family-friendly activities in Portland and lots of groups you can join to connect with similar parents in your very own neighborhood.”

Seven Social Media Consultants That Deliver Tangible Value – ReadWriteWeb

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes “Dawn Foster is a relatively new entrant into the consulting world but her blog Fast Wonder is already pumping out the usable information and tools.”

Lighthouse upgrade delays

Via ENTP “After bringing Lighthouse back online, we immediately noticed two crucial bugs in the system, which affected user invites and email notifications. Fixes for those bugs were promptly deployed to Lighthouse before traffic picked back up.”

wp-openid – faster, stronger, better

Will Norris (creator of wp-openid, the WordPress plugin many folks use to manage OpenID logins on their blogs) writes “One of the primary focuses for this next major release of wp-openid is stability. While most people have had great success with the plugin, there are a fair number that seem to have all kinds of strange problems, ranging from conflicts with other plugins, data corruption, library issues, etc. In order to reach the level of adoption I’d love to see, we have to make this plugin as easy to install and run as WordPress itself. This is certainly no easy task, but we’ve come a very long way.”

View all my bookmarks on Ma.gnolia

Category: Links

Strands continues to improve by listening to its users

Rick Turoczy on September 16, 2008

When Corvallis-based Strands released their new lifestreaming service a few months back, I found it friendlier than FriendFeed, but not without its share of faults.

To its credit, the Strands team was open to criticism—taking its detractors head-on—and, as such, they continued to elicit tons of valuable feedback on ways to improve the service.

Now, you get the chance to see some of those improvements with the latest release of Strands.

Gone are the dark and constrained streams of information. Now, they’re open, legible, and much more inviting.

Strands new interface

It’s definitely a marked improvement. And one that will likely draw me back into a more participatory role. As opposed to my current use: allowing Strands to churn along—ignored in the background as it works at capturing my lifestream.

This update makes me want to get back into the fray. Because, now, it seems so much more usable.

And I’m not the only one.

Prominent blogger and FriendFeed proponent Louis Gray highlights the progress Strands has made, too:

While it hasn’t yet gotten the buzz of some other social aggregators and lifestreaming projects, Strands is quietly going about making a product on par with the market leaders, letting the community find new content and people, and enabling micro-conversations.

I couldn’t be happier to see Strands getting these kinds of strokes.

If you’re a current Strands user (and I know a ton of you in Portland and Corvallis are), I’d highly recommend heading back over to Strands to give it a second look.

If you’re interested in trying Strands, comment below and I’ll be happy to get you an invite. I’ve got about 13 left. First come, first served.

Category: Corvallis, Features, friendfeed, Oregon, springstage, Strands
Tag: Corvallis, friendfeed, louis gray, Oregon, springstage, Strands