Thursday, May 22, 2008

Burlington, VT PHP Users Group Subversion Presentation

See Burlington, VT PHP Users Group Subversion Presentation at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Here is the Subversion presentation I just gave at the Burlington, VT PHP Users Group:

Monday, May 19, 2008

Subversion Presentation at PHP Users Group

See Subversion Presentation at PHP Users Group at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

I'll be doing a presentation on Subversion, an open-source revision control system, at this month's PHP Users Group meeting. The meeting is scheduled for this Thursday, May 22nd from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm at Brown & Jenkins Coffee Roasters. I'll be talking about reasons to use revision control, the benefits of using Subversion specifically, basic revision control concepts, typical workflow, branching, merging, and tagging. Hope to see you there!

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

GTalk Profile Hits 10,000 Profiles

See GTalk Profile Hits 10,000 Profiles at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Back in August of 2005 Google launched its instant messaging platform called Google Talk. One feature that Google did not provide was a way for Google Talk users to connect with other Google Talk users who they didn't already know. Within a week of the Google Talk launch Jason and I had rolled out the first version of GTalk Profile, a website with the purpose of helping Google Talk users connect with other Google Talk users from around the world. Users can search by location and interests and their contact information is kept private unless they choose to share it with another user. Today the 10,000 profiles mark was hit!

Unfortunately Jason and I have been too busy to maintain GTalk Profile the way we would like. We plan to streamline the core experience and there are many new features we'd like to add. The 10,000 profiles mark, while not representative of a huge number of users, is a significant milestone because it shows a real interest in what GTalk Profile has to offer. Our goal is to dedicate more resources to the website and treat it like any other project that a client may come to us with.

One of the great things about Google Talk is that it's built on the open Jabber/XMPP standards (GTalk Profile is actually a website for any Jabber/XMPP user, not just Google Talk users). This means that other organizations using these standards can choose to federate with Google Talk (and amongst themselves). Imagine if you could only send email to people using the same email provider as yourself. This is the current state of instant messaging and the Jabber/XMPP standards, with Google's help, are slowly opening the world of instant messaging. Now if only some of the other major instant messaging players like AOL Instant Messenger, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger were to start using these standards and federating with others like good citizens of the Internet.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Website Launches

See Website Launches at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Recently I talked about the updated Found Line website but we've also been busy with a few other websites!

Microcosm Aquarium Explorer was launched with thousands of pages of content for aquarium enthusiasts. It was built using MediaWiki and the content is written by Microcosm Books and various authors. Information architecture and data entry were greatly enhanced using the Semantic MediaWiki and Semantic Forms extensions. The newsletters are powered by VerticalResponse (we're a VerticalResponse partner) and are integrated with the website using the VerticalResponse API.

NEHP is a Vermont-based company providing "process piping solutions and modularization for the semiconductor, solar and life sciences industries." We've worked with them on several marketing initiatives and recently updated their website. It's fairly basic at the moment, but we're big believers of iterative improvement! One item on the list is integration with the third-party APIs.

CCTV's Center for Media and Democracy had been hard at work getting their new website into the Drupal content management system (CMS). They had some ideas about what they wanted the website to look like but needed someone who was skilled in CSS-based web design to bring this vision to reality. We worked closely with their technology integrator to design the recently updated website.