JITC Call For Speakers

We are in the process of lining up speakers for the rest of the year for the Jacksonville Information Technology Council. If you are interested shoot me an email an email with your information and an outline of the topic you would like to cover. Topics should be relevant to technology managers and directors as this is the target audience.

The JITC meets the last Tuesday morning of each month at the downtown FCCJ Technology campus. More information is available here.

SQL Saturday Tampa

I made it down to SQL Saturday in Tampa yesterday. It was a great event. Kudos to the event organizers. Brian Knight gave a great presentation on performance tuning SSIS. You can download the slide deck from his site Pragmatic Works.com. Bayer White also gave a great presentation on persisting and tracking workflows using SQL server. I'm not sure if his slides are up but check his blog.

If you missed out be sure to put SQL Saturday Jacksonville on your calendar for 5/3/2008 at the downtown library. For more info check the SQL Saturday website.

Solution to Scribe Fire Bug with Blogger

I've starting using ScribeFire for blogging and so far I like it except for a small glitch I came across in setting it up. I am currently using Blogger to host my blog. When I installed the ScribeFire add-on and tried to utilize the wizard to set up my account I followed all the steps in the wizard with automatic set up. ScribeFire said it set up and completed a test login successfully. However, when I typed up my first post in ScribeFire and hit the "Publish to Adam Lowe's Blog" button I received an error. After searching the web and not being able to find a solution to my issue or another blogger with the same problem I decided to have a run at the manual configuration option. After following the manual configuration and inputting only a few extra pieces of information compared to the automatic configuration I was up and running.

The difference came down to the URL ScribeFire uses for posting to your blog. If you go through the Automatic Set Up it will give you the following URL that generates the error:

http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

After following the Manual Set Up ScribeFire generates the following functional URL:

http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/full

The shortest road to functionality is to go through the Automatic Set Up and change the URL at the end of set up before you initiate your first test login.

Website: Square One Skate Shop Site Project Update 1

I built the news section for the Square One Skate Shop site using the Word Press blog engine and integrated it with the flat html site. I'm still debating on whether or not to use it as a content management system for the entire site. That will depend on how well it integrates with the e-commerce package we utilize and a few test runs on how user friendly it turns out to be for non-technical users. Right now I am looking at the store template, Quick Shopping Cart that comes with Godaddy's web host package. It's a fairly no frills package but I think with a little dressing up it could look solid.

Another great addition I picked up for syndicating the RSS news feed to the other pages on the site is a php script from Feedforall.com. It was relatively painless to set up and gave me a few options for adding the news feed updates to a small section of every page on the website. It can also be used on other sites if given permission to syndicate content.

Next I set up a Facebook page and posted the new site and some content on the existing Ghive and Myspace
accounts. The Facebook account is great because there are a number of RSS reader mini applications you can install on the page that pull the updates to the page itself and will also push them out to the home page of anyone that is a registered fan. I'm still working on a way to syndicate content to other sites like Ghive, Myspace, Zoominfo etc that do not offer an RSS reader program and have restrictions on the types of html and scripts that you are allowed to use on your page.

So far this project is going great. Once the site is fully operational with the news, gallery, and e-commerce portions I will post a comprehensive overview of all the tools and technology that I've leveraged. There are a lot of resources out there that enable building professional, functional websites without having to break the bank if you have a little bit of tech knowledge, a desire to learn, and a strong initiative.

Website: Square One Skate Shop Project Kick Off

I've been out of the web design game for a while now, but they guys over at Square One Skate Shop decided to let me have a swing at building their website. Everyone don't jump up at once and tell them what a horrible investment their making. However, any input or suggestions will be much appreciated. Check the site out and let me know your thoughts. Hoping to have the news section up and running the next couple weeks. Shooting to have the store and gallery live inside of 8 weeks.

www.squareoneskateshop.com

I designed the site with a basic layout template I snagged for free here, used Bluefish editor on Ubuntu and will most likely leverage WordPress for the CMS on the New section.