HighEdWebDev – Best of Track! Published October 25, 2006
Our Ruby on Rails presentation won best of track! We present twice more in a few minutes, and then we’re going home!
Blog
My blog. Personal thoughts, anecdotes, and musings.
HighEdWebDev – Museum Excursion Published October 25, 2006
The planetarium and science museum trip was awesome. After the day’s events were done, we were picked up by school buses and taken to the museum. Each floor of the three-story museum featured tables with food and an open bar, and we had the whole museum to ourselves. There were some incredible exhibits and I did take pictures but I’m still uploading them to Flickr. I also have a pretty cool video clip of the dinosaur robots.
HighEdWebDev – Day Two (continued) Published October 24, 2006
This conference is awesome. The presentations on Fair Use and application security were well worth my time. Dale Grady, presenter for the application security presentation, has developed a great code scanner that can pinpoint possible vulnerabilities in code so that it won’t be deployed. I’m really interested in developing something like this for UW-Eau Claire so if anyone wants to collaborate with me, I’d love the help. We’re getting ready to head out to the science museum and planetarium, I’ll take lots of pictures although I don’t know how well that would work out.
HighEdWebDev – Day Two Published October 24, 2006
I’m writing this on my WordPress blog while sitting in a great presentation about WordPress. I started out the morning watching a really well-done presentation on optimizing pages for search engines. The presenter made some excellent points and I’ll be changing how I do some of my optimization from now on. This presentation is great. It has confirmed the things I already knew and has taught me some things as well, such as the search engine on this site is only good for searching posts and not pages.
HighEdWebDev – Day One Published October 24, 2006
The first day was great. Some of the big things of the day were Shooting and producing videos using Vegas Video and Flash Our Ruby on Rails presenation Giving effective presentations A great presentation on the FieldSet Really good presentation about Apache configuration. After the conference, several of us traveled to Dinosaur BBQ and had a ton of food. We had to wait about 90 minutes for a table but in the end it was well worth the wait.
HighEdWebDev – Our presentation Published October 23, 2006
Our presentation went very well. We had a packed room of over 50 people. I’ve been getting lots of interesting questions and i’ve been doing my best to answer as many as possible. I’m not sure how much I’ll get to write during the conference but I’ll try to keep up because there are lots of neat things going on.
HighEdWebDev – Fieldset Published October 23, 2006
Just saw a great presentation about using Fieldsets to semantically mark up web forms. The examples I saw were so much nicer than table-based or list-based forms. I’d recommend looking into this further. I know I will.
Awful flying experience Published October 22, 2006
I hate flying. The trip started off with a long wait at the Chippewa Valley Regional Airport where I checked my luggage and waited for security. Our plane came in and I immediately noticed that it was one of those propeller-driven planes from the 60s which had been demoted to a shuttle. That didn’t give me a good feeling. I felt even worse at security. I removed my shoes, laptop, cell phone, and PDA, only to have the metal clip from my leather PDA case set off the metal detector.
HighEdWebDev – Preparation Published October 19, 2006
Lillian and I are presenting at HighEdWebDev this year about Ruby on Rails and how developers can use it to be more productive. I’m hoping for a good turnout so I can generate more interest. It’s neat to see how far the community has come in the last year. There are well over 200 unofficial plugins for the framework that people can use. There are tons of new books coming out, and I am seeing developers do some really amazing <a target="_blank href=“http://www.
Book progress Published October 19, 2006
I’ve been busy working on the book. I’ve got about four chapters done and the rest all mapped out. It’s a really interesting process that will take longer than I had expected. Pragmatic Bookshelf has a really neat production system; I get to see how my book will look as I write it. The most difficult part of this whole process is just finding the time to write. I’m hoping to make some progress over the next two weeks.