My first online community effort happened in 1994. I didn’t have a vision or understand what I was doing. It was low tech and attracted a small population, but it filled a need so it sustained for several years. Back then, building an online community was actually rather easy. In 2007, I was hired by… Read more »
Category: Career
Kitchen Sponge Best Practices
I’m frequently unpleasantly surprised by the standard kitchen sponge practices I observe in many many kitchens. I’ve often observed risky practices at the homes of friends and family. However, more recently, I’ve witnessed these frightful practices in the office kitchen. I’ve seen poorly rinsed sponges left sitting in the bottom of a grime filled sink… Read more »
You’re A Social Media What?
I’ve struggled with some job titles in the past. Occasionally I would be filling a new role that related to some emerging tech and have the challenge of trying to tell people what I was doing in as few words as possible. About the time I would finally settle on something I thought fit, I… Read more »
A New Virtual Community: DallasSnowboarders.com
There’s nothing particularly unique about the virtual community I helped launch recently. The community is for the small but quickly growing group of snowboarding enthusiasts in the Dallas area. Thus, the site is appropriately called Dallas Snowboarders. Here’s our banner: As I said, there’s not much unique about it. We used PHPBB as our forum… Read more »
My First Community: Fantasy Origin
I’ve always loved video games. My first non-pen-and-paper RPG was Dragon Warrior for the NES. I got it free with my subscription to Nintendo Power – so it was long after the game was originally published. My next RPG was a step up – Final Fantasy II (us) for the SNES. I loved the genre… Read more »
Could I run a company on open source?
Here’s an overview of my evening. I booted my Inspiron 630m up in Ubuntu. I activated my bluetooth mouse and then connected my Z22 via USB and synched it with Evolution. I logged in to gAIM and started working on a biz plan with Open Office. I got to thinking about the logo I put… Read more »
Why to NEVER spam! – A Lesson From a 2001 Startup
What We Did Near the end of the first bubble, I joined a cool idea for a startup company. We had a subscription based product to sell online and I was hired as the Director of Web Development. I was stoked; but it didn’t take things long to fall apart. Even if the bubble hadn’t… Read more »
Dr Wikilove, Or Wow I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The PMWiki (1964)
The Wiki I remember reading about the wiki so many years ago (mid 90s?). I wish my college Technical Writing classes would have included them. Wiki would have made the class far more interesting to those of us that were also CS majors, which accounted for a good 80%. Only in recent times have I… Read more »
Isogame – The Virtual World Based Forum Interface Experiment
Several months ago, I started a project I called Isogame. Using bits of programmer art, art from old projects, and art borrowed from google images (apologies to artists) – I built a very basic isometric map with an html interface. Using some custom forum software I’d developed for another project, I connect each tile to… Read more »
HTML Based Forms… and how they suck…
This is a rant… I hate HTML based forms. Since I started scrapping together bits of html a decade ago, forms have not significantly changed. They are still the same clunky limited user feedback interface they have always been. We’re building 2K5 website with the exact same level of technology we had in 1995. The… Read more »