At the recent Nercomp annual conference I was part of a group to attendees tweeting the conference.  It was an interesting experience and a good experiment.  I picked up a couple of good points in following the stream of tweets.  And it was a handy way to get references to websites and other references mentioned in the sessions.  I saw a couple of comments from non-attendees who were following too.  And as a ‘tweeter’ it didn’t interfere too much with my attention to the sessions I was attending.  But it was a bit of a hassle getting it all set up.  Following the hashtag itself can be a bit of a trick, and not always accurate.  In our case the first hashtag we chose was also being used by a group in North Carolina. So we changed it to #nc-2010 which worked, but the hyphen ended up making some of the twitter clients a little cranky.   I thought following the other official conference tweeters would be helpful, but then I got all their non-conference tweets too. The worst part is my normal Twitter followers were bombarded with a much higher tweet volume than normal, and a lot of it of little interest to them.

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A new open source project from FaceBook, HipHop for PHP, could bring big improvements for PHP developers.  From the description on Facebook’s Developers site HipHop for PHP will translate PHP code into C++, reducing cpu usage by as much at 50%.  And for a big site like FaceBook, written in PHP, this is a pretty significant improvement.  The ease of writing in PHP, with the performance benefits of C++ — sounds like a great combination.  There is nothing except an announcement so far, but expect more very soon.

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I am still slowly working through the videos I shot during the WordCamp NYC 2009 event.  This was the very first presentation I attended that day entitled “Building Community with BuddyPress” by Lisa Sabin Wilson.  It is a great presentation and she nicely runs through all the major features of this powerful set of WordPress plug-ins.

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The Google Wave team makes some conference visits, aiming at corporations at Enterprise 2.0and the educational market at Educause. Google seems to have created a cool tool, and is now trying to figure out what it is good for.  It will be interesting to see if it changes much as it comes out in a more general release.

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The program is finished and posted for the WordPress University workshop, scheduled for Thursday April 8, 2010.  It is a really exciting program: Read the rest of this entry »

I want to like Drupal, but despite a fair amount of effort I haven’t been able to get over its shortcomings.  Four years ago we had a need to create a web-driven resource library serving dialect training mp3s to students.  I did some research and found a really great model powered by Drupal.  I’d heard a bit about the system, and after researching it sounded like a good fit for our needs.  But as I started digging into a test implementation I found myself feeling a little overwhelmed, so I hired a consultant to serve as a technical resource.  We continued that relationship over the course of 2 months, with weekly phone conferences which were really training/technical consultation calls.  I got the application up and running, and even expanded its functionality over the last year with the help of a really dedicated student worker.  Now I’ve done a fair amount of PHP work, and extensive work with other open source systems like WordPress — and this student worker also had a really strong PHP background.  Neither of us ever got to the point of really liking Drupal, or feeling like we wanted apply it to any other projects.  Why?

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