Maxine of Web Directions North just brought something really unique to my attention, a first timer in our industry. If you are a full time student in the field related to the web industry you better listen up!
As conference organizers, speakers and attendees, Dave, Derek, Maxine and John have long been aware that while a good conference can be an unbeatable benefit for your career, they are definitely out of the price range of those in our industry who might benefit most - students. That's why they introduced scholarship pricing for students. 30 lucky students are able to buy conference seats at $195 (CDN) each.
To qualify you must be a full-time student in a related field (design, computer science, or a specific web development course, for example) and not currently in professional employment. I can image that these babies will be hot so hurry and go to the registration page and enter the following code to receive your special discount: WDNSCH.
Looking forward to meet some new people and old friends in less than a month.
Okay, I've finally had enough of Enetation (that's the company I've been using to manage my blog comments). Over the past year or so it's become very slow, and it's also somewhat of a spam magnet with no real tools to manage the constant comment spam I get.
The past few nights have been spent importing all of my old comments, parsing them out, deleting the spam, and formatting for upload into a MySQL database on the server where I will have to write my own interface. I automated it as much as possible, but it was still a huge pain. I had to write some Java code to download each day's comments individually (many of the days kept timing out or were very slow), then I had some separate code to parse out each day's comments into name, date/time, comment text, etc. and go through to delete the obvious spam by hand. In the end I wound up with almost 2,000 individual comments, which isn't huge by some blogging standards, but it's a lot to look at all at once.
So then I wrote some more code to format all the comments for upload to MySQL and now I'm working on the interface. For now, it's read only and it's mimicking the Enetation template I used. Eventually I think I'll try to build in some of Rob's NSFToolsMonkey Script functionality in too. Anyway it's a stopgap, and something I had the poor judgement to start doing now instead of... say... after Lotusphere.
Since you can't leave me any comments on this at the moment (ah, the irony), I'll answer the obvious question that some of you might have: Why the heck aren't I using a Domino blog template to handle all this?
There are a few answers to this:
So there you go. It'll all be set up soon, and you'll get more blogging and less plumbing. At the very least, I'll be ramping up with a lot of Lotusphere coverage at the end of the month -- see my coverage for Lotusphere 2006, Lotusphere 2005, and Lotusphere 2004 for examples of what to expect.
