Syndicate and Hague

I am currently aglow and in awe of what we accomplished yesterday. MinneWebCon wound up being a conference beyond the dreams of those of us who started gathering last fall and geeking out over our shared desire to have a conference that addressed the needs of those of us who are craftsmen (ty to Eric Meyer for that usage) of the Web. (And craftswomen. Craftspeople. Craftsgeeks.)

I had a great time in the sessions I attended and am craving the podcasts of the social networking and microformats sessions that I missed. This first conference reaffirmed my belief that the University is full of smart, talented, dedicated people who are leading in their various areas–and that people from outside the U would want to hear us and others talk about these things. It means that the things we’re interested in are the things others are interested in.

Honestly, the number of non-U people in attendance was humbling and mind-boggling to me (I believe it was 1/3).

Also, I had a great time presenting–but I dig getting up in front of people and doing my thing. It’s fun for me.

Anyway, thanks to everyone for coming–thanks to those I met in person and those who were twittering (tweeting? I’m new to that. I’ve caved. I was trying to avoid it.) with all the #minnewebcon stuff.

Hopefully next year will be better–considering none of us had put on a conference before, I think we did damn well. Or, rather, we were fucking awesome. But I’m not prone to hyperbole or anything…

From one of my incomparable Web colleagues here at the U:

The little web conference that could (MinneWebCon) has really taken off. We just made the University of Minnesota homepage. (At the bottom)

I’ve never had anything I was in leadership on have such a high profile and it’s really exciting. Yay me!!

This came up in a meeting today and I hadn’t seen it yet. I’m pretty sure you don’t care about how (in detail) it’s done, but suffice it to say that a programmer took Google Maps and housing information from Craigslist and made an interactive map that shows you, on the map, where all the rentals in your area are and pops up any pictures available when you click on one. It’s the coolest thing ever. Well, maybe not ever. But it’s cool. It’s all at HousingMaps.com.

Despite the bugs - and they’re lurking around - I’m diving in on this.

I miss blogging. Moving over from the Myspace blog has taken more time than I’d like, but I have this 40-hour a week “job” thing that seems to take up my coding time. And I try to maintain some semblance of a life that doesn’t involve wringing my hands over minutiae in the site’s styles.

So! Moving on!

We’ll be back to technology, politics, the news, and some mundane aspects of my existence in just a bit, but let me highlight some of the cool parts of this blog because I’m so gosh-darned excited about the whole enterprise.

• You can share my posts! (On the individual entry pages, there are a bunch of different icons for various bookmarking sites. If you’re a user of any of these, and you like what I’ve written, please do send it off into the ether
• Subscribing is easier! Look on the right sidebar. Ah, icons. Helpful. If you’re on any of these, just click the corresponding image and it’ll be as easy as that. If you’re not on any of these, take them as options if you ever decide to make your life easier.
• Fun, repurposed data. This part of the site will grow, but for now you can take a look at the books I’m reading on the left. The data for that is pulled in from Goodreads, which is a fantastic place to share reviews on books.

Oh, right, you can still comment on entries. And if you blog, please use the trackback info to highlight me if you grab content from this blog.

I think…I think we’re done with all that now. More improvements to come. This is my php sandbox for the time being.