XKCD on Period English

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Evolving Web Projects Into Online Products
There's a difference between a software project and a product. I've been helping clients create innovative projects on the web for a long time. Lately, I've been responsible for evolving, or planning to evolve, several projects into online products. It's harder than you might think. Discover some tactics for accomplishing this difficult transition.

Organizing and Running a Conference
For the last three years, I've been fortunate enough to work with a great team of people to run a successful and profitable technical conference called RubyNation. This conference is an annual event, part education and part entertainment, that promotes the Ruby programming language. As you might expect, I've learned a few things about how to organize and run a conference over the last three years. I'm going to share some practical tips and suggestions about how to organize and run a relatively large-scale public event like a conference.

KeenerTech.com, the SEO Powerhouse
My company, MetroStar Systems, just launched Votridea, an Online Contest Platform. Of course, the various search engines take a little time to properly rank such a new site. I'm tickled pink that I've been able to tease MetroStar's management with the fact that my Votridea-related blog entries on KeenerTech.com have been more effective at "getting the news out" than Facebook, Twitter and even MetroStar Systems' web site. In fact, the only site that beat KeenerTech, according to Google, was PrNewsWire.

Votridea Contest Platform Launches
Votridea is an easy-to-use online Contest Platform that fosters innovation by building communities around ideas and challenges. Votridea is an all-in-one, customizable suite of contest and community management tools that makes the complex process of building online multimedia contests simple. It's also the project that I've been working on for many months now, so I'm very pleased that we've just launched this dynamic product.

In Baltimore Inner Harbor
I was just in Baltimore engaging in business development activities for Votridea, our new online contest platform. Afterwards, we hung out in Inner Harbor, where there's plenty of nice restaurants, bars and shops. Hey, did I mention the bars? This is a picture of me, with Johnny Nguyen, Vice President of MetroStar's New Media Group, and Winifred Tse, our illustrious project coordinator.

At the Crossroads
It came to me a while ago that I had come to a crossroads in my career. This isn't the first time that this has happened. Like everybody else, sometimes you reach a point in your career where you need to decide what direction you want to go next. Read further, and gain some perspectives on what you might do when you next find yourself ... at the crossroads.

Recipe: Accessing Your Subversion Revision in Rails
Have you ever looked at a Rails web site and wanted to know precisely which code revisions were deployed? If you know that a certain fix was implemented in Revision 436, how can you verify whether that fix has been deployed to production? This recipe shows how to quickly and easily solve this problem.

Our First RubyNation Video is Live
Our first RubyNation video is now live. It features Jim Wierich and his well received "SOLID Ruby" talk. It's been a lot of work getting the RubyNation video production effort off the ground, so it's nice to finally see our first polished video (only 28 more conference sessions to go).

How to Get Your Conference Proposal Accepted
I've been part of a team running a technical conference called RubyNation for the past three years. It's been a successful conference all three years, both in terms of profitability and its reception by conference attendees. This wasn't entirely an accident. We worked hard to make sure we had high-quality speakers with the kind of content that would be attractive to our intended audience, as well as making sure other conference aspects were addressed - e.g. - venue, food, equipment, etc.

This experience has given me some insight into what it takes for an individual to secure a speaking engagement at a conference. I'll provide tips on how you can making your speaking proposal more attractive to conference planners, thereby increasing your odds of getting accepted as a speaker.

Filming at RubyNation 2010 
It's been crazy lately, first with the run-up to RubyNation 2010, and then getting the video production effort in full swing after the conference was over. We finally managed to get some of the photos from the conference online.

Multi-Shots: The Web's Newest Craze
My friend, Don Anderson, is a talented graphic artist and photographer. He recently started a side business called Clonimation doing custom photo shoots to produce what's generally referred to as a "multi-shot." An example multi-shot featuring my 135-pound Lab-Rottweiler, Bentley, is shown below: