Notes on everything in which I participated at Portland’s latest session of the international, self-organizing “unconferences” organized by techies for techies that occurred at Cubespace in Portland on May 2-4. (I link to notes if I could find them.)
- Worldwide upcoming BarCamp calendar
- Portland BarCamp page
- Portland BarCamp summaries and notes – tabs for each day, click session name for notes (on some).
- Portland Technology Groups and Events
- Haskell programming language: promising for multicore programming.
- Online Community Management, led by Dawn Foster, who has that role at Jive Software. Mostly I think this was a comparing notes kind of session.
- Calagator is an online calendar of Portland technology events and also a community-programmed Ruby on Rails project. See calagator.org..
- Time-centric social networking: for some participants the answer to how to do it already exists: Twitter.
- Options for Inexpensive Web Presence, esp. for small non-profits and startups: a session that Jim Tyhurst and I led. Least expensive ($0) is WordPress hosted on WordPress (don’t even need to know HTML). The next level ($20-$40/month) is a VPS (Virtual Private Server, which requires having someone who can put togther environments like WordPress, MediaWiki, Drupal, or Ruby on Rails applications on a server. The next level ($100/month) is a collocated server at a service provider, which has programming requirements similar to VPS but also means putting effort into supporting the server.
- Distributed Collaboration Tools for Software Development: For me, the best thing was finding out about Gobby collaborative text editor.
- Migrating from MySQL? Try Postgresql. By Selena Deckelman of the PDX Postgresql User Group. People are evaluating moving from MySQL to Postgres because the latter is a community-driven open source project and has had some important database technology longer than MySQL.
- Wagn: described as a database-like wiki on Ruby on Rails.
- Using WordPress as a Content Management System. Well, you can. Bottomline: Once there is much content, better off moving to Drupal.
- What’s the Web Missing for Bike Culture? Portland-based project to provide Google Maps-style street level views and optimal routing that does not include sending a bicyclist onto the freeway.
- Drupal. Overview of a widely-used content management system in PHP on MySQL. For me, I learned I probably would be well advised to stay away for a while, because there are too many modules and options to deal with and also the transition to 6.0 has created some bumps in the road.