barcampportland

Want a BarCampPortland T-Shirt? Act Now!

BarCampPortland is rapidly approaching. The event will be held on May 2, 3, and 4th at CubeSpace. If you have not yet RSVPed on Upcoming, please do it now. Having an accurate count of attendees really helps us plan the event!

This year we’re asking Portland BarCampers for a small donation if they want an event t-shirt. For a donation of $20, before April 26th, you help support the event (things like the space, food, and supplies) and get an awesome shirt designed by local design group Brash Creative. Please note that with this donation you will have our many thanks for supporting this event; however, you will NOT get a tax deduction, since Legion of Tech does not yet have 501c3 tax exempt status as an organization.

You can select your t-shirt size and make your donation through PayPal on the Legion of Tech website. We will not be taking orders for t-shirts after April 26th, and we will not have extra t-shirts available at the event.

Also, we are still looking for sponsors. If your company is interested in sponsoring, please contact Selena Decklemann (selenamarie on gmail).

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

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Portland is Awesome

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Social media project in Portland « Software Development, Digital Media and Me

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Portland Code Camp v4

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blogging

WordPress: Host it Yourself or Host on WordPress.com

I sent someone some advice on WordPress hosting and made the mistake of posting about it on Twitter, which resulted in a couple of requests to blog about it.

I started this blog as the Open Source Culture blog (later renamed the Open Culture blog) on Blogspot.com. Last April, I rebranded the blog as Fast Wonder and moved it to WordPress.com. After a few months, I grew increasingly frustrated with the limitations of WordPress.com, and I moved it to my own hosting provider. Based on this experience, I tend to recommend that most (but not all) people host their own WordPress installations, instead of using WordPress.com.

There are a number of benefits of hosting WordPress on your own domain.

  • You can use a custom feed and have it auto-discovered (I highly recommend the free FeedBurner service). The benefit of a custom feed is that you can move your blog around, rename it, etc. and keep the same FeedBurner feed forever to avoid losing subscribers.
  • You can have a custom favicon on your own host, but on WordPress.com, you are stuck with the WordPress favicon.
  • You can get better analytics (Google analytics are also free) if you host it yourself.
  • You have more control over the theme, since you can hack on the templates files, while you are more limited to just css changes on WordPress.com
  • It also seems like some countries may be blocking all of WordPress.com, so if you do business globally in certain countries this may or may not be important depending on how you use your blog. Thanks to Aaron Hockley for reminding me of this issue.

For people already on WordPress.com, it is pretty easy to migrate to your own host without losing comments, posts, etc. with the WordPress export / import.

There are some potential disadvantages to hosting your own WordPress installation:

  • Hosting it yourself requires a fair amount of technical knowledge to install.
  • You have to keep up with installing the WordPress security updates, which can be a lot more work to maintain.

Yes, I am a big fan of hosting my own WordPress installs; however it really isn’t for everyone. If you aren’t at least roughly familiar with databases and installing PHP applications, I wouldn’t try it yourself. Also, if you have a very small blog and really don’t want to do much customization or spend much time on it, then I would go with WordPress.com and not host it yourself.

There are probably some other advantages and disadvantages, so drop them in the comments if I missed anything.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

community

Why Companies Should Have Online Communities

As a community manager, I frequently take online communities for granted. Are you a business? Do you have or want to have customers? Then yes, of course you should have an online community (is that really a question?)

I’m here at Innotech this week, and this question came up on my panel about Online Communities. I wanted to share and elaborate on my answer to the question of “Why build an online community in the first place?”

I have a few reasons:

  • People: Communities first & foremost are about the people. Having a community gives people a place to engage with your company. These people will talk about you and your products in blogs and other online forums whether you choose to participate or not, so giving people a place to talk about you can help you keep engaged with the conversations.
  • Product Innovation: Communities provide a great forum for getting product feedback. It gives you a central place to ask questions about how people use your products. You also get to see first-hand what they complain about, what issues they have, and where they have questions about you or your products.
  • Evangelism: Communities also help you grow evangelists for your products from outside of your company. These are the customers or users of your products that are passionate and deeply engaged with you. Interestingly enough, these people frequently come to your defense within the community when people say negative things about your company. They can also have exceptional feedback for you, so it is important to identify these people early and encourage them to get deeply engaged (often with some special community permissions). For Jivespace, I created a special “Friends of Jivespace” blog with top community members as authors.
  • Brand Loyalty: Having a community can also help drive brand loyalty for your products. Giving people a place to engage with you can drive a tremendous amount of loyalty for your products.

These were my top four reasons, but I’m sure there are many more reasons to build an online community. I would love to hear your suggestions in the comments!

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

portland

The Portland Entrepreneur: POSSE Meeting Wed. 4/16

POSSE, the Portland Open Source Software Entrepreneur group is holding an open meeting on Wednesday at 5 pm at Jax Bar to kick off our speaker series on “The Portland Entrepreneur.” We’ll be hosting Martin Medeiros, a lawyer who specializes in open source and has lots of investment experience and connections to VCs in the area talk about what makes a “Portland Entrepreneur.” This is a group where we focus on the business side of open source, and we’d love to see you there.

I’ve been a member of POSSE for a little over a year. Usually, we have small member meetings, but we want to start bringing in more speakers and open it up for more people to attend. We are also actively looking for new members.

I hope to see you tomorrow!

portland

Don't Miss Innotech This Week in Portland!

I wanted to just remind everyone about InnoTech here in Portland this week. I will be there on Wednesday and Thursday, April 16th and 17th.

A few things that I am involved in or excited about:

  • Jive Software CEO, Dave Hersh, is presenting on “Ready or Not? Assessing Your Collaboration 2.0 Preparedness” at 9:30am on April 17th. Dave is a great speaker, so you won’t want to miss it!
  • The eMarketing Summit has some great content, and it will be kicked off on the 16th with a panel including Dawn Foster (me), Jeff Hardison, Kerry McClenahan, and Barry Tallis to talk about Strategies for Planning & Building an Online Community
  • I will also be moderating a panel about Open Source Communities on April 17th with some amazing panelists and open source rock stars: whurley, Stormy Peters, Danese Cooper, and John Mark Walker. The session is part of an all day open source tracking being organized by Raven Zachary.
  • There are many other great sessions at InnoTech including: Don Tapscott (author of Wikinomics), Ward Cunninham (inventor of the wiki), Brian Jamison, Andrew Aitken, Jason Mauer, Steve Morris, and many more.

Cost-wise, this event is really reasonable, and it is a great opportunity to learn and meet interesting people.

portland

Just Launched: Portland is Awesome

Yay! I just launched a new blog, Portland is Awesome, to celebrate all that is wonderful about Portland. We have so many great technology blogs, and group blogs run by big media, but Portland has such an independent (non-corporate) culture. I wanted to create something independent and fun to cover all of those other Portland topics.

If you want to be an author, send me an email (geekygirldawn on gmail) with your desired username and a link to your existing blog. Assuming that your writing style is a good fit for Portland is Awesome, I will get your account set up and you can start contributing!

jive software

Clearspace 2.0, Acquisition of Jotlet, Openfire Enterprise Goes Open Source and more

This weekend, we announced a bunch of changes at Jive.

We released Clearspace 2.0, including a renaming of Clearspace X to Clearspace Community. We also upgraded Jivespace to Clearspace Community 2.0 with an update to the look and feel, so I’ve spent a fair amount of time yesterday and today doing lots of testing and some tweaking.

Jive announced our acquisition of Jotlet. While I love to see Jive acquiring cool technology, I am even more excited that Adam Wulf relocated from Texas to Portland as part of the acquisition. Make sure you give @adamwulf a big Portland tech community welcome.

While Openfire has been open source for a long time, Openfire Enterprise had been a proprietary add-on to the open source version … until now. Openfire Enterprise is also being released under an opn source license.

The press has also been writing about the changes (search Google News if you don’t believe me). I won’t go into too much detail here, since the blog posts linked above have a bunch of details, but I am excited about the changes!

Open source, Linux kernel research, online communities and other stuff I'm interested in posting.