Month: April 2010

Joind.in Articles – Import & WordPress

I’ve been slacking a bit and haven’t posted these two articles/tutorials written up by Lorna Mitchell about using the Joind.in site in two different ways – importing your event’s information in and a handy WordPress plugin she’s whipped up to show some of the latest information from the site’s API.

  • Importing Data into Joind.in
    “As a conference organiser I work extensively with the site joind.in, which allows attendees to comment on sessions at a conference. Recently the site has also started supporting sessions with both times and tracks, making it indispensable as a way of keeping track of all the sessions during an event. The only downside is entering all the data into it!! Joind.in does have some import functionality, which I recently rebuilt to reflect the timings and track changes, however this only accepts XML at present, so there is still some preparation work to get your data ready to import.”
  • WordPres Plugin for Joind.in
    In case anyone thinks I’ve gone joind.in crazy after already writing about its import functionality this week, I really haven’t. Its just that some months of pulling a few things together have finally bourne fruit and so I can actually write about them now they are done! The good news is that this includes a plugin for wordpress, which pulls data from the joind.in website. You can find its official page on the wordpress plugin directory here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/joindin-sidebar-widget/

Many thanks to Lorna for writing these up! It’s always great to see something you’ve worked on be well used by the community that has contributed so much back to it. Want more information on Joind.in and what it has to offer? Check out the About page or send an email to me personally – i’m always happy to answer any questions!

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The times, they are a-changin’

Let’s get the exciting part of this post out of the way first – as of today I will be leaving Atmos Energy and will be starting at JWT on Monday the 19th!

I’ve been with Atmos for what seems like forever – this is my eighth year here – and I have grown so much in those years. I’ve come from a developer that barely knew OOP and couldn’t design pattern his way out of a paper bag to someone completely different. If you had asked me back in 2002 if I’d be writing articles, running an open source project and have had a few speaking notches under my belt, I would have thrown an Oracle manual at you (which was all new to me at the time). I’ve learned about best practices, fought my own battles with both code and things more on the human interaction level (I hadn’t worked in a large office before this) and have come a long way as a developer.

Atmos has provided me with an environment to make all of this possible – they’ve been receptive to my requests for training and conferences and for letting me try out new things and technologies. I’ve done things here that I can’t say I’ll so at other companies like write applications to interface directly with gas systems and work with huge customer databases (1.5 million customers over 13 states).

Unfortunately, over the last months I’ve become more and more aware that I’ve grown a bit too comfortable in my current skills. You know how it is – you do the same kinds of things over and over (and over) that you get used to doing that thing and not so much developing the applications you know you could. This is a big reason why I’m making the move. I’ve been doing the “gas applications” for a good while now and I wanted some place where I could stretch back out and really get back into a more real form of development. I think that JWT can offer me that so I’ll be starting there two weeks from today.

Thanks to all of you who have supported me in my job hunt, it definitely means a lot! Oh, and if you know of any good PHP developers (Oracle experience a plus) in the Dallas area looking for a job – let me know. I know recommendations would always be appreciated!