• Back when I started blogging, we didn’t have ...
• Nowadays, I guess it’s Twitter that people use instead of ...
• And then they got bought by ...
• This slide is from last year, though, and now there are already ten times ...

That aside, I’m really happy to be teaching again after about two and a half years away from it.  Preparing is a good way to remind myself what I know and what I don’t actually know, and the questions I get from the students often help me to see the industry through fresh eyes.

To my students, and others who might be curious about the course: Here are the class notes, though of course it doesn’t cover the hands-on training or the tangents we cover in class, and I may have skipped over or modified some of the slides on the fly.

Course Outline: Managing_the_Blogosphere_November_2009.doc

Week 1 Slide Deck: Introduction_to_Blogs2.ppt

I’ll update this with the course content as we go.

But that’s not all!  We also released a brand-new plugin, Hop Inject. This plugin “injects” arbitrary text at specified points in a custom field. For example, if you wanted to add an advertisement before the 3rd paragraph tag of your blog entries, Hop Inject makes it easy.  We’re looking forward to seeing what other creative people do with Hop Inject, so let us know how it works for you.  And if you think of some way to make it even better, we’d love to hear it!

In other add-on news, we officially decommissioned our Defensio for EE add-on last week.  If you’re looking for a tool to control comment and forum spam in ExpressionEngine, we’ve been very impressed by Low’s NoSpam module.

The gift company features a selection of gift boxes and promotional products that are either sourced locally, made sustainably or are environmentally conscious. I went with the cardboard pens because they are made with 100% recycled cardboard and biodegradable plastic. They also fit into our budget. A pricier promo item I’ll keep in mind in future is the Tradeworks wooden pen in their product catalog. It’s produced locally by Tradeworks Custom Products who provide training and employment opportunities to women from the Downtown Eastside.

The owner of the Saul Good Gift Co. just happens to be Saul Good. He did a fabulous job of keeping me informed about our order along the way and ensured we received the pens in time for the conference despite a tight deadline and an initial error in shipping. As for the pens themselves, I’m very pleased with the look of the Hop Studios branded cardboard pens, and they go nicely with the rest of the conference swag we keep on hand.

Note: We didn’t get any compensation for writing this; I just like the pens.

And it’s true—it went off wonderfully. What did I especially like?  I liked the space: Pravda Studios.  There’s something nice about a novel space that gets people talking, conversations happening, and ideas seem to float into the air.  I thought up two new add-on ideas, and heard from several other people about new projects that percolated from the meeting of the minds in that airy, bright space.

I liked the attitude of the folks who came—how willing they were to share with each other, like in Matt Perry’s presentation about high-performance EE sites.  I worry sometimes that as the EE community grows, more grumps, creeps and porcupines will join the EE community and push out us old, mellow do-gooders.  But that was not the case with the people at this conference, and that thrills me.  I hope next year we can make it even more inclusive of new EE users and the EE-curious, too—suggestions on that would be appreciated.

Most of all, I liked getting the reminder that each one of us, whatever our own skill set, can have a big impact on the growth of the EE community. I think the best story was the one told by Brandon Kelly, creator of some of the best EE add-ons like Gypsy, FieldFrame and Playa. He said he’d originally made one really good extension for ExpressionEngine, but then had drifted away from EE development until the end of 2008 when Ryan Masuga came up with the “AcademEE Awards” and named Playa the Extension of the Year. That recognition and praise gave Kelly the push he needed to get re-involved in EE, and now, 9 months later, he’s getting ready to quit his job and start developing add-ons full-time, to the benefit of all us EE users.

It’s just wonderful to see that happen, and it reminded me how important it was to give support and encouragement to new folks, because that can really come back around and help us all.

Seeing people making new friends, form new business relationships, solve problems, and meet face-to-face for the first time—that’s what the EE Roadshow was all about for me.

Hop Studios was proud to be one of the four organizers of the EE Roadshow this year—the other organizers being the tenacious and clever Degan Beley, the boundless and perfectionist Kevin Shoesmith and the insightful and wry Monique Trottier. I know, reading thank yous is boring, but these three deserve a moment of thanks from me, that’s for darn tooting, because we couldn’t have done it except all together, and I think we all got something special out of this.

From Amazon.com:

This comprehensive guide will help home bakers to create delicious, decadent, and spectacularly beautiful cakes of all kinds with confidence and ease. With her precise, foolproof recipes, Rose shows you how to create everything from Heavenly Coconut Seduction Cake, Golden Lemon Almond Cake, and Devil’s Food Cake with Midnight Ganache to Orange-Glow Chiffon Layer Cake, Mud Turtle Cupcakes, and Deep Chocolate Passion Wedding Cake.

The book is doing so well in its first week the publisher announced yesterday it is already going into its second printing! Way to go Rose!

At the moment Rose is busy with the press tour for the book and you can keep track of her appearances and book signings on the Real Baking with Rose blog.

ExpressionEngine Commercial License with free upgrade to EE 2.0 (EllisLab)
ExpressionEngine Forum Module (EllisLab)
ExpressionEngine Multiple Site Manager (EllisLab)
Playa 2 (Brandon Kelly)
Wygwam (Brandon Kelly)
User Module (Solspace)
Tag Module (Solspace)
Diggie (Solspace)
Gallery Extended 2 (Solspace)
FoxEE E-Commerce Module (HCC Development)
12 month S-2 hosting package (Engine Hosting)

That’s more than $1000 worth of EE Software that could would give the winner a huge head start in building a phenomenal ExpressionEngine site.

The draw will be made following the Add-on panel session at 5 pm.

Hurry. Register now if you haven’t already.

(Hop Studios is one of the organizers of the EERoadshow.)

A major issue for staff of the center was having to go through an external web master to make any changes to the site, which was frustrating and inefficient. They also had an unhappy relationship with their previous Web master which left them feeling like they didn’t have control over their own site. This made switching the domain and moving the site to a new provider awkward. It was like navigating through a messy breakup, but fortunately we made it through.

The new site is built with ExpressionEngine which allows the control the staff so badly wanted to easily make changes and add new content as needed. The design of the site is bright, colourful, sophisticated and incorporates twitter and a blog for direct engagement of their clients. Current and new clients of the Santa Monica Wellness Center can now make inquiries through the site, as well as enjoy the excellent resources for health and well-being they make available on their website.

Physician, consider thy site healed.

In case you haven’t heard of AdHack, their catch line is “People Powered Advertising”. Their goal is to connect ad buyers directly with ad creators, and produce work that is creative, affordable, and produced in a timely manner. Sounds good doesn’t it? We thought so too.

Using AdHack is easy. We set up an account on AdHack’s website, put together a creative brief of what we need, pressed publish, and away we went. If you’re interested in the commission, follow along to the AdHack site and read the full details. The deadline for submission is Friday September 18, 2009.

Kathryn Lord, owner of Find-A-Sweetheart, contacted me today.  Her blog has a list of monthly archive links on the right-hand side of the page. But she was noticing that her oldest months archives were not appearing.  What could be going wrong?

Well, it turns out that the documentation for ExpressionEngine’s monthly_links function looks like this:

And the limit of 50 months is reached about 4 years.  Which is when Kathryn started blogging—she was one of our first clients to do so, and she’s never missed a month. So, congrats, and beware of the default instructions sometimes!

Part of Gnomedex’s tagline is “Human Circuitry.” I find this label intriguing, because it describes the idea of the intertwining of people and the technology they use in one catchy line. The conference was less about technology itself and more about how people use it to connect, share ideas, and present themselves to the world. Funnily enough my favorite sessions—Nerd Craft: A Field Guide by Beth Goza and Personal Manufacturing: The Robots that Sharing Built by Bre Pettis—were about craft, which seems as far as you can get from high tech.

A very strong theme throughout the presentations was the use of social media to bring attention to a cause and raise funds for it. Local Vancouverites Jay Grandin and Leah Nelson of Giant ant media presented on their evolution as social media content producers and how this enabled them to start a charity and help street youth in Tanzania. By the end of their presentation (and this was the case for a few others presentations, too), they had raised additional funds for their issue or project. (Read more about their project at Bongo the Film)

In the end, I’m still not sure what the conference was all about, but I think that’s just because it’s not the kind of event with a specific theme. I enjoyed the experience and found inspiration in some of the presentations even though speaker quality and subject matter was all over the map. I really liked that there was only one track to follow, which meant I was only missing out on presentations I chose not to attend rather than because of scheduling conflicts. It was also interesting for me, an inexperienced conference goer, to attend one that was developed on such a large scale. I really only have Northern Voice to compare, so it was impressive to see what organizers can do with a large budget at their disposal.