Saturday morning, as the geonerds filtered in to WhereCampPDX (an unconference of assorted geo-geekery that I helped to organize), some of the guys from Metro's Data Resource Center covered the walls with a collection of interesting maps from their archives. The maps provided a great source of conversation in the breaks between sessions, and were a great set-up for photos like this one.

First of all, I'd like to give huge thanks to all of the organizers, volunteers, sponsors, and attendees that made the weekend what it was. Stretching multiple events across three days and four different venues is no easy task, and a few volunteers really put in extraordinary effort to make it all fit together. You can take a look at Igal's thank you post to the planning group for a look behind the scenes (and to get an idea about how you might be able to help out next year *hint, hint*).

All of the hard work paid off and we had a great weekend of discussion and discovery. In her write up on the game day, the completely awesome Kate Chapman (who traveled the farthest to attend WhereCampPDX) wrote:

WhereCampPDX was one of the best unconferences I’ve ever attended. It was well organized without being too controlled with a great a mix of people.

This is, of course, a great thing to hear.

Some Highlights

• I lead a session on Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse with Locative Tools. It was a fun mix of exploring technologies for quickly collecting and disseminating information in case of a disaster, ideas about adding fictional overlays to OpenStreetMap, and perusal of several legitimate scientific papers about our chances of surviving once the zombies arrive. (Coexistence is statistically impossible.)
• Audrey talked about post-digital mapping and got me excited about progressively-revealing origami map designs again. (Sadly, the idea didn't occur to me until after the session)
• Igal led a really neat show-and-tell session about strange maps. He then posted very comprehensive session notes because he's awesome like that.
• We discussed implications and implementations of adding more geographic features to Calagator. (A vital step on the road to world domination.)
• At our Saturday evening Hackfest, I teamed up with Kate Chapman, Michael Weisman, and James Fee to start development on Super Mayor, an app built on top of Foursquare that adds up mayorships to grant sovereignty over entire districts of a city.
• We played a round of live-action PacMan on Sunday using iPhones for real-time tracking. The tracking didn't work so well, but we learned some interesting things about how Safari on the iPhone deals with location refreshes and got to run around outside.
• Also on Sunday, I participated in a fun geocaching activity set up by Jim Cser. It was a nicely designed course of targets, all fairly close to our headquarters for the day, Backspace.
• I borrowed a camera (thanks Ben!) and caught a few photos, mostly portraits of our attendees doing mappy things.

Thanks again to everyone who participated in WhereCampPDX. I had fun and learned a lot and I hope you did too.

Soon after the launch of the Portland-based location tracking site, Shizzow, I put together client of sorts using a set of javascripts and CSS styles inside of a Fluid site-specific browser. I recently updated this code to work with the latest design revision of Shizzow and decided to take the opportunity to bundle them up for distribution.

Features

• Simplified site layout to work well in a compact window.
• Growl notifications for shouts.
• Automatically refreshes the homepage every minute, unless you're typing a message.
• Automatically returns you to the homepage after a period of inactivity.

Download

• A quick and easy packaged version
• The source files

Build Your Own

Fluid is a great tool for bringing web applications closer to the desktop and I'm presenting this initial release with step-by-step instructions of how I build the client in the hopes that it will encourage people to experiment with it. You can either grab the packaged version or follow along below and you'll (hopefully) end up with the same result.

1. Download Fluid.

2. Grab a copy of the latest support files from the github repository. They'll bundle up a convenient zip file just for you.

   You'll end up with five files:

   • Display Growl Notifications.user.js
   • Reload Shizzow.user.js
   • Return to Shizzow Homepage.user.js
   • shizzow-icon.png
   • userstyles.css

3. Open Fluid and fill out the form as follows and click Create.

   • URL: http://www.shizzow.com/
   • Name: Shizzow
   • Location: wherever you want the app to be created
   • Icon: Choose Other..., then pick shizzow-icon.png from the support files.

4. Open your newly created site-specific browser and bask in its glory for a moment before choosing Preferences from the Shizzow menu and navigating to the Userstyles section.

5. In the Userstyles preference pane, click the plus button to add a URL Pattern, click the checkbox that appears (to enable the pattern) and edit it to read http://*.shizzow.com/*. Next, paste the contents of userstyles.css into the large field at the bottom of the window. When you refresh the browser window, things should change quite a bit.

6. To add our extra functionality, choose Open Userscripts Folder from the script menu (the icon to the right of the Window) menu) and drag the three .user.js files from the support files into the folder that opens. With that done, bounce back to the Shizzow app and choose Reload all Userscripts (again from the script menu). The script menu should now have three brand new items in it. Choose each of these in turn to enable the scripts.

7. Finally, choose Convert to MenuExtra SSB… from the Shizzow menu to make your client hide away in your menu bar.

I've recently cleaned up and improved the code that powers these sites and am releasing it as an open-source project: TweetScope. It's all written in Ruby using the Sinatra web framework, both of which make me happy.

Setting up your own site with TweetScope is pretty simple.

1. Grab a copy of the source from GitHub: git clone git://github.com/reidab/tweetscope.git
2. Create a new site: rake site:create
3. Edit your new site's config.yml file to tell it what to search for and set other options.
4. Test things out by running ruby tweetscope.rb and visiting http://localhost:4567 in your browser.
5. Edit the CSS and template files to customize your site's design and structure.

The TweetScope distribution is optimized for easy deployment to Heroku (free, as of this writing), and I've written up a little deployment guide for their platform.

If you end up setting up your own sites, I'd love to know about it. Enjoy!

I'm posting about the CubeSpace video first since it was shown early in the set of videos, while people were still taking their seats from intermission, and our various inane comments weren't very audible.

The Video

Click here to view the embedded video.

Our Strange Little Process

Eva contacted me on Friday morning: "Need to make Ignite sponsor video by Monday. Help. Please." Had this been any other day that week, the evening would have brought crowds of happy geeks flocking to the many user group meetings and events that CubeSpace hosts but, as it was, no geek confluence was scheduled until after the video was due.

We wanted to capture a sense of the kind of fun conversation and interaction that goes on at CubeSpace on a daily basis, so we sat down Friday afternoon and started to record some audio. The original concept was to have a semi-structured conversation that just happened to include bits about all of the great services that CubeSpace offers. This fell apart quickly. Instead, we ended up recording 35 minutes of Eva, Igal, Shane, Schwern, Kendra, and me talking about the video and many other things.

We ended up splicing together tiny chunks of this epic recording to make the final audio track and overlaying it on some still images and titles that I put together in iMovie. After using Final Cut for the Open Source Bridge video, I found iMovie incredibly counterintuitive.

The video doesn't try to be a hard marketing piece. It wouldn't translate to a TV audience, or to people who hadn't heard of CubeSpace before, but I think it serves its intended purpose: revealing a bit about what makes CubeSpace a great place to be.

A Few Highlighted Outtakes

If you're reading this through a feed reader, it appears that the audio isn't appearing there. Click through for more enjoyment.

• A bit of an introduction to our team
• Our first take, explaining our lack of geeks
• Talk of a much longer video
• A fax tone
• Discussion of the reception area vortex
• Misinterpretation of the "Rent a Coder" services
• An alternate video idea
• Attempts to record Igal's two-day-a-week membership song
• A review of snack food
• An A-Z list of alcoholic beverages

Over the last few months, I've come to realize that I really do need a place to post my thoughts, ideas, and projects. I'm really excited by the things I'm involved in, and I have an urge to document, rant, and evangelize in more than 140 character chunks. And so, my friends, I launch this new site. The design may change at some point soon, but the important thing is that I have a place to put content again and that feels good. I'm also happy about the new profile page, which addresses the most common feedback I got about the old site (that there wasn't a way to contact me).

I'm kicking things off by chiming in with a late response to a new years meme that Audrey started. In 2008:

• Did I earn a living? For the most part, yes. I've been freelancing for several years now and there's always some ebb and flow involved. I've found that I need to learn how to better articulate exactly what I want to be hired to do. Having a wide skillset is great, but it can easily lead to job description creep.
• Was I able to incubate new ideas? The year was filled with new and interesting ideas. I'm building open source software, organizing events, and helping to make connections between communities. I've experimented a lot with the ways in which I work and collaborate with others. From Calagator code sprints, to hanging out with makerlab folks, I've found various forms of co-working to be incredibly enriching. I would have liked to spend more time working on some personal ventures (I own the domain names, why don't they magically have content?), but I'm pretty happy with how things turned out.
• Did I grow in ways I wanted? Indeed. I feel that I've learned an incredible amount in 2008, mainly by immersing myself working with new techniques and technologies. My work on Calagator, for example, has brought me from knowing very little about Rails development to it being one of my primary sources of income. Further involvement in event planning—helping out with WhereCampPDX, Ignite Portland, CyborgCamp, and the very exciting new Open Source Bridge—has taught me many things about what makes communities work.

In 2009, I'm trying to better manage the balance between my work and my side projects an. There's been talk of organizing a "How to keep your side projects from keeping you from getting paid" panel for Open Source Bridge along these lines. I'm also working to get more organized from a business perspective and figure out new income streams. So far (since I'm late at posting this, I can cheat) I've registered an LLC, set up a better billing infrastructure, and worked a bit on that job description creep problem.